Australian politics backup

Australia is already at Net Zero

Prof. Ian Plimer

Australia has a landmass of 7,692,024 square kilometres with a sparse inland population, greenhouse gas-emitting livestock, and heavy industry.

Combined with the transport of livestock, food, and mined products over long distances to cities and ports and the export of ores, coal, metals, and food for 80 million people, there is a high per capita emission of carbon dioxide. If for some perverse perceived moral reason we reduce our emissions of plant food, then we let millions in Asia starve. Our food exports contribute to increasing the standard of living, longevity, and health of billions of people in Asia.

The forestry, mining, and smelting industries have been under constant attack by green activists who are happy to put hundreds of thousands out of work and destroy the economy. They train their sights on the cheapest and most reliable form of electricity and want to replace it with unreliable subsidised wind and solar power simply because the burning of fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide which they fraudulently deem is a dangerous pollutant. The next target will be food-producing farmers. They, like the forestry and mining industries, have nowhere to go if destroyed by green activists. Australia cannot import food if there is no export revenue generated to pay for imports.

With inflation and debt on the rise, Australia has far greater economic priorities than to shift the whole economy into uncharted waters, increase energy costs, destroy a successful efficient primary industry, decrease employment, and decrease international competitiveness because its emission of the plant food carbon dioxide is deemed sinful. It is a very long bow to argue that Australia’s emission of one molecule of plant food in 6.6 million other atmospheric molecules has any measurable effect whatsoever on global climate.

Ice core shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide rises follow natural temperature rises and, in past times when atmospheric carbon dioxide was up to 100 times higher than now, there were ice ages and no runaway global warmings. Furthermore, it has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Why even bother about the minuscule Australian carbon dioxide emissions when the big emitters don’t?

Annual Australian per capita carbon dioxide emissions are in the order of 20 tonnes per person. There are 30 hectares of forest and 74 hectares of grassland for every Australian and each hectare annually sequesters about one tonne of carbon dioxide by photosynthesis. Australia has 4 per cent of the world’s global forest estate, the world’s sixth largest forested area, and the fourth largest area of forest in nature conservation reserves. On the continental landmass, grasslands and forests remove by natural sequestration more than three times the amount of Australia’s domestic and industrial carbon dioxide emissions. The expansion of woody weeds, crops, reduction in regular burning, and vegetation clearing restrictions further increases natural sequestration.

Australian forests adsorb 940 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum compared to our domestic and industrial emissions of 417 million tonnes. Add to that the absorption of carbon dioxide in continental Australia to the carbon dioxide adsorption of 2,500,000 square kilometres of continental shelf waters and Australia sequesters some five times as much carbon dioxide as it emits. Australia does more than its share of the heavy lifting for global sequestration of carbon dioxide.

Australia’s net contribution to global atmospheric carbon dioxide is negative. We are already at Net Zero. This is validated by the net carbon dioxide flux estimates from the IBUKI satellite carbon dioxide data set.

None of these calculations involve the fixing of biological carbon compounds and atmospheric carbon dioxide into soils. Soils contain two or three times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere, soil carbon increases fertility and water retention and reduces farming costs. Natural sequestration in Australia locks away carbon dioxide and to lock it away carbon dioxide by industrial sequestration in deep drill holes is a foolish fashionable way of wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money.

Using the thinking of the IPCC, UN, and activist green groups, Australia should be very generously financially rewarded with money from poor, populous, desert, and landlocked countries for removing its own emissions from the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide emissions from many other nations. By this method, wealthy Australia can take money from poor countries.

Net Zero has nothing to the environment and climate change and is all about power and the transfer of hard-earned wealth.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/australia-is-already-at-net-zero

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Now steak and sausages are off the menu! Australians told to give up MEAT as part of woke academics' plan to save the world from climate change

This is an old song. It is never likely to get large-scale support

Australians will need to give up their weekly steaks and turn 'flexitarian' to meet climate change targets and hit net zero by 2050, according to academics.

Aussie meat-eaters are blamed for accelerating the crisis in a new book by Sydney University's Dr Diana Bogueva and Professor Dora Marinova of Curtin University.

They say one calorie of beef takes a staggering 38 calories to create, causing one-third of all greenhouse gases and wiping out wildlife through land clearing.

The claims have been dismissed by the cattle farmers as out-dated nonsense.

But the academics insist the meat industry needs to be overhauled if the world is to survive - and current farming methods are unsustainable.

'Rather than growing the grain or the food we need for human consumption we are growing the grain for the animals - and then eating them.' Prof Marinvoa told the ABC.

''That's a very inefficient and irrational way of feeding the population.'

She said Aussies were 'addicted to meat', but needed to slash their intake by 80-90 per cent and turn flexitarian by becoming mainly vegetarian with occasional meat.

The academics' book 'Food in a Planetary Emergency' says Aussies need to switch to a diet based on vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts and fruits.

Prof Marinova admits older Aussies may find it hard to make the transition but she said the younger Gen Z population - born after 1995 - are more open to the idea.

But even they draw the line at switching to even more environmentally-conscious insect protein burgers and meat substitutes.

'They are quite keen to increase their consumption of traditional plant-based food such as fruit and vegetables, legumes, tubers,' she said.

'But they are more hesitant to go to alternative proteins despite this industry essentially booming.'

However the wider population has yet to get the message.

The book's authors carried out an earlier study which found meat consumption has gone up dramatically this century

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10835303/Australians-told-turn-flexitarian-stop-eating-MEAT-save-world-climate-change.html

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Coles: Caring for some but not for others

Coles sacked the last of its unvaccinated staff at the beginning of this year, long after state mandates fell and other industries began allowing the so-called mavericks of the workforce back into the office. The move, along with other supermarket giants, saw thousands of Australians unceremoniously dumped, many of them single mothers or from struggling households.

‘Shop safe at Coles’ is something that looks good printed in big letters across double-page ads to those still suffering from anxiety hangovers. Just don’t ask too many questions about the health logic, given unvaccinated people can shop in the store, but not stand behind the counter.

Speaking of corporate virtue signalling.

The same company turned around this week and announced it would be offering its trans and gender-diverse employees ten extra days of paid leave for the purpose of ‘gender affirmation’. ‘Affirmation’ is a hazy term that Coles describes as ‘any process’ that relates to the act of gender affirmation including surgical, social, legal, or medical action. Leave could be granted for anything from an appointment with a lawyer through to full surgery.

Gender Affirmation Leave was timed to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism, and Transphobia – one of the dozens of days and months dedicated to a sexual preference or pronouns.

Coles Chief Legal and Safety Officer, David Brewster, (who also serves as the Chair of the Pride Steering Committee), released a statement.

‘We know that we have at least 900 team members who identify as transgender or gender diverse. We need to have proper policy and education in this area so there is clear guidance around taking leave for this important transition in their life.’

Coles attached a long and bizarre ‘gender affirming’ statement that seems a little over the top for employment that largely involves stacking shelves and pushing trolleys. Its headings include ‘encouraging you to be your authentic self’ and ‘developing our Pride Team member network’ – which doesn’t sound like something employers should concern themselves with.

This move, described as ‘way ahead of politicians’ (add to that logic, reason, and fairness) is meant to be an action against ‘trans hate’. 2022 has transitioned into a world where an employer who is not constantly, publicly, and (preferably financially) ‘affirming’ an employee they must, by default, hate them. For most of human history, workers preferred their employers to keep their noses out of any private medical business.

‘You’ll be supported as the gender with which you identify, wear the clothes or uniform of your affirmed gender, use the toilets and change rooms of your affirmed gender and be referred to by the name of your affirmed gender too,’ read a statement, issued by Coles.

The statement leans heavily toward sentiments of anti-discrimination and equity – which is fine, one is simply left to wonder where this emotionally sensitive Coles hurt-feelings committee was when it was ruthlessly sacking unvaccinated staff who simply wanted to keep their jobs and their body autonomy at the same time. Coles went one step further, attempting to impose its vaccination policies on unrelated suppliers, contractors, partners, and anyone working onsite.

And no. If you’re an employee with a non-gender related medical or emotional issue, you’ll have to plan ahead and sacrifice some of your holiday leave when you run out of the standard state-sanctioned medical allotment. No one is going to give you a Woke Virtue point for a hip replacement.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/coles-sacks-unvaccinated-staff-creates-paid-gender-affirmation-leave

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Tony Abbott warns Liberals against giving into political correctness amid election loss

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has warned the Liberals against panicking in the wake of its devastating election loss, saying the party should not give into political correctness.

In an opinion column published in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Abbott said the Coalition didn’t deserve to be bundled out of office, based on its record, and former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who had navigated the country so well through the pandemic, should never have lost his seat.

“Defeat always prompts anxieties that our party might somehow be out-of-step with popular feeling on climate change, for instance, or on identity issues,” Mr Abbott wrote.

“And in the seats we lost on the weekend, perhaps we were.

“Yet between the Coalition and the ALP, this wasn’t actually a climate change election. Those that were – in 2010, 2013 and 2019 – had a very different outcome.

“The question is: do we win so-called teal seats back by trying to be even more zealous on climate or by finding other issues on which to appeal?”

Mr Abbott, who supported controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves during the campaign in his old seat of Warringah, which he lost to Independent Zali Steggall in 2019, said the loss of once blue-ribbon Liberal seats was just a “dramatic illustration of the long-term trend of better-off people to vote left”.

But also noted the declining margins for Labor in “struggle street”.

“Before leaping to the conclusion that the Libs should move further left, it’s also worth noting that the National Party held all its seats and that the Coalition did best in Queensland and Tasmania, where the state party has tended to be least ‘woke’,” he wrote.

“My instinct is that the teal seats will return to the Liberal fold when a Labor government is seriously mismanaging the economy, not when the Liberal Party goes green.”

Mr Abbott said the focus should be on the new Albanese government, which will inevitably make plenty of mistakes.

https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/tony-abbott-warns-liberals-against-giving-into-political-correctness-amid-election-loss/news-story/fec15e5c660c5f92be6ec52c84d1fd41

A note of caution

Below is one part of the post-mortem that the Liberal party is understandably having at the moment. I am inclined to think that the outcome will not matter much. It is often said that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And the ALP is constitutionally incapable of dealing with the economic disaster that is already unfolding so will make any alternative welcome. And the Liberals are the only party with a claim to economic rectitude so will romp in next time

History is instructive. What hope is there that the ALP will tame inflation? None that I can see. Their policies will expand it. In an earlier era Gough Whitlam (ALP) pumped inflation up to 19%. That gave Malcolm Fraser (LCP) such a big victory that he even took the Senate with him

James Allan’s take on the worst night on the Liberal Party’s history is, by and large, right.

The leafy suburbs of Sydney have for years not been Liberal heartland in fact, and now they are not in name. People who are loaded and don’t have to worry about the cost of keeping the lights on, and can afford to indulge in their climate warrior fantasies and champagne socialism, vote Left as part of their virtue signalling. Allan is right: preferential voting delayed the transformation, but it’s now happened.

Allan’s long-time thesis, repeated many times here, is that the Liberals’ recent time in government tossed aside its social and economic liberal roots, and that a spell in the opposition paddock will soon set things right. Well, he’s got his wish.

But he is also confident that this period of agistment will be brief. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a renewed conservative Liberal Party win in 2025,’ he wrote on Monday. Provided, of course, that the Liberals follow the prescription and ‘opt to go down the conservative renewal path’.

The truth is, Jim, that the appropriate response is what The Castle’s Daryl Kerrigan used to say about classified ads in the Trading Post: you’re dreamin’.

Renewing the Liberal Party will take more than one term. It will take years beyond that. What happened on Saturday is so much an existential danger that long and extremely hard looks need to be taken by the party not just to consider what went wrong, but to determine exactly what its values and principles should be in an age where voters don’t much seem to care as long as they get free stuff, and parties believe they can substitute the character assassination of opponents for the hard work of policy-making and shaping a programme for government.

That means it’s too early to say, as some already are, that the traditional heartland-turned-Teal should be abandoned for the outer suburbs and regions. It’s too early to say that going hard to ‘dump Dan’ or ‘maul Mark’ is a key to renewed Liberal electoral success at state level. In fact, it’s too early to say anything. Just trying to make sense of Saturday’s every which way slaughter of the Liberal parliamentary party does my head in.

We in the Liberal party need to return to our centre-right conservative roots, but are they the roots of Menzies in the 1940s, or of a new plant more attuned to the realities of the 2020s? Is it simply standing firm against the climate warriors and social engineers, or is it something more innate? Is it going full libertarian or accepting, like Burke, that the state and community have a respected place in our lives?

As for the politics of the Liberals returning to government, truly this was a good election to lose. The social, economic, and security headwinds Mr 32 per cent Anthony Albanese, his Left-leaning government and even further Left-leaning upper and lower house crossbenches, will try the competence of a far more talented and balanced ministry than Albanese’s will be. But an invigorated Labor also will continue to outplay the Coalition on politics, and drive wedges into the new Opposition to exploit existing divisions and create new ones – do you really think that Albanese committed to implementing the Ayers Rock Statement from the Heart ‘in full’ entirely out of altruism?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/jim-allan-youre-dreamin/

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Green True Believers now rule

It’s much worse than we thought. The ALP will govern in its own right, but will be forced into extreme positions by a Green-left Senate.

The first thing to recognise is that the result demonstrates a new consensus.

There are some differences between the ALP, the Coalition, the Teals, and the Greens. To placate its funders within the union movement the ALP will seek to abolish the ‘gig’ economy and promote a 5 per cent wage rise, something the Greens would also support. But that apart, the consensus represents a goal of abandoning the fossil fuel burning energy industry and coal and gas exports; differences are essentially confined to the pace at which this happens.

Replacing the socialist-free enterprise divide that conditioned political dualities during the 20th century, we now have the belief in global warming as the key delineator.

The vast majority of politically actives within society are undeterred by or unaware that there has been no significant warming over the past 30 years or that warmings and coolings were a feature of planet earth long before fossil fuels were burned. They are convinced that Armageddon is upon Australia with fires, floods, and rising sea levels resulting from human-induced global warming. These, the new True Believers, further believe that if Australia (with one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions) ceases to burn fossil fuels we will restore some imagined ecological nirvana. And, unchastened or unaware of this year’s five-fold increase in wholesale gas and electricity prices, they believe this will come at a trivial cost.

The Teal candidates, (described by Peta Credlin as, ‘Greens with nice clothes and designer handbags’) represent the left of the Coalition and have captured six Liberal blue-ribbon seats in major cities to add to their two incumbents.

Such success would not have been possible without the $12 million spent by Simon Holmes à Court and his affluent supporters (many of whom have vested interests in an outcome that promises more subsidies for renewables).

But Clive Palmer spent $70 million, which yielded very little.

The difference was that the Teals had the support of an army of devotees, many of them the result of the long march through the institutions that has indoctrinated a generation and a half of schoolchildren into accepting the green illusion.

Some National MPs representing coal districts and a handful of Coalition Senators like Gerrard Renwick, Matt Canavan, and Alex Antic depart from the delusionary climate consensus and recognise the importance of coal and gas for power generation as well as exports. There may be others, like Peter Dutton the presumed new leader, who were previously muted.

The Teals’ success may bring a split in the Coalition. Such an outcome was foreshadowed by Liberal leftist Senator, Simon Birmingham, though he saw this as a formal rupture between the Liberals and the Nationals, when the central Climate Change issue divides both parties (some more successful Nationals MPs, like Darren Chester in Gippsland, are pro-climate action). Simon Birmingham would take the federal Coalition along the path adopted in Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia, a path that would leave it in permanent opposition to the ALP/Greens.

If the Coalition parties split, the conservative elements would develop policies covering a range of matters beyond energy and climate change to include freedom of speech, regulation reform, and spending cuts.

But forging such a new party would be a formidable challenge. The Freedom Friendly parties which include One Nation and Liberal Democrats and, incongruously, Palmer United, failed to exploit any presumed gap from the Coalition adopting green policies. Taking the Senate vote, compared to the Coalition (at 33 per cent) and the ALP (at 30 per cent), these parties (plus the shooters, fishers, farmers) got 11.3 per cent. The Greens and their close allies got 14.6 per cent.

The freedom parties’ vote has hardly grown. Senate, swings to the freedom parties, as illustrated below, were much lower than those to the greens and their allies – they were even lower than the 1.95 per cent swing achieved by Legalise Cannabis Australia!

The fact that fewer than 12 per cent of people unambiguously voted against green mysticism suggests that, in terms of political tactics, the Coalition could have done worse than prosecute the campaign on a me-too climate change platform. But this is, in part, because for six years they failed to explain the importance of reliable energy to the economy both for supplying domestic power and for its share of the export revenues (half and growing). Nor did they make a dent in unwinding the institutional forces feeding the climate change agenda.

The policies the electorate has endorsed are profoundly against the nation’s economic interests and must lead to an economic collapse. For a poor country, like Sri Lanka, going the Full Green Monty quickly unravelled the economy. Australia, though, has fabulous natural wealth and a desperate government may be able to avert disaster by cashing-in much of that, since, even after the excessive spending of the Turnbull/Morrison/Frydenberg era, debt remains at only 54 per cent of GDP, half that of many European countries, America, and Canada.

World recession and rising interest rates may however expedite an unravelling of the economy. In any event, we need political leadership which explains the operations of the economy with the hope that the people through a democratic process will recognise where their true interests lie.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/this-is-worse-than-we-thought/

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Tony Abbott sees hope in suburbs and regions

In the USA, the Republicans have become the party of the worker Australia's conservatives could have a similar future

Tony Abbott’s advice to the Liberal Party not to focus too much on regaining the lost blue-ribbon heartland of Australia’s richest real estate but to look to less well-off outer suburbs for renewal and revival is spot-on.

Abbott believes too many former and current Liberal MPs have provided knee-jerk reactions to the drastic loss of affluent inner-city seats to the so-called teal Climate 200 group, declaring there needs to be a move to the “right or left”, particularly on climate change policy, as a solution without recognising the problem.

A swath of moderate, progressive Liberal MPs has been wiped out by teals running on just two policies – an integrity commission and more cuts to greenhouse gas emissions – in a parasitical political campaign that cost Scott Morrison any chance. In an election that mostly concentrated on cost-of-living pressures, the seats of Wentworth, Kooyong, North Sydney, McKellar, Goldstein and Curtin were not clamouring for income support.

But instead of conservatives or the remaining moderates fighting a new climate war over the undoubtedly difficult policy of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 they need to stand back strategically, and recognise the changed landscape and the entrenched nature of the affluent independent vote.

They also have to identify where to garner new support and build on existing strengths.

Abbott helped the Liberals where he could during the campaign and, unlike the man who knocked him off, Malcolm Turnbull, did not criticise or undermine the Coalition. As well, he has now spoken without recrimination or ideological bent to simply identify a potential advantage in a slough of despondency.

Women were ‘forgotten people’ by the Liberals this election
Former Liberal candidate for Warringah Katherine Deves says women were “the forgotten people” by the Liberal… Party this election. “Women like me who are told we can have it all – we got educated, we’re looking after kids, ageing parents, keeping our relationships together. We’re tired,” she told us.

As one of only four Liberal leaders to win government from opposition, as a successful opposition leader who reduced Labor to a minority government after just one term and who then won the next election with a 16-seat majority, Abbott’s view on a strategy on how to win deserves attention. He has recognised the likelihood of entrenched elitist, inner-city MPs holding traditional Liberal seats, just as Greens will hold traditional Labor seats, and the need and potential for Liberals to extend support in the outer suburbs and link with the regional and rural support of fringe Liberals and Nationals.

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson says the forgotten Australians need to be remembered in regaining… Liberal voters. “I think it’s incredibly important that the Coalition work together to ensure that they do not miss the concerns and aspirations of the so-called forgotten people,” he told Sky News

The demographics and election results speak for themselves of the potential for Liberal appeals to small business, family, migrants, tradespeople and contractors in the less affluent suburbs. In Sydney’s western, formerly Labor seat of Fowler, the only true independent success of 2022, Dai Le, who defeated former NSW Labor premier, Kristina Keneally, who was parachuted in from Sydney’s uber-exclusive Scotland Island, did so as a migrant and small businesswoman, with a family and grassroots support.

Obviously the Liberal Party has to repair its broken state organisations but it also has to do the reshaping without falling back on the stupid ideological and factional battles and look to a longer-term goal.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/stop-overreacting-tony-abbott-sees-hope-in-suburbs-and-regions/news-story/6eddbff43dc8c60dcc43863a2cf1ab8b

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increased subsidies for electric cars coming

Anthony Albanese will introduce policies to boost the take-up of electric vehicles but will stop short of imposing a ban on petrol or diesel cars as part of his plan to tackle climate change.

The Labor Party will introduce tax benefits to reduce the price of electric cars and plug-in hybrids, forecasting that 89 per cent of new car sales will be electric by 2030.

The new government will also make it easier to charge electric cars by setting up hundreds of new charging stations so drivers can easily travel long distances.

Although the cost of buying an electric car puts many potential buyers off, they are much cheaper to run than petrol cars and will save drivers money over the long term.

By making electric cars cheaper and more convenient, Mr Albanese hopes there will be 3.8 million on the road by 2030.

Labor will also invest in boosting the electricity grid so it can cope with a big increase in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.

Former Energy Minister Angus Taylor claimed the plan would push up power prices by $560 a year, an outlandish claim that was quickly de-bunked by experts - but there could be some smaller short-term price rises.

It remains to be seen whether the Greens will pursue their ambitious policies - such as banning petrol cars - in the senate where they can use their balance of power position as leverage on Labor.

Electric cars will be exempt from a five per cent import tariff that would reduce the cost of a $40,000 vehicle by $2,000.

They will also be exempt from fringe benefits tax which will encourage workplaces to give their employees electric cars.

The move would result in savings of up to $8,700 for a $50,000 vehicle.

The tax cuts will be introduced on July 1 this year and will be reviewed in three years.

Electric cars will be exempt from a five per cent import tariff . They will also be exempt from fringe benefits tax

Labor will also invest $39.3 million, matched by the NRMA, to deliver 117 fast charging stations on highways across Australia.

This will provide charging stations at an average interval of 150km on major roads, allowing Aussies to drive from Adelaide to Perth or Darwin to Broome with an electric car.

The result of these policies is that electric vehicles will make up 89 per cent of new car sales by 2030, with 15 per cent of all cars on the road by then being zero-emission.

According to this forecast, 3.8million vehicles on the road will be electric by 2030.

There is no electric vehicle sales target but Labor will overhaul the Commonwealth fleet to make it electric.

Labor dropped former leader Bill Shorten's plans to introduce average emissions standards for new vehicles.

In Australia just 1.5 per cent of cars sold are electric and plug-in hybrid. This compares to 17 per cent in the United Kingdom and 85 per cent in Norway.

Mr Albanese predicts some 5,960 jobs will be created in the electric car industry.

Electric Vehicle Council of Australia CEO Behyad Jafari has welcomed Mr Albanese's plans.

He said: 'It's refreshing to hear a federal political party recognise the massive potential electric vehicles provide for Australia and start to outline a plan to realise those benefits.

'There are some very positive and welcome steps already outlined. But key among them is to work with industry to develop a well overdue National Electric Vehicle Strategy.

'A great sign of things to come.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10844095/Anthony-Albaneses-big-plan-stop-driving-petrol-car.html

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Labor party already feeling heat over its emissions-reduction strategy

To meet the climate change promise that Labor took to the federal election, the Albanese government must boost renewable energy to 82 per cent of supply by 2030, put a carbon-trading scheme on big business and spend billions on infrastructure and new technologies.

But before the final numbers are even counted, the ALP is under pressure to do more.

The Greens have demanded tougher action to win their support in the Senate, and conservation and investor groups have been quick to insist that Labor lifts its target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.

Labor’s policy for the election would cost $75bn by 2030, equal to 3 per cent of GDP. Billions of dollars will be spent upgrading electricity networks, electric vehicles will be given special tax advantages, and a new $15bn National Reconstruction Fund will provide finance and investment for renewables and other low-emissions technologies.

The centrepiece of Labor’s plan is a revised safeguards mechanism which would become a cap-and-trade carbon market for the nation’s biggest emissions industries. A new body would decide which major companies were forced to cut their emissions, with the total amount of emissions allowed across the economy to be reduced each year.

Offsetting emissions is expected to spawn a range of new industries in the agriculture and land care sectors.

Modelling for Labor before the election estimated its climate change policies would result in lower electricity prices for consumers and thousands of new jobs. But it did not calculate the inflationary impact of forcing businesses outside of the electricity sector to act.

Labor’s plan was more ambitious than the Coalition policy of cuts of 26 to 28 per cent by 2030 but below the demands of the teal independents for a 60 per cent cut and the Greens demand of net zero by 2035.

Mr Albanese has said his government would legislate the new target. But to get the changes through parliament it must win support in the Senate from either the Greens or Coalition senators.

“Labor’s goal to have 82 per cent of our electricity generated by renewables by 2030 is a step in the right direction, but the new government must reconsider its position on new coal and gas projects”, Ms O’Shanassy added.

The Investor Group on Climate Change said the election outcome offered an opportunity to reset and align Australia’s economic policies with climate goals.

The group said stronger Paris-aligned 2030 targets were needed to unlock $131bn in investment in clean industries and new jobs across the economy by the end of the decade.

Mr Albanese has made climate change a defining policy for his government. He has pledged to raise it with the leaders of the US, Japan and India at the Quad meeting in Tokyo this week.

To signal its new approach, Labor will seek to host a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

This year’s meeting will be held in Egypt where a decision will be made on the venue for 2023.

Labor’s commitment to cut emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 is broadly in line with the pledges of other major countries.

To meet the target, emissions will need to fall to 351 million metric tonnes, or “Mt”, in 2030 in Paris budget accounting terms.

The ALP policy is projected to set Australia on a net-zero pathway by 2030, reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 in line with the Paris Agreement.

For this to happen, renewable energy penetration will need to grow to 82 per cent by 2030 compared to 68 per cent under business as usual.

The worst thing for the Liberal and National parties going forward would be to engage in another round of climate…
The Labor government has signalled $24bn in public investment to be matched by $51bn in private sector investment. During the election campaign, Labor said annual average electricity bills were projected to be $275 lower by 2025 and $378 lower by 2030.

The safeguards mechanism carbon trading scheme will be applied to facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2e per year across a range of sectors, including mining, oil and gas extraction, manufacturing, transport, and waste.

Labor modelled its policy on recommendations by the Business Council of Australia for emission baselines to be reduced gradually over time. Peak business groups have argued this would be in line with commitments already made by corporations to be carbon neutral by 2050. Businesses will be able to offset their emissions through internal abatement or external offsets from Australia’s carbon farming sector.

Industry will be given flexibility to discover low-cost abatement opportunities and invest in long-term emissions reduction technologies.

According to modelling published by the ALP, emissions covered by the safeguard mechanism have grown 7 per cent since its commencement in July 2016, rising to 140 Mt of CO2e in 2020-21 to be 17 per cent above 2005 levels, or just over one-quarter (28 per cent) of national emissions.

Without action, big companies were projected to overtake the electricity sector as Australia’s largest emitting policy segment in the early 2020s.

Labor said improvements to the Safeguard Mechanism were projected to deliver 213 Mt of GHG emissions reductions by 2030.

It said investment in industry abatement was estimated to create 1600 jobs by 2030, with five out of six of these jobs to be created in regional areas.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/labor-already-feeling-heat-over-its-emissionsreduction-strategy/news-story/73e76b920fa180d5f935c45adfecec31

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Incoming Indigenous Labor MP calls Greens a bigger threat to a Voice to parliament than Coalition

The incoming Indigenous MP for Australia’s red centre says the Greens are a bigger threat to the voice to parliament than the Coalition, as the left-wing party pushes a treaty between the government and Aboriginal people before any national Indigenous body.

Greens leader Adam Bandt on Monday dug in on the party’s official position that a $250m truth commission and a treaty process were higher priorities than Labor’s promised referendum on an Indigenous voice.

Tiwi woman Marion Scrymgour, Labor’s likely victor in the knife-edge count for the seat of Lingiari, said she believed the greatest threat to constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians did not come from the right but from the hard left.

“I’m not so much worried about the Liberals; it’s more the Greens,” she said. “While they say they are friends of Indigenous people, they’re not really because they just want to run their outrageous agendas all the time.”

The Greens were the first party to fully endorse the Uluru statement and its call for a voice in 2017 but they changed their policy after Uluru detractor Lidia Thorpe joined their ranks as a senator in 2020. Senator Thorpe was among activists at the time of the summit who walked out over the voice proposal, arguing a treaty should be top priority.

While Mr Bandt has previously said the Greens would not block a referendum, he has confirmed the party wants progress on a truth commission and a treaty in this term of parliament. “They are important things that we think we can get done during this parliament,” he said.

Incoming Alice Springs Country Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said the Greens were hopelessly out of touch with Indigenous issues in regional Australia.

“The extremism, the radicalism of the Greens, it’s very concerning,” she said. “The Greens might want to look back with truth hearings but there are things happening right now that are far more urgent like the safety of women and children in regional communities.”

Incoming Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney said on Monday that the new government supported a treaty but it would take time. “Treaties are complex. We need to look at the states and territories that already have treaty processes under way and look at the structures in place, the architecture,” she said. Competing priorities in Indigenous affairs in the new parliament have emerged as a record number of Indigenous Australians prepare to become MPs.

Counting from Saturday’s election continued on Monday but Australians have voted nine and possibly 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into federal parliament.

Ms Nampijinpa Price described the new Albanese government’s proposed referendum on the Indigenous voice as “a distraction” from the pressing issues facing Aboriginal people in remote communities.

The outspoken Warlpiri-Celtic woman said she would lobby Labor to keep the cashless debit card – a measure she sees as “a protective blanket for marginalised people” – and to block the reintroduction of alcohol into Northern Territory homelands.

Ms Nampijinpa Price said she hoped that Labor’s Indigenous MP in the NT, Malindirri McCarthy, and Ms Scrymgour – if she was elected – could work together on the issues affecting Indigenous women and children in the Territory, such as domestic violence.

Existing Indigenous senators include Pat Dodson from Labor, and independent Jacqui Lambie from Tasmania. The Greens’ two Indigenous senators – Ms Thorpe and Dorinda Cox – were also returned.

Ms Burney did not comment directly on the Greens’ urgent demand for progress towards truth-telling and treaty. However, she confirmed the truth-telling process that she planned would involve local governments and would not take the form of court-style hearings.

Ms Burney’s priority was to consult all Australians about the Indigenous voice, its role and the question they would be asked in the referendum. She said it was important people knew the Uluru statement called for an advisory body to the parliament on issues directly affecting Indigenous people.

“People need to be clear what they are voting for and need to be clear on the role of the voice,” Ms Burney said. “Uluru was absolutely clear … the voice is modest, it is generous and it does not have veto rights that would usurp parliament.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/incoming-indigenous-labor-mp-calls-greens-a-bigger-threat-to-a-voice-to-parliament-than-coalition/news-story/6028697104d58c490253d2295a0cb881

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Victorian Liberal MP Bernie Finn, who posted anti-abortion comments, expelled from party

The Victorian Liberals have voted to expel controversial MP Bernie Finn from the party.

The upper house MP has been a Liberal politician for nearly four decades, but has caused outrage within the party after a series of inflammatory social media posts.

Victorian Liberal Party leader Matthew Guy said the vote was not about the party "naval gazing from the federal election" but "being a sensible alternative government".

"It is disappointing that it has come to this, but I expect discipline from all members of the parliamentary party and I expect people to uphold respectful discourse," he said.

Speaking outside Victoria's Parliament House after the motion, Mr Finn said he originally joined the Liberal Party because "it was the party of freedom".

"What we have seen today is a statement from the leader of our party that the party I joined over 41 years ago is dead," he said. "The party of Menzies and Howard is no more — not in Victoria. "I will continue to fight, not just in this parliament, but in the next parliament as well."

Earlier this month, Mr Finn posted on Facebook that he was "praying" for abortion to be banned in Victoria, including for rape victims.

"So excited the US is on the verge of a major breakthrough to civilisation. Praying it will come here soon. Killing babies is criminal," he posted.

Mr Finn was referring to a leaked draft opinion from the United States Supreme Court that indicated the Roe v Wade decision, which makes abortion a constitutional right, could be overturned.

In response to a comment saying abortion should be available for those who have experienced sexual assault, Mr Finn commented that "babies should not be killed for the crime of his or her parent".

The comments caused fury within the Victorian Liberals, and Mr Finn resigned as party whip following the posts.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/controversial-mp-bernie-finn-expelled-from-victorian-liberals/101093478

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Voluntary assisted dying legalised in NSW

Terminally ill people in NSW will now be able to choose the timing of their death after a historic vote in state parliament legalised voluntary assisted dying.

Five years after it was first debated in parliament, NSW on Thursday became the final state in Australia to introduce assisted dying laws.

Independent Sydney MP Alex Greenwich introduced the bill to parliament late last year, with Coalition and Labor MPs granted a free vote.

Greenwich told parliament that the “entire diversity” of the parliament were involved in passing the bill, with 28 co-sponsors from across all parties - the highest number of any bill in Australian parliamentary history.

However, an opponent of the bill, Finance Minister Damien Tudehope, told the upper house that it was a “dark day” for NSW as it joined the rest of the country in accepting assisted dying laws. “It was a sad day because it was an opportunity for NSW to say ‘we can be better than this’,” Tudehope said.

Tudehope said the decision of the NSW parliament would be judged by history as a “dreadful mistake”.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/voluntary-assisted-dying-legalised-in-nsw-20220519-p5amo0.html

Monday, May 23, 2022

Some refreshing realism from Jim Chalmers

He has in fact inherited a poison chalice. Unwinding inflation is always painful. Unless he is very lucky he will fail so badly that it will detonate the already shaky support (32.8 per cent of the primary vote) for the ALP government and return the conservatives to power after just one term

Australia’s next Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he felt a sense of responsibility with the nation facing “dire economic challenges”.

“This will be the trickiest conditions an incoming treasury has inherited since World War II,” Mr Chalmers said from his Logan home.

“Inflation is skyrocketing, real wages are falling and there’s substantial pressure on the budget with $1 trillion in debt.

“We intend to implement our commitments, we intend to start with these challenges straight away, but we’re realistic about how long it will take to turn these challenges around.”

Mr Chalmers, Labor’s most senior federal MP in Queensland, said he would bring a perspective to the Cabinet table and Treasury from outside the Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra triangle.

“I’m a Queenslander born and bred, but I want to be a Treasurer for the whole country,” he said.

“Being from the suburbs in general and being from Logan particularly means that I have an understanding of the realities of life in communities like ours.

“For me personally, there’s a real sense of responsibility for the hard task ahead.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/federal-election/labor-unhappy-with-butler-brisbane-seat-on-knife-edge/news-story/ead468f37b3dd00362fe309ce88670dc

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Labor can't ignore low primary vote: Shorten

Incoming NDIS Minister Bill Shorten says while the Morrison government had “run out of puff, Labor can’t “walk away” from their historically low primary vote.

After losing the “unloseable” 2019 federal election, Mr Shorten said the qualitative difference between the two polls was that Scott Morrison’s promise to “just be a daggy dad who wouldn’t cause much harm” had proven to be a lie.

“But more importantly, it feels like a national sigh of relief. The Morison government had run out of puff arguably like this to happen three years ago,” he told Sky News on Monday.

With less than one in three Australians voting for Labor as their first preference, Mr Shorten said he wasn’t going to “walk away” from the challenge of improving Labor’s primary vote, but rejected the narrative Labor's low primary meant the party had not “won the election”.

“When you look at where people put their second preferences, more Australians wanted Labor to be in charge than Liberal. But I don't walk away from the challenge of wanting to improve Labor’s primary vote,” he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/politicsnow-survivor-dutton-in-box-seat-to-lead-libs/live-coverage/ce067d10e53c1c1dabbf135d6c0950e2

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Coal, gas sticking point in Senate: Bandt

Bandt is a nasty old Trotskyite but seems to have conned the Greens into thinking he is one of them

Greens leader Adam Bandt says Labor’s support for new coal and gas mines will be a sticking point between the parties in the Senate, saying it will be a “very critical question” in the next parliament.

Riding high behind the Greens' shock victories in the Brisbane seats of the Labor-held Griffith and Liberal-held Ryan, Mr Bandt asserted the party could end up with six seats in the lower house if voting in Macnamara and Richmond broke their way.

But with Labor likely to gain a majority in the lower house, attention has turned to the Senate, where Anthony Albanese will need to negotiate with the crossbench to ensure his legislative agenda can be passed.

“But on the question of climate, the big issue is coal and gas. And we were clear about that during the course of the election and we said to tackle the climate crisis, we can't open up more coal and gas mines now,” Mr Bandt told Radio National on Monday morning.

“And Labor went to the election saying they back the Liberals in opening more coal and gas mines. That is going to be something we were going to need to talk about in this Parliament. We can't put the fire out while we're pouring petrol on it.”

The Greens' demands for their support could put a raft of energy projects in jeopardy, including the Northern Territory's Beetaloo gas basin and mega-mines mooted for Queensland's Galilee Basin.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/politicsnow-survivor-dutton-in-box-seat-to-lead-libs/live-coverage/ce067d10e53c1c1dabbf135d6c0950e2

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Australia set to sign Geneva’s Global Pandemic Treaty

The ‘New Normal’ of medical fascism is coming regardless of how Australians vote at the federal election.

Having acquired a taste for globalised control during the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organisation has teamed up with vaccine manufacturers, philanthropic billionaires, and power-crazed world leaders to create a ‘Global Pandemic Treaty’ in Geneva.

It is set to form part of the ‘one health’ approach proposed by the WHO and has been pitched by its creators as a way to overcome the inconvenient battle between – as they put it – globalism and statism.

According to International Affairs who were reviewing the treaty, the globalist approach ‘shares many overlapping values with that of a transnational cosmopolitan, medical humanitarianism or moral egalitarian world-view, rooted in the Kantian logic of universal community’ while the statist approach is a nationalist one that might ‘undermine’ global efforts.

In June of 2021, Scott Morrison commented on the proposed treaty, saying:

‘It’s essential that we strengthen global (disease) surveillance and provide the World Health Organisation with the authority and the capacity to do this important job for all the peoples of the world. If we are to deliver on this ambitious reform agenda, then we must work together and put other issues aside.’

Yes, the same Prime Minister who attempted to escape criticism by saying ‘there’s no such thing as vaccine mandates’ is champing at the bit to grant the WHO absolute control over the health choices of Australian citizens. It amounts to extending similar emergency powers to the WHO that Daniel Andrews gifted himself in Victoria – except Australians can’t vote the WHO out of power. As for Labor, they have laid down at the feet of the WHO, tummies up and paws in the air like dogs waiting for a rub.

The advertised pretext for a global health treaty is that countries were wrongly allowed to take bespoke approaches to Covid – in particular, their vaccine roll-outs. According to the WHO, this endangered the health of the whole planet.

A more accurate reading of the situation comes from discussions had at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and a consortium of nations that include Australia. The Liberal government pledged a further $100 million to CEPI in March, 2022 to add to the $1.5 billion it has raised from other governments.

As explained in a previous Spectator Australia article, CEPI’s mission is to create ‘equitable access to vaccines’ because they do not like the volatility (and competition) of the free market. This is the same organisation that poured a fortune into RNA and mRNA vaccines for the WHO’s DiseaseX scenario which – less than a year later – was put into emergency production to combat Covid as a ‘proof of concept’ exercise. Their stated objective from the beginning, long before Covid, has been to find a way to force Western governments to purchase vaccines in bulk for the Third World under the banner of ‘equity’.

The handling of the Covid pandemic is being used as an excuse to justify what was already designed and publicised. In this light, the proposed Global Pandemic Treaty is – first and foremost – a trillion-dollar business deal.

Being discussed is a $10 billion per year ‘preparedness fund’ along with an additional $100 billion emergency fund – that you pay for. Who knows what else is coming…

The World Health Organisation often complains about free will when it comes to national pandemic responses. We now know that nations like Sweden were able to provide real-world data that contradicted much of the ‘approved’ health advice issued by the WHO. We also know that the WHO ‘leaned on’ European nations that tried to go their own way with health directives.

If anything, one of the great weaknesses of the Covid pandemic response was the uniform approach enacted by world leaders that copied Communist China in their locking down of nations, unethical medical coercion of citizens, and widespread police brutality. How much worse would the behaviour of state premiers, prime ministers, and presidents have been if their actions were ‘legalised’ by an international treaty with no possible recourse for citizens? There is certainly no confirmation that the WHO took the correct approach, considering some of the countries who deviated from the norm did better than the average of obedient nations.

Worse, the nation that caused the pandemic – China – is one of the notable absences from the treaty. What is the point of enacting the treaty if Patient Zero refuses to come to the table? It’s a bit like the United Nations’ Climate Change promises that don’t include the world’s largest polluter.

Further difficulty is being created by the reputation of the WHO. Historically, the WHO has hardly been a reliable or independent body worthy of wielding absolute power over the global health decisions. Its leader, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was controversially backed by Xi Jinping’s government in a nasty election process. Tedros, in turn, was criticised for shielding China from investigation over the outbreak of Covid that (almost certainly) escaped from a Level 4 Viral Lab in Wuhan. On repeated occasions, advice issued by the WHO was found to be inconsistent or simply wrong, while they issued eye-brow raising changes to long-held dictionary definitions of fundamental concepts like ‘herd immunity’ and ‘vaccines’, let alone the near comical back-flipping on mask advice.

It is not the sort of behaviour that instils confidence. This is before addressing the recorded failures and subsequent investigations into WHO practices in the Third World. If anything, what the world desperately needs is independent thought in pandemic responses – a free market of ideas where merit, not compliance, is given the opportunity to advance health.

If Anthony Albanese signs this treaty, it represents a seismic shift in everything we thought we knew about democracy.

It is likely the treaty will make it possible for a foreign bureaucracy with unacceptably close ties to China to call the shots – literally – on global public health. Universal healthcare was meant to be a voluntary safety net – not a stepping stone to international socialism or the dissolution of body autonomy. That said, the wheels are already falling off, with questions being raised about whether it will be a ‘treaty’ in the legal sense after parts of the WHO Constitution were re-worded.

The vote for this dangerous Pandemic Treaty will be held in Geneva on May 22-28. The Prime Minister of Australia will be there will bells on, ready to sign and absolve himself of the ‘bother’ of responsibility. It is a dream come true for weak leaders who would love nothing better than to let the blame for the next pandemic and the accompanying citizen outrage rest safely offshore.

Among the horrors facing Australia if the treaty were to proceed are the advertised promises of global tracking (most likely through the World Economic Forum’s Digital Identity policy linked to health passes), mandatory vaccination of all citizens, and the ability for the WHO to declare and sustain a pandemic along with its emergency powers.

Lately, international treaties have been used to undemocratically circumnavigate the sovereign will of nations. A treaty is a powerful legal document that leaders use to defy public opinion. While the United Nations cannot force a country to honour its ink-mark (as we saw with China’s shredding of the Sino-British Joint Declaration), Western leaders frequently brandish these treaties as security blankets to justify unpopular policy.

‘The ongoing chaos of this pandemic only underlines why the world needs an ironclad global agreement to set the rule of the game for pandemic preparedness and response,’ said WHO Director General, Dr Tedros.

Or – stay with me on this one – the WHO could do its actual job and properly investigate China and its medical partners for dangerous and experimental gain of function research in dodgy labs.

Will Australia vote for freedom?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/australia-set-to-sign-genevas-global-pandemic-treaty/

Anthony Albanese will be sworn in as prime minister today, pledging to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full and take tougher action on climate change as Labor takes power for the first time in nine years.

Mr Albanese, who will fly to Tokyo with Penny Wong today for the Quad leaders’ summit with US, Indian and Japanese leaders, promised to “get down to business’’ on Labor’s policy agenda when he returned on Wednesday. Labor was on Sunday confident of forming majority government despite the ALP primary vote plunging to 32.8 per cent and the shock losses of frontbenchers Kristina Keneally and Terri Butler.

Simon Benson writes: This is a watershed moment for Australian politics. The depth of disillusionment in the two-party system is unmistakeable and the tipping point that people have talked about for years has finally arrived. The size of the crossbench will more than double, with up to 15 independents and minor party MPs. Such an outcome is without precedent for the Australian parliament.

Peter Dutton is the frontrunner to replace Scott Morrison unopposed as Liberal leader following the election bloodbath and loss of rising stars in the partyroom. The loss of up to 10 moderate Liberal MPs is expected to hand Mr Dutton and the conservative faction greater power in deciding the leadership line-up at the next partyroom meeting. Keep up with the latest in our live blog, PoliticsNow.

The Liberal Party has been cleaved in two and faces divisions in how to respond to the election defeat, including which direction to take in the next parliamentary term, after its moderate faction was “eviscerated”.

According to Jamie Walker, the Liberals’ centre of gravity has collapsed into the outer suburbs and regions, far removed from the leafy inner-city heartland seats that turned teal or Green to pose an existential threat to the party of Menzies and Howard.

The Coalition has been weakened by Anthony Albanese’s election victory, with senior Liberal and Nationals frontbenchers acknowledging growing differences between urban and regional communities as well as ongoing conflicts over climate change.

While the Liberals were on track to lose 19 seats on Sunday, with a further three in danger, the Nationals were holding all of their 16 lower house seats. Barnaby Joyce says his future as leader of the Nationals will be a “decision for the party room”. Mr Joyce said: “With three retiring members, the Nats held every seat and picked up another senator. I am proud that, with our team, I have never gone to an election as leader or deputy and not held all the seats as well as winning one, and that is with the tide coming in or against us.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/anthony-albanese-vows-to-get-down-to-business/news-story/2fdfa5058bb48f938cc0a5abeb95810f

Sunday, May 22, 2022

In Good Leftist style Albo starts with a promise he cannot deliver

He promises contitutional change in favour of Aborigines but constitutional change can only be delivered by way of a referendum. And Australia has a long history of referenda. And what has emerged is that referenda only get up if there is no significant opposition to them. And both the the National Party and the One Nation party are highly likely to oppose this one. I think I can already hear the articulate David Flint on the matter.

And referenda have to deliver in the States as well as nationally. And there are known high levels of anti-Aborigine sentiment in both Queensland and Western Australia.

Australia's next Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to serve Australia after Labor won the election and Scott Morrison stood down as the Liberal leader after conceding defeat.

It follows huge surges to the teal independents and Greens that claimed the scalp of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

But Labor's result was far from a landslide with star candidate - former NSW Premier Kristina Keneally - somehow losing the safe seat of Fowler.

Addressing an excitable crowd, Mr Albanese promised to establish a First Nations voice to Parliament, enshrined in the constitution.

After walking onto the stage with his partner Jodie Haydon at the Hurlstone Park RSL to the Australian classic GANGgajang's Sounds Of Then, the Labor leader was greeted by cheers of "Albo, Albo, Albo".

"On behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full," Mr Albanese told the crowd.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/federal-election/federal-election-2022-live-polls-set-to-close-as-nation-holds-its-breath/live-coverage/3d69e553c2fcaf1d4ea217b48bb2d230

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The Leftist response to troubled children is to mutilate them

On this page last election eve I wrote, ‘Mums and dads across the country look set to elect a Labor party that has vowed to impose the kooky notion of gender fluidity on all of our children, even those seeking refuge in religious schools.’ We were spared in 2019, but after a term of flaccid failure by the Liberals to fight this culture battle, it looks like the party that introduced the breast-binding, penis-tucking ‘Safe Schools’ programme will now be given a free hand with your kids.

Governments and schools must not mess with the minds of children. That means they must not mess with archetypal realities like male and female as if they were cultural fads instead of facts of nature. For those who have forgotten these facts – like Australia’s former chief medical officer who couldn’t say what a woman was – just remember that a woman is an adult human female, where ‘female’ is defined by a reproductive system organised for gestation. Therefore, a transwoman is not a woman but a male who feels a deep need to present in feminine stereotypes.

But perhaps it’s niceness, not facts, that matters to you? Niceness compels you to affirm a confused boy who says he’s a girl and affirm a male athlete who says he’s a woman? Yes, that’s nice, but it’s untrue, and collaborating with confusion has un-nice consequences.

Keira Bell was a confused child of fifteen who thought she was a boy. The Tavistock Clinic in London affirmed her confusion and set her on the path of hormones that sterilised her and surgery that removed her breasts. Keira was not a boy; she was a troubled girl who has now sued Tavistock for failing to address the source of her confusion and leaving her sterile and scarred.

Tammika Brents was a mixed-martial arts athlete whose skull was smashed by a burly transwoman. Aspiring female swimmers have been metaphorically smashed by transwoman Lia Thomas. Transwomen preserve the male advantage in muscle bulk, limb-length, heart and lung capacity, so allowing biological males to compete in women’s sport not only breaks records and bones but denies a fair go to females. In this timid and trivial election campaign we have watched one brave woman, Katherine Deves, founder of Save Women’s Sports and Liberal candidate for Warringah, get hammered for telling this truth. Because everyone from blind Freddy to the drover’s dog agrees with Deves’ central argument – that women’s sport should be for women – the nice woke Left dredged social media for something smellier to hang around her neck. They found a picture of a young woman with surgical scars where her breasts had been removed. This woman now identified as a man and tweeted satisfaction with the surgery. Deves put the opposing view: that young people are being ‘surgically mutilated and sterilised’. That language fails the niceness test, even if said out of compassion for young people like Keira, but the language is arguably correct.

The term ‘mutilating surgery’ does not imply any lack of good will or skill; it simply describes the radical nature of a procedure. In the days when radical mastectomy was the recommended treatment for breast cancer, no doctor disputed that this was mutilating surgery; the only dispute was whether it was necessary – over time, we realised it was not. In Testing Treatments, the medical authors write, ‘The surgical excesses were eventually challenged, both by surgeons who were unwilling to continue in the face of questionable benefits for their patients, and by outspoken women who were unwilling to undergo mutilating operations.’

Deves is an outspoken woman. She objects to mutilating operations with questionable benefit being performed on young women. The youngest known gender-confused girls to have bilateral mastectomy in Australia were aged 15. The question is not whether the removal of a girl’s healthy breasts is mutilating surgery – arguably it is – but whether it is necessary. The question is not whether cross-sex hormone treatment sterilises the young patient – typically it does – but whether it is justified. Some doctors conclude, in good faith, that it is justified. Others disagree – indeed, hundreds of us (including nine child psychiatrists) wrote to federal health minister Greg Hunt in 2019 (see genderinquiry.org) asking for a parliamentary inquiry into ‘the rapid rise of childhood gender dysphoria in Australia and the lack of scientific basis for current medical treatment.’

Why should we usher children down a path of radical hormonal and surgical treatment when we know about 80 per cent of these children would get over their gender confusion around puberty? A supportive, watchful approach seems wiser. Former cutting-edge countries like Sweden and Finland have now reviewed the evidence and halted hormonal and surgical treatment for gender-dysphoric youth, prioritising psychological treatment. Here in Australia, however, hormonal transition remains the dominant paradigm while Labor’s evil laws in Queensland and Victoria prosecute GPs who dare suggest that treatment should address the child’s troubled mind, not her body.

Deves spoke as truthfully as she could on youth sterilisation and mutilating surgery, on British data that found half their transgender prisoners were sex offenders, on the high incidence of autism and mental health disorders among gender-confused children, and on how unsafe and unfair it is to let transwomen compete with real women. But it’s niceness that matters, not truth. So Deves’ opponent in Warringah, Climate 200’s Zali Steggall, took the nice approach of slurring mothers as ‘transphobic’ if they worry about their daughters playing sport against biological males. That is a safe insult: Steggall will not have to get police protection, but Deves has had to, saying, ‘We are in a time when it is dangerous to speak your mind.’

We are in a time when it is dangerous to leave our kids in school, their minds subject to cult-like indoctrination by gender whisperers on the one hand and peddlers of climate doom on the other. At what point does the imposition of such psychological confusion and superstitious terror become notifiable abuse? Educational mutilation? Parents, maintain the rage.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/australian-notes-317/

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Erasing mothers is not ‘progress’

In the name of inclusion and diversity:

* Barnardos has cancelled its ‘Mother of the Year’ award

* Volunteers from the Australian Breastfeeding Association have been investigated for their use of the word ‘mother’ on social media

* The Labor Party has removed the word ‘mother’ from its policy documents

The reasoning goes: some families don’t have a mother and some mothers identify as ‘fathers’, so we should stop using sexed language for parents altogether. In the modern family, ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have been replaced by Parent 1 and (if you’re lucky) Parent 2.

Sadly, mothers are also being erased, not just from our speech, but from children’s lives. There have been some recent high-profile cases of men ‘creating’ children through surrogacy, with the intention of raising them without a mother. Depending on the arrangement, a baby can have – and lose – up to three different ‘mothers’: a genetic mother, a birth mother, and a social mother. And we are supposed to applaud.

I understand how normalising ‘diverse’ families can help the children of those families to feel less stigmatised, but deliberately removing mothers cannot possibly be called progress. This forced political correctness – telling children that mothers are optional and interchangeable – is a denial of biological reality and human need.

It diminishes a mother’s unique role

Every child has a mother: the woman who was ‘home’ for nine months, delivered them into this world, and (in most cases) fed them from her own body. A mother and her baby share an intimate and irreplaceable bond – even before the child is born.

Beyond birth and breastfeeding, mothers continue to relate to their children in a unique way. Compared to fathers, mothers have higher levels and more receptors of the hormone oxytocin, which is responsible for human bonding. As a result:

‘Fathers tend to play with, and mothers tend to care for, children … Fathers encourage competition; mothers encourage equity. One style encourages independence, while the other encourages security.’ (Glenn Stanton, Why children need a male and female parent).

Katy Faust and Stacy Manning summarise the science of motherhood like this:

‘Mum tends to focus on feelings, regardless of the facts. She’s wired to nurture and connect, an especially important ability when an infant is completely dependent on her to survive. Mothers set the emotional tone at home and intuitively respond to the physical and emotional needs of her family. In her uniquely feminine way, Mum embodies “the home” to her children.’

(Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement, Post Hill Press, 2021 Chapter 3, Part 4, Loc 1546)

A man cannot simply decide to call himself a mother; a woman cannot call herself a genderless ‘parent’ or a ‘father’. The word ‘mother’ has a biological referent in the real world and so we must insist on using it.

It diminishes children’s needs

When we delete mothers from our vocabulary and from children’s lives, we are sending the message that there’s nothing special about mothers – any adult will do. But the reality is that every human being needs and longs not just for a generic parent, but for their genetic mother. Babies spend nine months preparing to meet the mother they already know and share a relationship with. After birth, mother-infant bonding is of the utmost importance for a child’s healthy development.

All of this was deemed to be common sense until reproductive technologies began opening up new possibilities. Now, a man’s desire to be a father can override a child’s right to have a mother.

Earlier this year, a Victorian man made headlines by becoming the first single man to become a father through surrogacy in that state. Predictably, this was celebrated as a win for equality. But having children is not a ‘right’ that can be asserted regardless of biology or the best interests of the child. It’s often asserted that ‘love makes a family’, but children need more than love: they have a deep need to know, and ideally be raised by, both their biological mother and father.

The advocacy organisation Them Before Us exists to give children a voice in the debate over family structure. They have collected hundreds of stories from people who were born through donor conception and surrogacy. Those people commonly experience genealogical bewilderment, a sense of commodification and trauma from the loss of a biological mother or father.

A donor-conceived woman describes her struggle:

‘I cannot put into words the pain of not knowing who my biological mother is and not being able to have/have had a relationship with her. I really do think about this at least once a day, and it is deeply mentally, emotionally, and psychologically troubling.’ (Them Before Us, Chapter 7, Loc 3015)

One young woman conceived through commercial surrogacy (in America – only altruistic surrogacy is legal in Australia) explains:

‘To be loved by the two who created you and not from the strangers who bought you, is natural and beautiful. But I was denied this primal family structure to support a business and [an unfamiliar] infertile couple.’ (Them Before Us, Chapter 8, Loc 3627)

Of course, in an imperfect world, children do lose mothers through death, divorce, abuse, or abandonment. Those children deserve all the love and support we can give them. We applaud the single fathers who raise their children alone. We applaud the selfless women who step in to mother children they didn’t give birth to: grandmothers, step-mothers, foster and adoptive mothers.

But the ‘modern family’, where mothers (or fathers) are treated as optional, is a deliberate denial of what children need and naturally long for. Motherlessness is always something to be mourned, not celebrated.

The primal word

It’s telling that ‘mama’ is, universally, the first word that babies say. It’s a sound that’s easy to make and mimics the movement of the baby’s lips as they feed. For better or worse, it’s still the first word that my younger children call out in the middle of the night.

That’s why we cannot allow ‘mother’ to become a dirty word. It symbolises the deep and irreplaceable bond between a woman and her children. Banning this primal word will cause a primal wound that will take generations to heal.

Mothers matter. Our wombs, breasts, and hormones make us unique and indispensable. Every baby looks for ‘Mama’ from the moment of its birth. We are not parents! We are mothers – and no good will come from erasing us.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/erasing-mothers-is-not-progress/

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Asylum vessel intercepted on way to Australia

I am a bit sympathetic to these people. Sri Lanka is an economic disaster area at the moment and these people are much more likely to be Sinhalese than Tamil Tiger sympathizers. And Non-Muslim South Asians generally make good citizens

A vessel carrying Asylum seekers has been intercepted off Australia's coast.

The Prime Minister used his final media conference of the campaign to announce the boat had been intercepted on Saturday morning after making its way from Sri Lanka.

It is understood about 15 people were on board the vessel that was stopped by Australian authorities off the west coast of Christmas Island after almost making it to the mainland.

Those people were on Saturday afternoon on board an Operation Sovereign Borders vessel having their credentials verified.

As reported in The Weekend Australian today, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said the Sri Lankan navy had intercepted a fishing vessel and two dinghies carrying dozens of people on Wednesday before Saturday’s development.

“This is not scaremongering, this is a reality and it has been demonstrated by the two attempts that we are aware of,” she told reporters at a press conference on Saturday.

“We don’t know if there are any other attempts that have been made over the last few days and we don’t know if there have been any deaths at sea.

“I’ve said very clearly on my watch that I wanted no people to be attempting to travel to Australia illegally by boat and I didn’t want any deaths at sea.

She said that the Labor government posed a risk to Australia’s borders because of its opposition to temporary protection visas, which are aimed at denying permanent resettlement.

Shadow Minister for Home Affairs Kristina Keneally said Labor supported Operation Sovereign Borders, calling people smuggling a “vile trade”.

“Labor supports Operation Sovereign Borders – offshore processing, regional resettlement, and boat turn-backs where safe to do so,” she said on Saturday.

“Labor thanks the Operation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Task Force for their continued work at keeping our borders secure.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/people-smugglers-back-in-business-karen-andrews-says-as-liberals-send-out-warning-texts/news-story/9fd76709b77901b492bef2b7344014f6

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People dying of COVID while life-saving drugs go unused, doctors say

Top doctors have warned that vulnerable patients who test positive to COVID-19 are missing out on potentially life-saving antiviral treatments, with just a fraction of those at risk of serious disease having accessed the new drugs.

Figures from the federal health department show 1379 patients received antiviral medication Paxlovid through their GP in the first weeks in May, after the drug was listed on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme.

“We are still getting quite a number of deaths – and making sure people know antivirals are available is one way of trying to address this,” infectious disease physician Professor Allen Cheng said. “We don’t have many levers left to pull [to protect those at risk of severe illness]. It is easy for people to fall through the cracks”.

With tens of thousands of COVID-19 cases recorded each week, experts say a major awareness campaign is needed to make sure at-risk people know that highly effective treatments can help prevent severe disease if they are taken within five days of symptom onset.

There were more than 680,000 coronavirus cases recorded nationally in the first two weeks in May and 563 deaths.

Fourth ‘winter’ COVID vaccine recommended for people over 65

“Clearly not everyone eligible or those that would benefit are getting access to the treatments,” Cheng said. A major push is needed to make sure older patients with other risk factors, those with co-morbidities, people who are immunosuppressed and unvaccinated are aware treatments are available, he said.

Evidence from trials show that for every 10 to 20 patients treated with Paxlovid one person will be prevented from being hospitalised, Cheng said.

Paxlovid, a combination of the drugs nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, was listed on the PBS last month. Eligible adults who test positive to COVID-19 through a PCR or rapid antigen test can access the treatment from their local pharmacy with a GP prescription.

Paxlovid is available to people aged 65 or older, with two other risk factors for severe disease, or one factor for those aged 75 and over. It is subsidised for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander patients aged 50 or over with two other risk factors and patients who are moderately to severely immunocompromised.

Another antiviral drug, Lagevrio – the trade name for molnupiravir – was also listed on the PBS in March and has since been used to treat more than 15,000 patients, including about 7000 in NSW.

“Clearly not everyone eligible or those that would benefit are getting access to the treatments.”

President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners Karen Price said doctors need to tell “eligible patients proactively that if they contract COVID-19 they should contact their GP”.

“A lot of people are sitting at home with a positive rapid test. We must make sure they know about the medication they can access which could stop them ending up in hospital.”

Australian Medical Association president Dr Omar Khorshid said an awareness campaign was needed for vulnerable people, especially because treatments were previously only available from hospital.

“If you get a positive test, and you’re at risk, a telehealth appointment is all that is needed to be assessed for treatment”.

“Paxlovid has many drug interactions, so it does take time for GPs to have a good grasp of who should be having antivirals. There are definitely barriers in accessing medication”.

Last month Health Minister Greg Hunt said the antiviral PBS listings would support the national plan to transition Australia’s COVID-19 response, which outlines steps to remove all remaining coronavirus restrictions in the community.

“This medicine will help reduce the need for hospital admission,” Mr Hunt said.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/people-dying-of-covid-while-life-saving-drugs-go-unused-doctors-say-20220519-p5amvs.html

Friday 20, 2022

Massive changes to plastic shopping bags in Australia with NSW set to BAN lightweight bags in days, while Woolworths has stopped selling its 15c reusable bags

And what good will this do? The claim is that it will keep plastic out of the oceans. It won't -- for the excellent reason that plastic bags used in Australia don't go there anyway. Most plastic in the oceans comes from Asia. Such waste in Australia is normally disposed of properly. All those garbage trucks running around our suburbs are actually doing something

Australian consumers face a plastic bag revolution in just days with major changes coming into effect in NSW and Western Australia in the coming weeks.

NSW will ban lightweight plastic bags from June 1, while Woolworths supermarket will stop selling its 15c reusable plastic bags across all stores in WA from July.

The supermarket giant will only be offering its paper, green fabric and Bag for Good alternatives when a statewide ban on plastic bags comes into effect from July.

'Over the next month, we'll be gradually phasing out plastic shopping bags from our stores and online orders across WA, as we move to support the WA Government's upcoming plastic bag ban,' Woolworths state general manager Karl Weber said.

'This change will see more than 30 million plastic bags removed from circulation in WA every year — which is a big win for the health of our oceans and waterways.

'While our paper bags will continue to be available, the most sustainable bag you can use is the reusable one you bring from home.'

More than 80 per cent of shoppers are bringing their own bags into the supermarkets - meaning the latest change will have an impact on a small number of customers.

'The vast majority of our customers already bring their own reusable bags to shop, which is the very best outcome for the environment, and we encourage customers to keep up the great work,' Mr Weber said.

'We know the change brought about by this new WA legislation may be an adjustment for some customers and we thank them in advance for their support as we all work together to grow greener.'

Customers will be reminded of the looming change by in-store advertisements.

Environment minister Reece Whitby said the state was leading the way on banning single-use plastics across Australia.

'Western Australia has a strong track record on reducing single-use plastics in the environment, and was named the top jurisdiction in the country two years in a row by WWF Australia, for the work that is being done,' he said.

'The WA community has shown overwhelming support for this — and I would like to thank everyone, including Woolworths, who have embraced these important changes.'

The paper bag will cost 20c and will be able to carry up to 6kgs of groceries.

Woolworths was the first supermarket to ditch single-use plastic bags in 2018. The reusable plastic bag was introduced for 15 cents and was sold as a cheaper alternative to its 99c fabric bags.

Plastic items will be banned in two stages across Western Australia.

The first stage includes banning thick plastic bags, plates, bowls, cups, cutlery, stirrers, straws, takeaway polystyrene food containers and helium balloon releases.

The second stage will ban thin plastic produce bags, cotton buds with plastic shafts, polystyrene packaging, microbeads, oxo?degradable plastics, takeaway coffee cups and lids, and polystyrene cups.

This change will come into effect by the end of 2022.

Businesses disregarding the ban risk heavy fines of up to $5,000.

Meanwhile, the NSW Environment Protection Authority outlined more detail on other products facing the state's upcoming ban.

Items in the firing line include single-use plastic cutlery, straws, stirrers, plates, bowls, chopsticks and sporks.

Other products being phased out are cotton buds and expanded polystyrene (EPS) food service items.

Plastic microbeads found in rinse-off personal care products - used for exfoliating and scrubbing - will also face a ban.

The supply of all these materials will be phased out by November 1 2022.

The NSW parliament passed the 'ground-breaking' legislation in November last year which will gradually halt the supply of problematic single-use plastic items.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10823817/Woolworths-stop-selling-15cent-reusable-bags-month.html

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Do Leftists rely on ill-informed women to gain power?

On extremely rare occasions, news stories about political focus groups reveal something interesting.

Last Friday, Newscorp reported on a group of swinging voters who will (apparently) decide the Prime Minister’s fate. The group was mainly comprised of women because most male voters said they had already made up their minds.

What did these crucial women voters – who we are told time and time again have a near-mystical understanding of what is best for Australia – have to say?

Did they fume about the Liberal Party’s supposed ‘woman problem’ and demand to smash the patriarchy?

No.

They compared Scott Morrison to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, finding the latter quite the hottie in his T-shirt and battle fatigues. That is what they ‘want our Prime Minister to be’ on the campaign trail – not shaking hands with people in a suit.

Did they give detailed rundowns on how Morrison has performed and follow up with a careful analysis of his failings?

No.

He ‘knows his finances and stuff’ but ‘comes across as obnoxious’ so they ‘don’t really listen to anything to do with [him]’ – according to the focus group.

Did they rage about ScoMo’s views on climate change, transgender rights, or any of the things that supposedly damn him forever? Did they show an interest in the economy, or security, or long-term nation-building goals?

No.

Even when prompted about their main policy issue, they could not identify anything in particular. They wanted to get rid of Morrison, but didn’t ‘know the best way to go about that … don’t know enough about it’.

Did they show even the most basic knowledge about or interest in the democratic process?

No.

They ‘don’t follow it closely’ but also definitely don’t want someone ‘arrogant’.

Thank goodness these women have vague ‘feelings’ about Prime Ministerial dress codes. Their position on fashion policy will see their votes used judiciously for the common good of the nation.

There is nothing astounding about their quotes. Political scholars have repeatedly found that women – although often more partisan than men and quicker to take up ‘causes’ – are less likely than men to show interest in macro-level political issues and more likely to preference narrow topics that they believe directly affect them (think sexual harassment or paid period leave).

What is new to the political field is this demographic being elevated to holy status in Australia by so-called ‘progressives’ in both major parties.

They want us to believe that women will guide us into a Utopian future – well, a future that involves getting politicians elected without requiring policy detail.

The same ‘progressives’ who are quickest to jump on a platform about how ‘women need to be heard more in politics’ are silent about how little average women know. Female political ignorance suits ‘progressives’, so long as those women stick to criticising anybody who ‘progressives’ disagree with.

‘Progressives’ go dewy-eyed about equality while encouraging women to stay focused on soft, highly gendered issues. By refusing to call any of this out, the same ‘progressives’ who wax lyrical about girl power are complicit in women remaining wilfully ignorant on significant political issues.

Ignorance makes people far easier to control, but is pandering to it for short-term gain really going to take our country in the right direction?

And why do many women choose to remain ignorant in a society where they have so much opportunity to be otherwise?

For years, this was blamed on useful scapegoats like gendered socialisation. Anybody who still invokes such excuses is trying to skirt the far more likely prospect that there are fundamental differences between how women and men think, and one of those seems to be that – even after decades of feminism – women still prefer babies, husbands, and domesticity. Women are not turned off politics because of misogyny in Parliament House. They never switched on to politics because they simply do not have a burning interest in the big picture.

For all their protests otherwise, ‘progressives’ want the status quo to remain because they need women to have feelings about small targets, rather than thinking deeply about difficult problems. They rely on this for their pathway to power.

If ‘progressives’ admitted that they can only get ahead by manipulating women’s ongoing obliviousness, this would undo years of carefully constructed narratives about the wisdom of women. It would also raise some uncomfortable questions about things like quota systems.

Suddenly, questions might start to come up about whether, when women do engage with politics, it is because they are truly interested in the broad issues that do affect everybody, or because they think their own small issues should concern everybody and damn the rest. Unfortunately, when you consider what is happening in Australia today, it looks a great deal like the latter.

‘Progressives’ validating ignorance and encouraging women to turn a blind eye to anything but the low-hanging fruit of gendered politics is going to end badly in the long term. However, I will not hold my breath on anyone having the guts to stand up against it. Such a step would be too much like real progress. And that might not go over very well in focus groups.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/progressives-prefer-to-keep-their-women-ignorant/

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Energy security fears spark oil and gas supply pledge

Australia’s biggest energy companies say they will ignore calls not to open up new oil and gas fields, describing a “frightening” scarcity of new developments as Russia’s Ukraine invasion sparks the worst global energy security crisis since the 1970s oil embargo.

While the International Energy Agency warned last year that no new oil or gas fields or coal mines should be opened up if the world is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, Australia’s largest producers say it is vital to develop new sources of supply, with Santos concerned it has already missed opportunities.

“We are watching an energy crisis play out in Europe right now, but we have on our doorstop a prime example of what happens if the energy transition is focused only on stopping new oil and gas projects,” Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher will tell the APPEA industry conference on Wednesday.

“We’ve had a decade of moratoriums, shutdowns and lockouts in resource-rich states and territories. And, as I have said for a number of years, the resulting scarcity of new developments today is frightening, with forecasts of tight supply over coming years.”

LNG has shot to all-time highs this year, while oil has surged 40 per cent after supplies were effectively shut off from Russia, sparking a battle across Europe and Asia to secure replacement volumes.

Woodside Petroleum said a crunch on supplies around the world had elevated energy security into a major issue for both the industry and consumers.

READ MORE:Ditch the ideology on energy policy: Santos chief|Open up new oil and gas fields: APPEA
“I think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine really has catalysed the energy security conversation in a way that it’s not been done since the 1970s with the Arab oil embargo,” Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill said.

“Nations and political leaders first and foremost think about their home patch before thinking about their role in the global world. And the short-term implication is that there are challenges on reliability and challenges on affordability.”

The scramble for supplies has reignited a debate over energy security and emboldened producers to agitate for opening up new oil and gas fields, despite rising pressure from investors to set more ambitious climate change goals.

A push by activists to exclude fossil fuels was misguided and would simply push supply to rival nations with less stringent pollution goals, said the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, the industry body that counts Woodside, Shell, Santos, BP and BHP among its members.

“The focus of our opponents on stopping fossil fuel projects has had no effect on consumer demand, and no effect on emissions reduction. What it has done is to push fossil fuel developments to places such as the Middle East and Russia,” APPEA chairman Ian Davies said.

“This has created a supply crunch and has raised prices, hurting people and economies around the globe.”

Chevron, which operates the giant Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects in Western Australia, tipped ongoing price and supply volatility.

“There are going to be disruptive forces that move the markets around and energy supply around. Given these types of challenges, we can help to solve the types of problems that we‘re seeing, but there will still be some bumpiness as we make the twists and turns,” Chevron Australia director of operations Kory Judd said.

ExxonMobil Australia said the industry was used to geopolitical ructions and the best way for it to respond was by ensuring sufficient supply in the market.

“We’re putting a lot of focus now on Russia but in the past it could have been Venezuela, it could have been Iran, it could have been Libya. So there are always geopolitical events affecting overall supply and demand dynamics. In many instances we see those reflected in price and supply issues,” ExxonMobil Australia chairman Dylan Pugh said. “It goes back to some of those fundamental principles about continuing to bring on investments and making sure that you have a market that’s not so fragile.”

Chevron also took a swipe at iron ore producer Fortescue Metals after its chairman Andrew Forrest attacked the oil and gas industry for relying on carbon capture schemes to cut emissions.

Dr Forrest slammed carbon capture as unreliable and questioned whether a mass rollout of the technology was going to solve the industry’s pollution problems.

Chevron said its $2.5bn Gorgon carbon capture and storage project under WA’s Barrow Island, which is still only operating at half capacity, was storing the equivalent of Fortescue’s annual pollution each year.

“We’ve injected 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide since 2019 and 2.1 million tonnes last year, and that’s about equivalent to the emissions a company like FMG emits in a year,” Mr Judd told the conference.

“I read all of the negativity around it but I see it happening reliably every day.”

Santos, which is developing several major carbon capture projects, was also set to criticise negativity around the technology.

“The new focus on stopping oil and gas projects in environmentally responsible jurisdictions such as Australia is centred around discrediting a proven technology for low-cost, large-scale emissions reduction – carbon capture and storage,” Mr Gallagher is expected to tell the conference on Wednesday.

“Yet CCS has been done before. We are doing it now in 27 commercial projects around the world. And it works.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/energy-security-fears-spark-oil-and-gas-supply-pledge/news-story/8bb9f61f0ba431724748631e87086c67

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Cost benefit analysis of Australia's Covid response shows low benefit and big costs

Australia’s Covid policy response has been driven entirely by primal fear and hysteria, with reason playing no role. Until today, no Australian state or federal governments have commissioned a CBA.

In mid-2020, Professor Gigi Foster of the University of New South Wales, had prepared on her own CBA for Victoria. Last year, she decided to update it and broaden it to cover the whole of Australia. I have assisted her over the past 8-9 months on this project. She has published a PDF of the Executive Summary of the CBA.

Its highlights are:

The government has lied about the magnitude of the Covid pandemic, which is 50-500 times less lethal than the Spanish flu. Once we consider the fact that Covid kills mainly the elderly, its effective lethality is even less.
Lockdowns have prevented a maximum of around 10,000 Covid deaths during 2020-21 in Australia, not the 40,000 lives Mr Morrison claims to have saved.

There were at least 7,940 additional non-Covid deaths from lockdowns in the first two years of the pandemic (in fact, there were more: ABS data shows over 3,000 excess cancer deaths just in 2021 of people so terrorised by the lockdowns and hysteria in 2020 that they did not get their cancer identified and treated in time).

Every policy-driven harm that reduces our lifespan or earning power, every harm to our children, and every harm through reduced capacity of the government to buy wellbeing is added up in the CBA. Gigi Foster estimates that the harms from lockdowns exceed any benefits by at least thirty-six times.
This CBA’s estimate is not an outlier. It is consistent with innumerable CBAs that have by now been published across the world which show similar (or even greater) orders of magnitude of harm from lockdowns.

While the full CBA will perhaps be published later in a book form, its Executive Summary is sufficient to destroy the innumerable falsehoods we have been told over the past two years.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/lockdowns-did-more-harm-than-good/

Why the PM’s first homebuyers plan gets a big tick

I am normally the last person to disagree with Terry McCrann but I am surprised by his judgment below. He does recognize that the government proposal will put more buyers into the property market and hence increase prices -- but seems to discount the importance of that.

His judgment seems to be that the effect on prices will be small. I suppose it depends on how many take up Morrison's offer. So some modelling of the effect would be interesting.

My fear is that the price effect might nullify the increased ability to spend. If the superannunt frees up $20,000 to spend and the price of a desired property goes up by $20,000 we surely have an exercise in futility. And a price rise of $20,000 would not be a big move

The Government’s proposal to let first homebuyers use some of their super to buy their first house makes unequivocal good sense.

The major criticism is that it’s taken so long. Many people in their 30s and 40s, who are still renting, would be entitled to be a tad pissed.

Why is it now only happening when that first house is probably going to cost me a million, at least in Melbourne and Sydney?

Why wasn’t it around when I could have got my first house for, say, $500k? And then spent the last ten or more years building a tax-free capital gain – and by the bye shared in the Reserve Bank mandated free money for home loans for a few years – instead of all that rent money?

It is important to understand two big points.

First, the Morrison scheme has the same roots as the Albanese proposal for the government to fund up to 40 per cent of that first home buy.

Head-to-head, Morrison’s proposal is, in my view, superior. But I would also argue there is clearly both room for and a need for both. Let the buyer choose.

Albanese’s proposal has a homebuyer going ‘partners’ with the government to buy the property.

In contrast Morrison’s has the homebuyer going ‘partners’ with their own super fund; and in a more limited way.

Albanese’s would have the government providing up to 40 per cent of the total home cost; and so also would get up to 40 per cent of the – of any – capital gain.

Morrison’s would indirectly limit the super fund’s effective equity in the home to a much smaller percentage; and so both the super fund’s exposure to the property, to the ‘risk’ of profit or loss.

But critically, there’s no real ‘leakage’ to a third party. The super fund’s likely gain still is also the homebuyer’s.

The second big point is to accept that, yes, the whole issue of doing ‘something’ to boost the ability of first-home buyers is a vexed issue; there are genuine pluses and minuses.

This was rather neatly captured in a series of successive emails that popped into my inbox in reaction to the prime minister’s announcement.

“Allowing super for home deposits would ignite a new housing price explosion.”

“Super for housing inflationary and contrary to retirement income objective.”

“Access to super a step up for home ownership.”

Yes, all of them have elements of truth; in particular, any scheme which boosts the number of buyers and the amounts they can pay, other things being equal, will add upward pressure to property prices.

But to make that determinative - that there should therefore be no or only very marginal schemes – is really an argument to deny first home buyers both the ability and the right to buy their first home.

To deny them that, critically, in the context where there’s active concerted and persistent action by policy-makers to enrich those already owning property.

It’s not only a social imperative to help people buy their first home; it’s also a critically important finance one and really about fundamental financial equity.

Further, the bit of the third email headline I left out – from the Master Builders I might note – asserts, correctly, the over-arching justification for the Morrison proposal: it “maintains (the) Integrity of (the) super system.”

This is not a proposal to let people take money out of their super to go on a holiday, or fund a business or some other frolic. It is very directly an investment by the super fund, just like any other investment.

And one that critically enables the single most important investment a person can ever make, given the way owner-occupied home ownership is so significantly and widely tax-enhanced

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/terry-mccrann/why-the-pms-first-homebuyers-plan-gets-a-big-tick/news-story/1f1c3299001d55af520183dc77110de9

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Unemployment drops to lowest rate since 1974

This is not as good as it sounds. It is basically a "sugar hit" from massive governmemnt spending. But that spending will fuel inflation, which will in turn lead to job losses as people have to cut back on their spending

The latest unemployment figures show that the unemployment rate has dropped from 4 per cent to 3.9 per cent.

That’s the lowest level in half a century or since mid-1974 and it comes after a small increase in the number of people working through April.

Officially, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) says the unemployment rate held steady at 3.9 per cent that’s because it revised down March’s rate of 4 per cent to 3.9 per cent, the same figure for April.

It is the lowest jobless rate since August 1974 when it was 2.7 per cent.

Total employment increased by only 4000 for the month but there were huge swings involved.

Full-time employment increased by 92,400 but part-time employment dropped by 88,400.

Underemployment dropped by 0.2 percentage points to 6.1 per cent while the hours worked lifted by 23 million across the economy.

“The number of people working fewer hours than usual due to bad weather dropped from its March peak of over 500,000 to around 70,000 people in April,” ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/election-2022-live-updates-anthony-albanese-to-release-labor-s-costings-six-million-australians-voting-early-as-campaign-enters-final-days-20220518-p5amh8.html

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Report: widening price gap between fixer-uppers and hot new homes

Hmmm ... This is good news for investors. At 78, I am too old to get back into the property market but I am pretty sure I would win big in this situation if I were up to my old form.

It is perfectly obvious why fixer-uppers are now avoided. Doing any kind of renovation would be both difficult and costly at the moment.

But if one could afford to buy and hold until renovation services become more available, the investment would be a good one. Fixer-uppers are normally in big demand and that will return

The cost gap between brand new homes and fixer-uppers is expected to widen amid steep price hikes for construction materials and difficulty securing a builder.

Homeowners had shied away from taking on projects of their own, with rising interest rates tipped to add further pressure, a new report has found.

Herron Todd White’s Month in Review report noted a shift among homeowners as the construction industry struggled to balance existing strong demand coupled with supply chain shortages.

“Many are weighing up whether buying an established home might be more prudent given the cost and time blowouts,” HTW CEO Gary Brinkworth said.

“We’ve observed that homeowners and investors alike are being drawn to completed homes rather than those with renovation potential.

“Given costs are predicted to elevate over the coming one to two years, I’d venture that finished homes will not only retain their price premium for some time, but the value spread between renovated and unrenovated properties will, in all likelihood, get wider,” he said.

The HTW report found the cost of building a new home had risen by about 30 per cent over the last 12 months, equating to about $4,000 per square metre for a four-bedroom house with a pool on the southern Gold Coast.

https://www.realestate.com.au/news/report-widening-price-gap-between-fixeruppers-and-hot-new-homes

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Qld Attorney-General to appeal Joshawa Eric Kane’s ‘inadequate’ sentence over sickening attack

What an inadequate thing this is

Joshawa Eric Kane had been hiding in the bushes at the park when he attacked a 22-year-old woman, asking “baby are you single” before grabbing her from her behind, dragging her to a nearby cricket club house and sexually assaulting her.

Kane, 28, walked free at sentencing in the Brisbane District Court last month after serving only 282 days in custody, sparking criticism from experts who slammed the state’s treatment of victims of sexual crime.

Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman has announced she is appealing Kane’s sentence on the grounds it was “manifestly inadequate”.

Harrowing CCTV footage was played to the court at Kane’s sentencing hearing in which the young woman can be seen struggling to break free as he carries her to the sporting club at a Dakabin park in November 2020.

The court heard Kane carried the woman underneath the building, pushed her against the back wall, touched her breasts and put his hands in her underwear while restraining her with a hand around her throat.

The terrifying assault only ended when a bystander heard the woman’s screams for help and came to investigate.

The CCTV showed the woman run to the bystander who rang police as Kane left the scene.

Judge Michael Williamson sentenced Kane to 18 months’ imprisonment, immediately suspended for three years. He had already served nine months in prison for the offending.

“This was a cowardly, disgusting act on a woman who was vulnerable going to catch the train,” Judge Williamson said at the sentencing last month. “It is something about which you should be deeply ashamed.

“Now it would not take much imagination on your part to realise the attack would have been terrifying, distressing on the complainant.”

The “light” sentence sparked criticism from community members and advocates for victims of sexual assault who said the system and the legislation judges were bound by in sentencing was letting down victims of crime.

Both the prosecution and defence in Kane’s case had submitted the 18 month head sentence was appropriate based on the legislation and similar case law.

The prosecutor submitted Kane should be given parole eligibility, meaning it would be up to the parole board to decide whether to release him, at which time he would be under supervision for the remainder of his sentence, while the defence argued in favour of an immediate suspension.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/police-courts-qld/qld-attorneygeneral-to-appeal-joshawa-eric-kanes-inadequate-sentence-over-sickening-attack/news-story/647f6bca1e58dfb2647d5650146feaa9

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Bob Katter: A Lebanese Aborigine?

Bob is very popular in Far North Queensland -- where I also come from. All four of my grandparents were born up that way, as I was. In my memory, the Far North was a very conservative place. Views that today identify me as very conservative were simply normal during my early life in North Queensland. It is my "spiritual" home.

It is over 30 years since I spent much time back up there, though I did have a couple of holidays there, with the last such being in 2004. So I have often wondered if my old home is still as conservative as it was. My impression is that not much has changed

And Bob's great popularity up that way confirms it. He too is very consrervative. So I am rather pleased with his views and what he does. As a member of Federal parliament he represents the North well

But I don't like his claim to be Aboriginal. He bases that claim on once having been "adopted" into an Aboriginal tribe. And under current Australian law, if he "identifies" as an Aborigine, he IS an Aborigine. I am critical of that rule in general so I deplore Bob using it for political advantage.

In fact he is, if anything, Lebanese, though he fiercely denies it. He grew up in a clothing shop run by his Lebanese grandfather. It is a curiosity of North Queensland that there are or were in many towns a men's clothing shop run by Lebanese immigrants -- with surnames like Mellick and Malouf. I remember them well.

The surname Katter is most common among Americans of German origin. In German, a "Kater" is a tomcat

Bob Katter has declared his people made a 'big mistake' 250 years ago by letting in whitefellas, and that's why Australia should keep borders shut to asylum seekers ahead of Saturday's federal election as he prepares for his 10th win.

A surprising little-known fact about the controversial Queensland MP is that he identifies as Aboriginal, but Mr Katter recently spoke candidly about the subject during a TV appearance when addressing foreign policy and the plight of refugees.

'I come from Cloncurry, and I'm dark - I'm one of the Curry mob, you know?' Mr Katter said on ABC's Q&A.

'We made a hell of a bad mistake 150 years ago, letting you whitefellas in. I don't know that we should make the same mistake again.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10823217/Bob-Katter-says-Aboriginal-people-big-mistake-letting-whitefellas-ABC-Q-QLD-Kennedy.html

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Sergeant Bruno's big speech mistake

A Victorian policeman is under investigation for posting online that there are only two genders.

And so he should be!

Everyone knows there are actually three genders: Males (pronouns he/him), Females (pronouns she/her), and Narcissists (pronouns me!/me!/me!).

The Age newspaper reported this week that 62-year-old Sergeant Bruno Staffieri was interviewed by officers from Professional Standards Command over an online comment he made to an officer working in the Gender Equality and Inclusion Command.

Staffieri reportedly wrote: ‘So you are doing tertiary education studying genders. I’ll make it easy for you to pass … there are 2.’

Someone call triple-zero!

You have to hand it to Victoria Police; they know what constitutes inappropriate behaviour.

* Shoot peaceful protesters with rubber bullets? No consequences.

* Pepper spray law-abiding citizens? No consequences.

* Harass old ladies sitting in a park during Covid lockdown? No consequences.

* Slam people into the pavement for not wearing a mask? No consequences.

But if you dare to state a biological fact, everyone – from the Deputy Commissioner down – wets their pants.

Sergeant Staffieri should demand to know how many genders there are so that he can be more accurate in future.

Google doesn’t know, so we’ll wait for the answer.

Oh, and if you’re the victim of an actual offence, you’ll have to wait too. Police are busy attending to thought crimes.

Staffieri, who has been an officer for more than 35 years and is close to retirement, could lose his job because of the online comments.

This is not the first time Staffieri has upset police command with views that, until five minutes ago, were entirely unremarkable.

Staffieri was also investigated over his public criticism of the government’s decision to cancel Australia Day and Anzac Day celebrations last year, but allow the Gay Pride March in St Kilda to proceed.

‘So the next time Australians are sent out to fight a war, maybe we can send out the 8,000 that marched today … and try to stop the enemy by waving feathers and brightly coloured boas at them,’ Staffieri reportedly posted on May 17, 2021.

‘Triple-zero. What’s your emergency?’

‘Sergent Staffieri objected to the Mardi Gras.’

‘Does anyone need help?’

‘Yes. We are all very hurty.’

‘Does Sergeant Staffieri have a weapon?’

‘It’s his words. His words! Words are violence.’

‘Stay in a safe space and practice socially distancing until a squad car full of thought police arrives.’

In June last year, Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Neil Paterson posted on Yammer, the force’s internal communication platform, that…

‘Victoria Police is proud to have been recognised as a silver employer at the 2021 Australian LGBTQ+ inclusion awards.’

Staffieri reportedly responded by posting:

‘Yes, I agree. Great achievement. But if the public knew how much time, effort, and taxpayer dollars went into this, they would also be demanding why we didn’t get a gold.’

That’s pretty funny.

Paterson didn’t think so. According to The Age, he defended the campaign and denied it had received significant public funding.

Staffieri responded: ‘Sir, I totally value and respect your opinion and your rank, I simply ask that you value and respect mine.’

Paterson fired a broadside back at Staffieri… ‘I don’t respect or value your views as they are offensive and there is no place for those views in Victoria Police… Either limit your comments on Yammer to comments that are respectful of everyone or consider your employment options.’

So in Daniel Andrews’ Victoria, it’s an honest police officer who tells the truth who is threatened with the sack for being in possession of what police hierarchy call ‘those views’

Maybe, if Sergeant Staffieri flies the Chinese flag outside his station, all will be forgiven.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/sergeant-brunos-big-mistake/

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The unprecedented use of force to control the population during the pandemic means all previous notions of limited state power belong in the dustbin of history

Any lingering doubts evaporated when Victorian protesters, alarmed by their losses of liberty, were fired on by their own police

When it comes to our freedoms, former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, got it right. He believed that people don’t appreciate what they have until it’s gone. ‘Freedom is like that,’ he said. ‘It’s like air.’

There was a time when we cherished our freedoms. We even fought two world wars to preserve them. But, over the last fifty years, first by stealth, then with determined haste, a growing coalition of anti-democratic elites have colluded to reset society and render those sacrifices in vain. We ignored the warning signs and began taking our freedoms for granted. Now, as we feel the effects of government’s pervasive, suffocating, actions, we are understanding what Yeltsin meant.

Of course, when we struck our bargain with the forces of darkness, we were promised that in exchange for the surrender of a few personal freedoms here and some individual responsibility there, everyone could be better off and live more equitably at the expense of everyone else.

For half a century, that compact was restated, yet only one party kept its side of the bargain. It is the people who naively continued to cede responsibility for themselves and their families to an ever-expanding army of officials who began progressively interfering in every aspect of their daily lives.

The trade-off – the promise of greater prosperity and equity for all – has been an ever-receding horizon. Indeed, according to a recent report released by the Productivity Commission, economic growth per person over the past decade has slipped to its slowest rate in sixty years, both in terms of GDP per capita and income per person. And not only that, but the wealth of the top twenty per cent of Australians has grown sixty-eight per cent in the past fifteen years compared to six per cent for the bottom twenty per cent.

But then, while cloaked in good intentions, the ‘promise’ was always about powerful interests colluding to deliver power, patronage and protection to a chosen privileged few. Even the Reserve Bank played a part by creating a systemic moral hazard, dubbed ‘too big to fail’. By making credit cheap and plentiful, it de-risked the stock and real estate markets underwriting enormous gains for the rich and well-connected.

Central bankers also lent their weight to push economy-destroying, emissions abatement regulations. This peculiarly Western obsession helps transfer wealth from the poor to rich renewable-energy rent-seekers via subsidies and consumer taxes. Soon governments will be able to use an app to monitor household emissions, giving them a seat right at the kitchen table.

Far fetched? Perhaps once. But not any more. The unprecedented use of force to control the population during the pandemic means all previous notions of limited state power belong in the dustbin of history. Any lingering doubts evaporated when Victorian protesters, alarmed by their losses of liberty, were fired on by their own police.

Worst of all, this atrocity was met with a deafening silence. The media behaved like an arm of government. The Prime Minister and the federal and state parliaments were silent. Business leaders were invisible. It was a defining moment in our nation’s history and confirmed that we now live in a society where freedom and the rule of law are at the sole discretion of the state.

This is the ‘great reset’ our children and grandchildren have been prepared for. From primary school on, they have been brainwashed to be ashamed of their heritage, their parents’ values and their traditional institutions. They have been taught how capitalism and markets are evil and that our colonial settlers were nothing more than oppressors, slave owners and environmental vandals.

They learn that fighting for freedom on the battlefields was nothing but the assertion of white supremacy. Their curriculum includes Marxist critical race theory and gender fluidity. Academic assignments lead students down an ideological path which, if they are to pass exams, they must take. This merciless moral scrutiny of the nation’s past and present is intended to cancel the past and confer legitimacy on today’s illiberal new direction.

Unsurprisingly, the most recent report from the OECD Program for International Student Assessment confirms that when measured against eighty countries, Australia has continued its 20-year decline in the quality of schooling in reading, mathematics and science. Indoctrination may not give tomorrow’s leaders the critical edge in a competitive world, but at least they will get their pronouns right.

Who dares speak against this brave new world, where even the word ‘mother’ can cause offence to some? Where to be politically incorrect can be career limiting or socially ostracising. Understandably, intellectual cowardice abounds.

There is certainly no mention of freedom or smaller government in today’s election campaigns. Voters are expected to forget the past’s multiple costly blunders like the NBN, the NDIS and the French submarine project and embrace new, expensive thought-bubbles, none of which will achieve their stated intent.

But, as US economist Herb Stein once quipped, ‘If something can’t go on forever, it will stop’. Massive debt overhangs, growing deficits and economic waste and distortions will soon prove him right in a way that neither the electorate, nor the political establishment, are expecting. Then the incompetence and frivolous nature of today’s political class will be exposed. So too, how centralised power has concentrated risks and robbed society of its resilience. But don’t expect the elites to relinquish their power and privilege. They will use the moment to expand them.

It’s as Mark Twain observed. ‘Every civilisation carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.’

We have been warned. But have we the courage to turn back?

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-seeds-of-our-own-destruction/

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Tradies forced into a quasi-union under Labor

About 43,000 self-employed Queensland tradie independent contractors could be declared “employee-like” and forced on to enterprise bargaining agreements under a Labor policy, Master Builders Australia claims.

More than half the tradies in a survey conducted by the MBA said they were opposed or strongly opposed to being forced into “being covered by union enterprise bargaining agreements”.

But Labor said the building industry group is “peddling false stories” and that genuine small businesses are not “employee-like”.

Under its Secure Australian Jobs plan Labor would extend the powers of the Fair Work Commission to include “employee-like” forms of work and to determine “what rights and obligations” would apply.

Master Builders CEO Denita Wawn said the policy wording was broad and she feared independent contractors and sole traders, working mostly for one or two big building companies, could be taken to the FWC by unions to force them on to EBA agreements and essentially become employees.

“The Rudd-Gillard policy was balanced. This is exceptionally one sided,” Ms Wawn said.

“People want to be able to retain those choices. We want people to maintain choice, as opposed to be forced on to something they don’t want to do.”

She said while there were legitimate issues around sham contracting or some individuals who wanted to be employees rather than contractors, there were other tools in place to deal with them including the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

But a Labor spokesman said the Masters Builders had been “peddling false stories” about Labor during the election campaign.

“I don’t know what part of the phrase ‘employee-like’ they don’t understand. Someone who is genuinely running a small business is not ‘employee-like’,” he said.

“But it’s pretty obvious when we have so many workers being paid below the minimum wage in the gig economy this reform is essential.

“The Master Builders and Scott Morrison might be relaxed about people being paid less than the minimum wage. Labor is not and we will fix it.”

The MBA survey was of 1000 people taken between May 4 and May 11, in electorates with high proportion of construction industry workers.

It found 53 per cent of tradies, and 48 per cent of all respondents, opposed “forcing independent contractors into being covered by Union enterprise bargaining agreements”.

It also found 84 per cent of respondents believed independent contractors should have the right to choose whether they become part of a union or not.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/federal-election/tradies-forced-on-to-eba-under-labor-master-builders-claims/news-story/a7595197c6fc9f6dd6daaff56473cf32

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Tuesday, May 17, 2022

How Australia saved thousands of lives while COVID killed 1 million Americans

From the NYT below. We are honoured

MELBOURNE, Australia — If the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives would have been saved. The Texas grandmother who made the perfect pumpkin pie might still be baking. The Red Sox-loving husband who ran marathons before COVID might still be cheering at Fenway Park.

For many Americans, imagining what might have been will be painful. But especially now, at the milestone of 1 million deaths in the United States, the nations that did a better job of keeping people alive show what Americans could have done differently and what might still need to change.

Many places provide insight: Japan, Kenya, Norway. But Australia offers perhaps the sharpest comparisons with the American experience. Both countries are English-speaking democracies with similar demographic profiles. In Australia and in the United States, the median age is 38. Roughly 86% of Australians live in urban areas, compared with 83% of Americans.

Yet Australia’s COVID death rate sits at one-tenth of America’s, putting the nation of 25 million people (with around 7,500 deaths) near the top of global rankings in the protection of life.

Australia’s location in the distant Pacific is often cited as the cause for its relative COVID success. That, however, does not fully explain the difference in outcomes between the two countries, since Australia has long been, like the United States, highly connected to the world through trade, tourism and immigration. In 2019, 9.5 million international tourists came to Australia. Sydney and Melbourne could just as easily have become as overrun with COVID as New York or any other U.S. city.

So what went right in Australia and wrong in the United States?

For the standard slideshow presentation, it looks obvious: Australia restricted travel and personal interaction until vaccinations were widely available, then maximized vaccine uptake, prioritizing people who were most vulnerable before gradually opening up the country again.

From one outbreak to another, there were also some mistakes: breakdowns of protocol in nursing homes that led to clusters of deaths; a vaccine rollout hampered by slow purchasing. And with omicron and eased restrictions, deaths have increased.

But Australia’s COVID playbook produced results because of something more easily felt than analyzed at a news conference. Dozens of interviews, along with survey data and scientific studies from around the world, point to a lifesaving trait that Australians displayed from the top of government to the hospital floor and that Americans have shown they lack: trust, in science and institutions, but especially in one another.

When the pandemic began, 76% of Australians said they trusted the health care system (compared with around 34% of Americans), and 93% of Australians reported being able to get support in times of crisis from people living outside their household.

In global surveys, Australians were more likely than Americans to agree that “most people can be trusted” — a major factor, researchers found, in getting people to change their behavior for the common good to combat COVID, by reducing their movements, wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Partly because of that compliance, which kept the virus more in check, Australia’s economy has grown faster than America’s through the pandemic.

But of greater import, interpersonal trust — a belief that others would do what was right not just for the individual but for the community — saved lives. Trust mattered more than smoking prevalence, health spending or form of government, a study of 177 countries in The Lancet recently found. And in Australia, the process of turning trust into action began early.

Government: Moving Quickly Behind the Scenes

Greg Hunt had been Australia’s health minister for a couple of years, after working as a lawyer and investor, when his phone buzzed Jan. 20, 2020. It was Dr. Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, and he wanted to talk about a new coronavirus in China.

Murphy, a low-key physician and former hospital executive, said there were worrisome signs of human-to-human transmission.

“What’s your honest, considered advice?” Hunt recalled asking.

“I think this has the potential to go beyond anything we’ve seen in our lifetime,” Murphy said. “We need to act fast.”

The next day, Australia added the coronavirus, as a threat with “pandemic potential,” to its biosecurity list, officially setting in motion the country’s emergency response. Hunt briefed Prime Minister Scott Morrison, visited the country’s stockpile of personal protective equipment and began calling independent experts for guidance.

Sharon Lewin, director of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, one of Australia’s top medical research organizations, received several of those calls. She fed his questions into the meetings that had started to take place with scientists and officials at Australia’s public health laboratories.

“There was a very thoughtful level of engagement, with politicians and scientists, right at that early phase in January,” Lewin said.

The first positive case appeared in Australia on Jan. 25. Five days later, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first human transmission of the virus in the United States, President Donald Trump downplayed the risk. “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for us,” he said.

The same day, Hunt struck a more practical tone. “Border, isolation, surveillance and case-tracing mechanisms are already in place in Australia,” he said.

Less than 24 hours later, on Feb. 1, Australia closed its border with China, its largest trading partner. On Feb. 3, 241 Australians were evacuated from China and placed in government quarantine for 14 days. While Americans were still gathering in large groups as if nothing was wrong, Australia’s COVID containment system was up and running.

A full border closure followed. Hotels were contracted to quarantine the trickle of international arrivals allowed in. Systems for free testing and contact tracing were rolled out, along with a federal program that paid COVID-affected employees so they would stay home.

For a business-friendly, conservative government, agreeing to the COVID-containment measures required letting go of what psychologists describe as “sticky priors” — long-standing beliefs tied to identity that often hold people back from rational decision-making.

Morrison trusted his close friend Hunt. And Hunt said he had faith in the calm assessments and credentials of Lewin and Murphy.

In a lengthy interview, Hunt added that he also had a historical moment of distrust in mind: Australia’s failures during the 1918 flu pandemic, when inconsistent advice and a lack of information sharing led to the rise of “snake oil” salesmen and wide disparities in death rates.

In February and March, Hunt said, he retold that story in meetings as a warning. And in a country where compulsory voting has been suppressing polarization since 1924, Australia’s leaders chose to avoid partisanship. The Morrison government, the opposition Labor Party and state leaders from both parties lined up behind a “one voice” approach, with medical officers out front.

Still, with a highly contagious virus, scientists speaking from podiums could do only so much.

“Experts ‘getting on the same page’ only matters if people actually trust the actions government is taking and trust their neighbors,” said Dr. Jay Varma, director of Cornell’s Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response and a former COVID adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York.

“While that type of trust is relatively higher in New York City than in other parts of the U.S.,” said Varma, who has worked extensively in China and Southeast Asia, “I suspect it is still quite low compared to Oceania.”

Health Care: Sharing the Burden

The outbreak that many Australians see as their country’s greatest COVID test began in late June 2020, with a breakdown in Melbourne’s hotel quarantine system. The virus spread into the city and its suburbs from guards interacting with travelers, a government inquiry later found, and within a few weeks, daily case numbers climbed into the hundreds.

At Royal Melbourne, a sprawling public hospital built to serve the poor, clusters of infection emerged among vulnerable patients and workers. Case numbers and close contacts spiraled upward. Vaccines were still a distant dream.

“We recognized right away that this was a disaster we’d never planned for, in that it was a marathon, not a sprint,” said Chris Macisaac, Royal Melbourne’s director of intensive care.

A few weeks in, the system started to buckle. In mid-July, dozens of patients with COVID were transferred from nursing homes to Royal Park, a satellite facility for geriatric care and rehabilitation. Soon, more than 40% of the cases among workers were connected to that small campus.

Kirsty Buising, an infectious disease consultant at the hospital, began to suspect — before scientists could prove it — that the coronavirus was airborne. In mid-July, on her suggestion, Royal Melbourne started giving N95 masks, which are more protective, to workers exposed to COVID patients.

In the United States, hospital executives were lining up third-party PPE vendors for clandestine meetings in distant parking lots in a Darwinian all-against-all contest. Royal Melbourne’s supplies came from federal and state stockpiles, with guidelines for how distribution should be prioritized.

In New York, a city of 8 million people packed closely together, more than 300 health care workers died from COVID by the end of September, with huge disparities in outcomes for patients and workers from one hospital to another, mostly according to wealth.

In Melbourne, a city of 5 million with a dense inner core surrounded by suburbs, the masks, a greater separation of patients and an intense 111-day lockdown that reduced demand on hospital services brought the virus to heel. At Royal Melbourne, not a single worker died during Australia’s worst institutional cluster to date.

)In the U.S., coordination within the health care system was haphazard. In Australia, which has a national health insurance program and a hospital system that includes both public and private options, there were agreements for load sharing and a transportation service for moving patients. The hospitals worked together, trusting that payment would be worked out.

“We had options,” Macisaac said.

Society: Complying and Caring

“I’d just hate to be the one who lets everyone down.”

When Australians are asked why they accepted the country’s many lockdowns, its once-closed international and state borders, its quarantine rules and then its vaccine mandates for certain professions or restaurants and large events, they tend to voice a version of the same response: It’s not just about me.

The idea that one’s actions affect others is not unique to Australia, and at times, the rules on COVID stirred up outrage.

“It was a somewhat authoritarian approach,” said Dr. Greg Dore, an infectious diseases expert at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “There were lots of mandates, lots of fines for breaching restrictions, pretty heavy-handed controlling, including measures that were pretty useless, like the policing of outdoor masking.”

But, he added, the package was effective because the vast majority of Australians stuck with it anyway.

“The community coming on board and remaining on board through the tough periods of 2020 and even into 2021 was really, really important,” Dore said. “There is a general sense that for some things, where there are major threats, you just have to come together.”Studies show that income inequality is closely correlated with low levels of interpersonal trust. And in Australia, the gap between rich and poor, while widening, is less severe than in the United States.

During the toughest of COVID times, Australians showed that the national trait of “mateship” — defined as the bond between equal partners or close friends — was still alive and well. They saw COVID spiral out of control in the United States and Britain, and chose a different path.

Compliance rates with social distancing guidelines, along with COVID testing, contact tracing and isolation, held steady at around 90% during the worst early outbreaks, according to modeling from the University of Sydney. In the United States, reductions in mobility — a key measure of social distancing — were less stark, shorter and more inconsistent, based in part on location, political identity or wealth.

In Australia, rule-following was the social norm. It was Mick Fanning, a surfing superstar, who did not question the need to stay with his American wife and infant in a small hotel room for 14 days of quarantine after a trip to California. It was border officials canceling the visa of Novak Djokovic, the top male tennis player in the world, for failing to follow a COVID vaccine mandate, leading to his eventual deportation.

It was also all the Australians who lined up to get tested; who wore masks without question; who turned their phones into virus trackers with check-in apps; who set up food services for the old, infirm or poor in lockdowns; or who offered a place to stay to women who had been trapped in their homes with abusive husbands.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)At a recent awards luncheon in Melbourne for people who made a difference during COVID, those were the kinds of people being celebrated. Jodie McVernon, director of epidemiology at the Doherty Institute, was the only scientist lauded at the event.

“Care is so undervalued,” she said. “This was all about the power of care.”

And, perhaps, the power of adaptability.

When the delta variant flooded the country last year as vaccine supplies were low, Australia’s ideas of protection and compliance changed.

Hunt scrambled to procure vaccines — far too late, critics argued, after the AstraZeneca vaccines made in Australia seemed to pose a greater-than-expected risk of heart problems — while community leaders fought against a moderate burst of fear and skepticism about vaccines.

Churches and mosques became pop-up COVID inoculation clinics. Quinn On, a pharmacist in western Sydney’s working-class suburbs, took on extra staff at his own cost to get more people vaccinated. Mayor Chagai, a basketball coach in Sydney’s South Sudanese community, hosted Zoom calls with refugee families to answer questions about lockdowns and vaccines.

Many Aboriginal Australians, who have countless reasons to distrust authorities, also did what they could to get people inoculated. Wayne Webb, 64, a Wadandi elder in Western Australia, was one of many to prioritize a collective appeal.

“It all goes hand in hand with protecting our old people,” he said he told the young men in his community.

Vaccination uptake in Australia surged last year as soon as supplies arrived, rushing from roughly 10% of Australians over age 16 to 80% in six weeks. It was the fastest rate in the world at the time. Once that 80% was reached, Australia eased open its national and state borders.

Now, more than 95% of Australian adults are fully vaccinated — with 85% of the total population having received two doses. In the United States, that figure is only 66%.

The arrival of the omicron variant, which is more transmissible, has sent Australia’s case numbers soaring, but with most of the population inoculated, deaths are ticking up more slowly. Australia has a federal election Saturday. COVID is far down the list of voter concerns.

“We learned that we can come together very quickly,” said Denise Heinjus, Royal Melbourne’s executive director for nursing, whose title in 2020 was COVID commander. “There’s a high level of trust among our people.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/how-australia-saved-thousands-of-lives-while-covid-killed-1-million-americans/

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The Team Morrison claim that the government’s handling of the pandemic saved 40,000 lives

James Allan is more skeptical

This is to defend itself against the charge that Australia’s pandemic response – on the ‘weld them in their homes’ end of the spectrum – condoned despotism, police brutality and heavy-handedness, preventing citizens from leaving the country, unbelievably massive government spending needed after government itself forced businesses to close (and that everyone knows is a main cause for the looming inflation, and for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich via asset inflation and from the young to the old via massive debts our grandchildren will be paying off); vaccine and mask mandates; and the rest.

So what do we make of the ‘we saved 40,000 lives’ claim? Let me be as polite as possible. It’s patent nonsense. It’s worse than disingenuously mendacious. It’s based on looking at Europe, arbitrarily picking a median country death rate per capita, then implicitly assuming Australia’s death rate would have been precisely what it was had we been situated in Europe. But it wouldn’t have been. No European country came close to our low Covid death tally.

The European country that now has some of the best ‘excess deaths during the pandemic’ numbers is Sweden, the one country that did not lock down but focused on protecting the vulnerable, trusting individual citizens and not going down the China-inspired lockdown route. So its economy is doing better than most all of Europe and it did not rack up a huge debt burden for the kids and grandkids.

What basis is there for picking a model that assumes away every variable to do with geography and being an island? (And haven’t we all had enough of models that were wrong every time throughout the pandemic, and always on the over-stating it side of the ledger so convenient to the authoritarian public health types?) Listen, Taiwan is in our neck of the woods. It was nothing like as despotic as we were. And its Covid deaths per capita were seven times lower than ours.

And anyway, British epidemiologists are already predicting that deaths caused by lockdowns (think missed health checks, suicides, super-charged alcoholism, what flows from a stuffed economy and two missed years of schooling, etc.) will be upwards of ten times higher than lives saved by locking down. It was a brutal, stupid, fear-mongering approach we took in this country. It opted to throw all freedom concerns out the window. Likewise all inter-generational fairness ones. It should not be rewarded.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/jims-how-to-vote-card/

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Truths that should guide voting in the Federal election

Viv Forbes is pulling no punches

The ‘Man-made Climate Crisis’ is a fraud. Natural cycles control the climate.

‘Net Zero Emissions’ is a destructive, impossible green dream.
Hydrogen, Pumped Hydro, and Big Batteries are all net consumers of energy. They can store energy and recycle it, but that round-robin process consumes energy.

Carbon Capture and Storage and ‘Clean Coal’ are con games designed to consume more hydro-carbon energy for no public benefit. They would enrich big businesses.

Reliable affordable electricity for industry and homes is best supplied by coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear power.

While the world scrambles to get coal supplies, Australian bureaucrats have delayed coal exploration and development for decades. And we can mine and export uranium, but not use it. These follies must stop.

All electricity generators should be treated equally – no special taxes or subsidies. They should be obliged to provide their own backup power and their own connections to the grid.

Electric cars may suit rich city folk (who forget they are powered mainly by coal), but battery-electric engines are an impossible dream for dozers, tractors, harvesters, road trains, aeroplanes, and bulk carriers. The supply chain that delivers daily food and fuel to the cities relies totally on hydrocarbon energy.

To moderate the effects of droughts and floods we need more dams right now.

We need a regulatory firestorm to clear the legislative litter of green and red tape.

We have far too many complicated tax laws. We need to slash and simplify taxes everywhere, starting with the abolition of payroll tax (the tax on jobs) and capital gains tax (the tax on capital improvements).

Most politicians since the Whitlam era as having helped to create a huge national debt. Unless we reverse this, our currency will be destroyed, opening the door to digital money, electronic rationing, and The Great Green Reset.

We must abolish federal/state/local duplication, leaving more control with state and local authorities and with families.

The federal government should focus on defence, foreign affairs, quarantine, and maintenance of free trade between states.

We need a ‘back-to-basics’ in public education, with less green indoctrination.

Australia has a shortage of labour, and a surplus of people receiving welfare. Welfare for able-bodied recipients with no dependents should be reduced.

It is time to vote for real change.

Australia is in possession of huge resources regarding minerals, energy, timber, and food but too much is sterilised in nationalised parks, world heritage areas, or buried under rainbow serpents. We have to import farm labour while we pay Australians not to work. Now, grasslands and farms are being suffocated beneath subsidised green energy paraphernalia while speculators tout capital-destroying dreams like hydrogen. Our education system devalues maths and science, despises educational excellence, and offers an expanding array of soft options. Australia’s immigration policy seems to encourage racial tension while our military leaders seem more concerned with diversity and zero emissions than with discipline and skills.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-strong-stink-of-an-election-on-the-nose/

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Coalition launches strongly, but will it pay off?

Of everything that was said yesterday, this are the sentences spoken by Scott Morrison that stood out for the Liberal base:

‘I also know Australians, they’re tired of politics. It’s been an exhausting time and they’ve certainly had enough of Governments telling them how to live their lives and I agree’.

How Morrison persuades disillusioned and frustrated voters of the Liberal conservative base that these words are true and sincere – even if they don’t give him their first preference – can decide the result on Saturday night. Can Morrison lure the Straya Strayers back from parties of protest, whose power is in their preferences, to the only centre-right party that can seriously aspire to government?

The most enjoyable part of the post-launch was watching commentators, either expecting or cheering an Anthony Albanese victory, react to Morrison’s surprise ‘game changing’ announcement that younger people will be able to borrow from their own superannuation savings to contribute to a first home deposit. It has the lot to appease the base: zero cost to the budget; promoting self-help and self-reliance, promoting home ownership without government taking equity in the dwelling; and making the Coalition’s being saddled with an unreformable (in terms of a permanent Senate majority against it) compulsory super sector work for the Coalition rather than against it. Take it from a campaign veteran: keeping a blockbuster policy announcement like this from leaking was an achievement in itself.

Other things from the policy launch that were welcome? Actual, detailed policy; a focus on the positive with a vision for the future beyond three-word slogans; and absolutely no mention of Anthony Albanese. John Howard always referred to his opponent as ‘my opponent’, let alone mud wrestle with him. Morrison should always have done likewise, and his taking a prime ministerial time is long overdue.

Anthony Albanese staged an ambush rally yesterday, also in Brisbane. Scott Morrison was mentioned. A lot. Let’s be clear: beyond framing this election as a referendum on Scott Morrison, what has Labor really offered, other than ‘trust us, we’re not the Morrison or the Morrison government and, if we win, we’ll keep our glorious Leader in witness protection in the national interest’.

Final thought: Had the Coalition’s launch been held last Sunday, with Morrison speaking as strongly as he did yesterday – that is, the day before pre-poll voting started – and with the blockbuster Super to First Home policy centrepiece sucking Labor’s oxygen, what effect would it have had? As it is, this revivified version of Scott Morrison, PM, might yet carry the day, but one fears he has left his run a little too late. But, from a similar position in 2019, Morrison won. So, let’s see.

Email from The Spectator

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Monday, May 16, 2022

I don’t need to be ‘welcomed’ to my country

Its just endemic Leftist stupidity and race-hate but it gets tedious

Lincoln Brown

The notion that Australians must be welcomed or invited to their own country by Indigenous leaders – as occurs at the opening of state and federal parliaments, conferences, and school assemblies – is a divisive and destructive one.

This practice, while it may appear reasonable or harmless, is a manifestation of the ongoing assault on Australia’s Western heritage and implies that non-Indigenous Australians, whose families have called Australia home for many generations, do not really belong here.

I recently attended an event where the audience (mostly comprised of Australians with European heritage) were ‘welcomed’ by an Indigenous speaker. It was a pitiful display of bitterness, resentment, and even hatred towards white Australians. Indeed, it was little more than a scolding for the colour of their skin.

The speaker bluntly stated that Australia still belongs to ‘First Nations’ people (a nonsensical and ahistorical term lifted from Canada’s debates about colonialism) and does not belong to so-called ‘white people’ (or presumably any other migrant families). He then asserted that the audience needed to learn Australia’s ‘true history’. This, even though ignorance of Australia’s British heritage has never been more apparent than it is now.

It was an overtly adversarial presentation – devoid of hope or a positive vision for Australians. Not a trace of recognition for the fact that Indigenous people enjoy the same fundamental rights that all Australians enjoy, or the tremendous efforts that governments, charities, and individuals have put into improving life for Indigenous Australians over many decades. Instead, the speaker aggressively asserted that Indigenous people are still colonised and that white people must continue to be reminded of this until colonialism ends.

The belief that all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, have a right to call the country in which we were born home is now openly attacked.

The desired outcome for such activists is unclear. How, exactly, will we know when enough has been done to overcome racism? What measurable goals must be achieved? When will we be able to congratulate ourselves for elevating Indigenous voices and dismantling colonialism enough? Will it be when all references to Christianity are removed from the national curriculum, as was attempted (and, thankfully, negated) last year? Or when we abolish the Australian flag? At what point will we have made enough progress?

Ironically, as I flew home on a Qantas jet, the pilot acknowledged the traditional custodians of the state I was returning home to. It is a strange form of colonialism in which major corporations, from airlines to the AFL, feel the need to constantly remind everyone that the land belongs to Indigenous people. One would think that if racism were the ubiquitous problem that we are told it is then major corporations would not bother with such sentiments.

White people, as nebulous as that concept is, are not guests in Australia. My ancestors were also born and raised here many generations ago. No one should be made to feel guilty for the colour of their skin or blamed for the actions of people who have long since died. This attribution of historical, collective guilt to an entire group of people due to their ethnicity is not only racist but is a symptom of a dying Australia. It is a direct, ideological assault on Western values based on selective distortions of history and the Marxist idea of class guilt, now applied to race, which divides humanity into ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ classes and ascribes sinfulness or virtue based on whatever group one happens to belong to.

If you are Indigenous, you are a victim, and therefore virtuous. If you are white, you are an oppressor, and therefore sinful. If you disagree, this demonstrates that you are entrenched in your oppressor privilege, which makes you more of a racist.

This is a dangerous fiction.

The reality that nobody is allowed to acknowledge, but everyone knows, is that Indigenous Australians not only enjoy the same basic rights as everyone else but are now viewed by mainstream institutions such as government, media, and education as having a kind of culturally protected status thanks to policies concerned with promoting ‘equity’. Such policies mean that Indigenous people have access to a range of opportunities, from scholarships to employment, that non-Indigenous people do not.

Welfare policies for Indigenous people abound, yet so do high rates of alcoholism, abuse, imprisonment, and early deaths in Indigenous communities. Is this because of racism? How many more apologies, more welcomes to country, more equity programs, are needed to remedy these issues and undo the supposed harms of our colonial heritage? Or could it be that these policies, which negate personal responsibility (that nasty colonial idea), do more harm than good?

People are afraid to suggest these things because they will be accused of racism. To call someone a racist is one of the most destructive slurs available. It destroys careers and reputations. This constant threat of ostracism for saying ‘the wrong thing’ is a cudgel the Left wields to shut down debate and discussion about how to view Australian history and how issues in Indigenous communities can be addressed. The tragic irony is that ‘welcome’ ceremonies, apologies, and other pointless gestures do nothing whatsoever to address the real and serious problems faced by Indigenous communities (especially those who live in remote areas). The virtue-signalling activists do not care about helping them, only about getting revenge on white people, and promoting themselves as victims.

None of this is likely to be new to most readers of The Spectator Australia. We know that Western values are under attack and that Australian history is more complex than being entirely good or entirely bad.

What is needed is the courage to say the unsayable: it is not right for white people to be chastised for their skin colour, nor is it right to blame every problem that Indigenous people face on so-called racism. This assault on Western values only ends when cancel culture is countered with courage culture, and name-calling stops being a weapon that can be used against people who see through the pernicious cultural-Marxist worldview.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/i-dont-need-to-be-welcomed-to-my-country/

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Outrage at Deves ignores gravity of her message

British teenager Keira Bell was 14 when she began to feel dysphoria about her body. She was not a traditionally feminine girl but, instead of rejecting feminine stereotypes, she came to reject her own femaleness instead.

In doing so she decided she was, in fact, a boy. When she saw professionals about these issues – at a British clinic for gender dysphoric children – the health practitioners affirmed her belief that she was a boy. The clinic did not explore whether she was suffering from depression, or whether she had a history of trauma or low self-esteem, and promptly placed her on a treatment path to halt her normal development.

It took only three appointments before Bell was prescribed puberty blockers at age 16. She then took testosterone from the age of 17 and underwent a double mastectomy at 20. When Bell, at 23, decided to sue the clinic for malpractice, she said these treatments did not alleviate her dysphoria and she wished the clinicians had challenged her more about her beliefs that she was a boy. Reflecting on her transition, Bell has said: “I look back with a lot of sadness. There was nothing wrong with my body, I was just lost and without proper support. Transition gave me the facility to hide from myself even more than before. It was a temporary fix, if that.”

In Australia, activists have argued that gender-affirmation surgery is unavailable to children and therefore concern about such medical treatments is unfounded. But this applies only to surgery on the genital region. Children still can access double mastectomies if they have permission from a doctor and a parent or guardian. And children still are prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

We don’t know how many children have undergone double mastectomies or how common puberty blockers and cross-sex hormonal treatment is, as there is no data publicly available for journalists to access.

It is for this reason, as well as many others, that outrage over comments made by the Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, has been disingenuous. While her choice of words may have been indelicate (Deves has likened gender-confirmation surgery to mutilation) these issues are serious and are in dire need of debate in this country.

Several journalists and activists have made efforts to paint Deves as a culture warrior railing against trans children – much like a puritan railing against gay boys and lesbian girls a generation or two ago. The issue has been framed as a battle between progressive values and conservative prejudice, with conservatives just lagging behind in their acceptance of children who are different.

But this framing is factually wrong. There is no scientific consensus on the treatment for childhood gender dysphoria.

Sweden, for example, recently has halted the prescription of puberty blockers for minors and Finland prioritises mental healthcare for gender dysphoric children over drugs and surgery. When the most socially progressive countries in the world are pumping the brakes on using medical treatments to transition children, the idea it is only conservatives who have legitimate concerns is as shallow as it is dishonest.

The medical community knows puberty blockers are associated with significantly reduced bone density in developing children. They know cross-sex hormonal treatments can lead to infertility, which is irreversible. They know after double mastectomies patients are at risk of bleeding, infections and blood clots. They know after genital reconstruction surgery many patients can expect to experience lifelong sexual dysfunction. And they know while severe complications are rare, they can be debilitating: males who undergo vaginoplasty are at risk of fistula – a rupturing of the colon.

Sky News host Chris Kenny has rubbished claims his interview with Katherine Deves was “set up”.
It is for these reasons the issue of transgender children and how to treat them is profoundly different to the issue of accepting lesbian and gay children in decades past. For a gay teenager to embrace their sexuality, they must learn to see themselves as no less of a boy because they are attracted to other boys (or no less of a girl because they are attracted to other girls). It involves learning to love one’s body while overcoming feelings of shame and alienation.

By comparison, embracing a transgender identity involves rejecting one’s body and medicalising one’s shame. This is a process that leads individuals to have a lifelong dependence on medical interventions such as drugs and surgeries. In some cases this may be liberating; in others this path may be tragic and unnecessary.

The way in which outraged media commentators have framed the issue is to portray Deves as attacking or belittling gender dysphoric children, when in reality Deves’s comments appear to come from a place of genuine concern for these vulnerable individuals.

Bell had no one in her corner when she took her feelings of distress to the British gender clinic that prescribed her puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and that led to the removal of healthy female breasts. We need more discussion, not less, to ensure that stories such as Bell’s do not become more frequent than they have to be.

When asked how people can support gender dysphoric children without pushing them into medicalisation, Bell has offered the following advice: “It has to start with how we look at gender nonconformity, and nonconformity in general. Almost every girl (if not all) that wants to or has transitioned has felt like they are wrong because they do not conform to something that this society deems as important or necessary … Gender nonconformity needs to be accepted …

“We need better mental health support, and I think that speaks for most countries. Mental health support is a great preventative measure.”

We do our children no favours if we ignore the advice of brave individuals such as Bell. Similarly, our society does not benefit if people such as Deves are demonised simply for sharing honest opinions on such complex and important issues.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/outrage-at-deves-ignores-gravity-of-her-message/news-story/687632d9c0eb6f324d6c754201566931

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Parents turned away as childcare centres don’t have enough staff

Queensland’s childcare industry is being crippled by worker shortages with many centres forced to turn parents away due to regulatory child and staff ratios.

The number of job vacancies in the early learning sector are at record highs across the country with one in 10 roles vacant nationally and 1371 in Queensland. Hiring difficulties are so dire fears grow that some centres will not survive and many have had to apply for a government waiver to legally operate as they have not enough staff.

The Australian Childcare Alliance in Queensland is deeply concerned by the job crisis and has been lobbying all parties in the lead up to the Federal Election to recognise the need for strategies to attract workers to the sector and in the long run keep more mothers, who need childcare, in the workplace.

“The workforce crisis in early childhood education has been on our radar for many years but this became even more of an issue during the pandemic when we had a significant number of educators leave our sector, either taking early retirement because they were simply exhausted, or due to vaccine mandates,” president of the ACA in Queensland Majella Fitzimmons said.

The ACA has been working with members on the most effective ways to find new staff.

“We highlight government programs for staff and businesses to support new entrants to the sector. There are some great packages and grants that bring new entrants to our sector and allow them to ‘earn while they learn’ through supported work placement programs,” Ms Fitzimmons said .

The early education peak body believes the government needs to look at reduced fees for qualifications in this field, and a boost in Skilled Visa Immigrants.

Lucy Schweizer Cook, general manager of a chain of Amaze early education centres across the state plus outside school hours care services, told The Courier-Mail that all but one of the Amaze centres are at capacity due to staff shortages.

“Parents are on waiting lists until we can meet the ratios to enrol more children. During Covid a lot of educators had a life reboot with many deciding they would stay home rather than work or looking for jobs with higher wages. We are doing all we can to make things more attractive for workers. We give loads of bonuses, pay four per cent above award wages, have staff childcare discount, flexibility, free uniform,” she said.

“It is such a rewarding career, who wouldn’t want hugs from babies and children every day,” she said.

Under The National Quality Framework there must be one educator for four children under 24 months in child care settings, two to three year olds require one staff member for five children and in outside school hours care and vacation care one educator for 15 children.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/parents-turned-away-as-childcare-centres-dont-have-enough-staff/news-story/54299fec1eec4ad3c6601e0bf8892833

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Sydney upsizers face record gap between unit and house prices

Making the leap into a larger home has become increasingly difficult for Sydney upsizers, who need to bridge a record price gap to trade up from a unit to a house.

Sydney houses now cost twice as much as units, Domain data shows, with the price difference between the two property types widening rapidly during the pandemic.

More than $794,000 now separates the harbour city’s median house price of almost $1,591,000 and the unit price of about $796,500, climbing from a 54 per cent gap in late 2019 to just shy of 100 per cent last quarter.

Domain chief of research and economics Dr Nicola Powell said demand for houses has soared amid the pandemic as buyers sought more space, with house prices growing six times faster than unit prices over the past two years.

Despite Sydney’s cooling property market – with house price growth flatlining and unit prices down 1.2 per cent last quarter – a record price difference remains.

However, that gap is likely to narrow, Powell said. Unit prices were first to fall, but house prices would follow and could see sharper declines, given their stronger growth during the boom.

Apartment demand could also be propped up by increased investor activity, at the same time as affordability constraints pushed or kept more people in the unit market.

The premium paid for houses varies greatly across the city, with the smallest difference found in more affordable outer suburbs and the Central Coast, and the starkest difference in the city’s east, north shore and inner west.

Median house prices in Vaucluse are more than five times higher than unit prices, while house prices are at least four times higher in Bellevue Hill, Mosman and Strathfield. It’s a virtually impossible gap to bridge for most, though Powell said few apartment owners in such areas would ever expect to be able to upsize locally.

The smallest price gap was in Ingleburn, at just under 10 per cent, or $66,000.

House prices in Riverstone, Quakers Hill, Norwest and Terrigal were also less than 30 per cent above unit prices. Medians were only recorded and compared for suburbs with a minimum of both 50 house and unit sales over the year to March.

Higher price gaps highlighted the extreme cost of land in inner markets, Powell said. While land was more affordable in outer areas, reducing the premium for houses, there were also more low-density apartments and villas on offer. These and newer units could command higher prices, reducing the price difference.

In the inner west, where the house median of $2.4 million is three times the unit median of $800,000, it’s become very difficult to upsize locally, said buyer’s agent Hamada Alameddine of BuyerX.

Apartments had been subject to softer price growth, and owners had built up less equity. More people were leaving the area to upgrade, or opting to upsize to a larger apartment as a result.

“People upgrading from a unit to house are struggling if they’re relying on capital growth. Unless they’re higher earners or have the capacity to borrow a lot more money, it’s hard,” Alameddine said.

Buyer’s agent Pete Wargent, co-founder of BuyersBuyers, said a lack of suitable stock, strong competition and rapidly rising prices had made upsizing more difficult over the past two years. Moving from a unit to a house in suburbia was usually the hardest gap to jump, he said.

However, conditions for upsizers would improve with increasing stock levels giving buyers more choice and time. He also expected the higher end of the market, which was traditionally more volatile, to see greater price declines, narrowing the price gap between houses and units.

While the borrowing power of upgraders would be affected by rising interest rates, most upsizers were not borrowing to their maximum capacity, he said. Rate rises would also put downward pressure on property prices.

https://www.smh.com.au/property/news/sydney-upsizers-face-record-gap-between-unit-and-house-prices-20220512-p5akp0.html

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Disturbing implications of the Peter Ridd case

Ridd was fired because he questioned the integrity of the research behind a claim that the Barrier Reef was threatened by global warming.

Now that he is gone there is no-one in a position to critique the latest panic. In the circumstances this year's panic lacks all credibility

In October last year when the High Court handed down a short, unanimous decision in Peter Ridd’s case, it was a tragic outcome for a world class professor of physics who tried to defend his right to engage in robust professional discourse – no matter who took offence.

After 27 years at James Cook University, Ridd had failed to overturn his dismissal. Officially, James Cook University won this case. But it’s a pyrrhic victory.

The university was left with a big legal bill and a judgment that identified its improper attempts to silence an academic who questioned the rigour of other scientists.

The High Court broke with normal practice and refused to order Ridd to pay the university’s costs. But James Cook University lost something far more important than money: the reputation of this institution has been trashed.

The world has been left with the impression that this university did not understand the principle that lies at the heart of the scientific method: when searching for truth, robust debate is more important than professional courtesy and collegiality.

So to describe this university as a winner does not capture the full impact of what happened.

The High Court’s ruling falls into two parts: the first is a defeat for one man based on the peculiar circumstances of the case and the court’s even stranger form of reasoning. That aspect of Ridd’s case is best viewed not simply as an aberration, but wrong.

From Ridd’s perspective it was utterly unjust. On the substantive issue of academic freedom, the court’s judgment shows he was right and the university wrong when it tried to silence his criticism of what he considered shoddy science.

Yet these wrongdoers still managed to salvage victory after the court used a form of reasoning that was right out of Kafka: Ridd had failed to respect the confidentiality of an improper disciplinary process that targeted his legitimate right to engage in robust professional discourse.

That form of reasoning is less than persuasive and will eventually be seen for what it is: an embarrassment that sits uneasily with the rest of the ruling.

The lasting significance of this decision is in the second part of the judgment, which is an entirely convincing exposition on the importance of academic freedom and why robust scientific debate needs to prevail over bureaucratic demands for courtesy.

If the next federal government builds on this foundation, the real winners will be future generations – not just of academics but of all those who benefit from academic rigour.

This part of the ruling serves as a warning to university bureaucrats. The nation’s highest court is united on the importance of intellectual freedom and seems likely to side with academics should this issue again come before the court.

That, of course, assumes that other academics will have the fortitude and resources to follow Ridd’s example and fight for the right to speak their mind. That is quite an assumption.

In the real world, it would be a rare soul who would be prepared to risk their career and finances in a fight over an issue of principle. That is why the next federal government has an obligation to build on the foundation laid in the second part of this judgment.

The next education minister needs to ensure academics will never again need to resort to private litigation to defend their right to engage in robust professional discourse.

We have already seen how government action can nudge universities in the right direction through the development of a voluntary code on academic freedom by former High Court Chief Justice Robert French.

This code, however, fails to take account of the fact that universities are sensitive to threats to their revenue and the interests of influential stakeholders. Public policy therefore needs to support those who challenge academic orthodoxy, regardless of who takes offence.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/legal-affairs/intellectual-freedom-at-universities-must-be-protected/news-story/d1c09ef81a66b118149549c4e8e2b482

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The costs of ignoring the powderkeg men

Did restrictive feminist ideas of what is allowed in a relationship lead to a dreadful explosion?

Bettina Arndt

Three months prior to the appalling homicide of Hannah Clarke and her children, Clarke visited her local police station concerned about her husband’s behaviour, particularly following the break-up of their marriage.

She spoke to Senior Constable Kent who told the inquest last month that at first, she wasn’t “greatly concerned” by what Hannah was telling her – “just because they’re not a very pleasant man doesn’t mean it’s necessarily domestic violence,” she told her.

But then came the revelation. “She disclosed to me he makes her have sex every night. Then I went, ‘Ok, now we’ve got something.’”

There had never been violence. It was just that Clarke didn’t particularly want to do it every night - “She said that she did it so the house would be peaceful the next day.”

That was enough for Kent. She explained to Clarke that such “controlling behaviours” constituted family violence and referred her to a domestic violence support service.

Wow, how’s that for concept creep? Now having sex to keep a difficult hubby happy is domestic violence.

Of course, most long-married women aren’t interested in having sex every day, and it isn’t a healthy relationship if she feels she can’t say no. But plenty of wives choose to sometimes have sex simply because they know everything is better if they maintain that intimate connection. It’s their choice and they have agency in that decision.

But that’s not good enough for Sen Const Kent. She decided that Hannah Clarke’s reasons for having sex breached the new rules – rules underpinning enthusiastic/affirmative consent laws currently being introduced across Australia. Legal sexual relations now require more than just consent but rather, constant expressions of enthusiasm.

Now we discover that demand for enthusiasm will also be used to define when a married woman needs protection from unwanted sex. Clearly for Kent, having sex to keep hubby happy is a sure sign that a woman doesn’t know what’s good for her.

Kent is a domestic violence officer, after all. She’s used to imposing domestic violence laws requiring police to slap apprehended violence orders on the male partner at any hint of potential trouble, even over the objections of the woman concerned.

The Senior Constable felt entitled to decide what was good for Hannah Clarke and to inform her that daily sex was a sure sign that she was a DV victim. The assumption is that behind every woman having sex without appropriate enthusiasm is a dangerous, coercive man. “Sex demand a sign you could be in danger,” read the alarmist news.com headline, reporting Kent’s evidence to the inquest.

This red flag was enough for Kent to swing the whole domestic violence apparatus into place to target Hannah Clarke’s husband, Rowan Baxter.

Let it be understood that in discussing these issues, I totally condemn Rowan Baxter for his heinous crime. His actions are inexcusable – there is no possible justification for the abhorrent act of setting fire to a car containing a woman and three children. But the question remains as to whether what led him there is potentially preventable.

It is shameful that we have allowed the mob to silence any proper discussion of the motivations and trigger points that resulted in Baxter committing this dreadful crime – information which could one day prevent other similar tragedies. This month’s inquest was not a fact-finding mission to determine the truth of what happened. It had no interest in understanding the systemic factors required to prevent such tragedies in the future.

It was a posthumous show trial, parading Baxter’s head on a spike to promote the twin towers of the latest feminist edifice – enthusiastic consent and more importantly, coercive control.

Remember what happened when the investigating officer, Detective Inspector Mark Thompson, announced at a press conference that the police would investigate with “an open mind”, including the possibility that this was an instance of “a husband being driven too far.”

His statement was greeted with outrage, the mob descended, the police officer taken off the case. Regular readers will be aware that after I supported him in a tweet, I was condemned by the Australian Senate which falsely claimed I’d raised this question, rather than quoting Mark Thompson. My treatment made all too clear the dire consequences of breaching the gag on public discussion of this issue.

Well buried in the huge mountain of evidence given at this month’s inquest, is the sequence of events that, from Baxter’s perspective, fuelled the escalating crisis, culminating in his appalling crime, followed by his own stabbing suicide. Kent’s decision to link too much sex to domestic violence seems to be the initial trigger which led to Clarke’s sudden rationing of access to the children and eventually, as everything unravelled, the restraining order preventing him from going near the family. Read this revealing message Baxter wrote to Clarke which was found on his phone, describing his bewilderment at what was happening to him.

Naturally this is given short shrift in the carefully constructed coercive control narrative dominating the inquest. Indeed, counsel assisting the coroner, Dr Jacoba Brasch, announced after eight days of hearings that nothing could have stopped Baxter from killing his family. “Why? Because Baxter was evil.”

Brasch marshalled abundant evidence of the evil man’s controlling behaviour. Witnesses trotted out bizarre stories about Baxter working people so hard in his gym that they vomited and dropping his mother-in-law on her head in a gym exercise.

Here’s a selection from a list of 17 red flags compiled by Hannah Clarke’s parents, with the help of The Guardian:

isolating Hannah from her friends and family; controlling where she could go and who she could see; depriving her of food, clothing and sleep; belittling her; monitoring her phone; printing and sharing intimate photos she had taken of herself; becoming violent towards other people when drinking to excess; throwing away children’s toys.

Baxter apparently had previously threatened to kill his previous wife and son and had been charged with assault both in New Zealand and Australia.

There’s no doubt that Baxter was a volatile man with a troubling history, and a propensity for predatory behaviour. A man set up to respond to stressful situations with behaviour destructive to himself and to others.

Within weeks of the homicide, Hannah Clarke’s grieving parents, Lloyd and Suzanne Clarke, were speaking out about the need for coercive control laws - they went on to raise $330,000 through their small steps 4 hannah campaign. It’s totally understandable that people facing this type of unspeakable loss would seek to make a difference, hoping to protect others in similar circumstances.

But their recruitment into this latest feminist campaign parallels the capture of our former Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty, who initially spoke so movingly about how her ex-husband’s mental illness contributed to the tragic murder of her son. But she quickly became a spokesman for the feminist cause, with her take on domestic violence narrowing to the party line - that male misogyny and patriarchal control is the real cause of such dreadful events.

Predictably, the Clarke family homicide is being used to demand ever more stringent domestic violence measures, coercive control legislation across the country, specialist domestic violence courts, GPS electronic monitoring of perpetrators – the list is endless.

Last year I interviewed a former police officer Evelyn Rae, who explained that she dealt with many more false allegations of violence than real cases. Rae said police everywhere are aware that most protection orders are issued to women falsely claiming to be violence victims to gain advantage in family law battles. The outcome of the Clarke homicide is bound to be more stringent laws making lives miserable for the thousands of innocent men caught up in this net.

There’ll be no discussion of whether there was any possible intervention that could have prevented Baxter from going off the rails, no examination of factors in his treatment prior to the homicide which contributed to his growing instability. Note that instead of being offered help to deal with his distress over being denied contact with his children, he was told to seek a behaviour change program to control his violence. The transcript of his subsequent phone call with a MensLine counsellor is pretty revealing.

Nearly twenty years ago I wrote about powderkeg men, making the point that the pain of marital breakup leads people to do terrible things. I reported a mild-mannered man telling me how surprised he was to find himself crawling around in the bushes outside his ex-wife’s house, mad with jealously and rage. “If I had a gun, I’d have killed her,” he said.

Wounded bulls can be lethal, I wrote. “With women so often making the decision to end the marriages, men are left floundering, deprived of daily contact with their children, often losing their homes, their social and support network. Our newspapers so often carry tragic tales of separated men lashing out, doing awful damage to their families or to themselves. These are powder keg men, but it is our system which lights the fuse.”

It's thankfully very rare that powderkeg men wipe out their families. Most simply kill themselves – a fact our society prefers to conveniently ignore. The shameful secret carefully hidden by our mental health authorities is that family breakup is the number one cause of suicide in this country – I will write about this soon.

Try as we may to pretend they don’t exist, ignoring the wounded bulls is simply asking for trouble.

https://www.thinkspot.com/discourse/zquJPl/post/bettina-arndt/the-costs-of-ignoring-the-powderkeg-men/bvZtjy

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How Australian farmers are on track to save millions of lives

The war in Ukraine is studded with shocks and surprises. The multitude of deaths, suffered especially by Russia, is much higher than was anticipated, and a global energy crisis is feared.

Even food supplies in impoverished parts of the world are a potential casualty of this conflict.

In Australia, hardly any of us have noticed that our country – seen as a pariah at the Glasgow climate summit last year – has quietly emerged as one of the worthier nations of the world. Australian children, who in primary school often are instructed that their country has so much of which to be ashamed, will have to be told that at present it is a global benefactor.

The contrasting stories of farming and food production in Ukraine and Australia could teach us a lesson. Across Ukraine and the southwest corner of Russia is one of the world’s most extensive layers of that black soil the Russians call chernozem. Rich in decomposed plants, it is as fertile as a first-rate compost heap. Ukraine’s black soil occupies two-thirds of the arable land in a nation that has a higher proportion of arable land than all but two other countries on earth, Denmark and Bangladesh.

The damage to Ukraine’s diverse grain-belt with its wheat and corn and barley is causing increasing concern. Many farms are damaged severely; explosives and booby traps have been laid on the edge of some farmlands; and grain from last year’s harvest is pilfered from silos and trucked away by the invading Russians. Even the lumbering farm machinery, similar to the costly combine-harvesters in our wheatbelt, has been stolen by the invaders.

The harvest, normally at its busiest in just a few months, will certainly be much lower than last year’s and there is no likelihood that the surplus usually set aside for export will even reach the crucial Black Sea ports.

Mariupol, now a wreck of a city, is a wheat port as well as a hub of heavy industry. The biggest wheat port, Odesa, and various oil and wheat facilities and high-rise apartments have been hit by Russian missiles. Only as old as Sydney, this celebrated city with its terrace of 192 stone steps leading to the waterfront (I once tried and failed to count them) was the setting of a highlight in the history of cinema, the Battleship Potemkin mutiny.

One fact rarely noticed is that three of the world’s five largest wheat importers in 2020 were Muslim nations. Egypt was the largest, followed by Indonesia and Turkey. A fourth nation, Nigeria, has recently become more a Muslim than a Christian nation.

China and India as hot spots of malnutrition have been replaced by Arab nations in a typical year. According to an authoritative report issued in June last year, one-quarter of Arab children under the age of five were defined as stunted.

Egypt and its 101 million people – a larger population than any nation in the EU and still growing swiftly – now depend on foreign wheat. The country’s local output of grain always lags far behind the imports. In Cairo the government operates the ingenious Baladi subsidy scheme, which provides – largely from imported grain – cheap bread for more than half of the population.

Ukraine and Russia in recent years have supplied most of the grain used by Egyptian flour mills and bakehouses. Here is an exceptional somersault in world history. Egypt’s Nile Valley was a major supplier of wheat to the Roman Empire in its heyday. In the past decade, however, millions of Egyptians would have starved to death without the frequent arrival of food ships, some of which come from Australia.

The Middle East nation that depends most heavily on Australian grain is Yemen. One of the poorest nations in the world, its farms are noted more for their sheep and goats, asses and camels than their cereals, and its schools are notorious for the low attendance of girls. Yemen’s population, doubling every 20 or so years, has already passed Australia’s.

In the past two years especially, we have been a huge exporter of wheat to East Asia. In Indonesia, countless families who ate their daily bread or noodles made from wheat grown mainly in what is now the war zone in Ukraine now consume bread from Australian white-wheat flour.

In some months, Indonesia is the world’s largest importer of wheat, while The Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and now China are also large importers of Australian wheat. Australia is one of the five or six main wheat and barley exporters in the world and a major power if a world food shortage should arise.

In this simple old-time world, if a harvest is poor, a government will try to import grain. As shipments from the Black Sea are highly unlikely, the Third World nations that urgently need wheat will pay dearly for it on the world market in the following months – even after a ceasefire or a fragile period of peace begins in eastern Europe.

In our nation, the gap in attitudes between city and countryside is wider than ever, and in a city-dominated election campaign the farms and their contribution to the economy are barely touched on. Yet we hardly hear the news that agriculture here – highly efficient and innovative by world standards – has just experienced two prolific harvests. Last summer in Western Australia and NSW the wheat harvest, for example, has been sensational.

Thus the lives of tens of millions of adults and children on the far side of the equator will be saved or prolonged.

The past two years have been record-breaking for Australian wheat and barley and canola crops, in aggregate. It is almost certain that no matching period in our history has been so productive. While the recent floods in northern NSW have been devastating, and are seen by some scientists as proof that our climate is somewhat out of control, there is hardly a mention of the fact the grain harvests in vast areas of inland Australia have been wonderful and a reason for intense satisfaction.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-war-in-ukraine-and-australias-harvest-for-the-world/news-story/33402f184a7d48668722d3ab3e774c33

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Large deficiencies in our political debate

None of us want to acknowledge that our runaway inflation is less a product of the war in Ukraine than it is because of free government money being poured like petrol on the dumpster fire of pandemic over-reaction.

How can we address cost of living when both sides of politics are committed to eschewing cheap and abundant coal and gas and refuse to embrace nuclear energy?

Here the Greens and Teal ‘independents’ are driving policy in an illogical direction that suits rich people who can afford to virtue signal on climate but oppresses people in the suburbs with unaffordable electricity.

We can’t have jobs and manufacturing without affordable and reliable energy and both major parties are frittering away Australia’s competitive advantage as an energy superpower by installing wind turbines and solar panels which cannot power a modern economy.

The key to reducing cost of living is a vision for energy.

The key to ensuring young people can get into a house is land supply – something Australia has plenty of yet this is barely discussed.

If we want to tackle violence against women and children, we should have pro-family policies – policies that favour mum, dad, and the kids as the basic group unit of society.

This doesn’t mean we ignore others, it just means we do our best to support the model which provides the best security for children and the least prospect of violence against women.

But loyalty and faithfulness are old-fashioned concepts, as we prefer sexual licence and keeping options open.

Political correctness means we discriminate against stay-at-home parents as money is poured into every form of childcare choice except the choice to care for one’s own kids in one’s own home.

Women’s issues are high on the agenda but there is no discussion on a major cause of violence against women – pornography.

It was good to hear both leaders give the right answer to the question, ‘What is a woman?’ but the obvious follow-up questions were not asked. Why are our children not taught this at school and why are our schools teaching harmful LGBTQI+ gender-fluid ideology?

Why can’t the government overturn the Australian Human Rights Commission’s transgender guidelines which put sporting clubs at risk of legal action if they try and protect girls’ and women’s sport and private spaces?

Woke climate and social policy is stifling debate and hobbling our future, making a mockery of Albo and ScoMo’s respective slogans for a better and stronger future.

But because Woke is viciously anti-free speech, politicians shy away from reality, preferring to appease our cultural and media elites.

So, the election campaign consists of appeals to the base-selfishness of voters who don’t seem to want leaders who will rock the boat too much but will complain about them nonetheless.

The price we pay is kicking the can of hard issues down the road until they come to bite us.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/we-get-the-politicians-we-deserve/

Friday, May 13, 2022

Homosexual marriage issue divides Anglican Church in Australia

The people of the church were clear on what their faith demands. They understood the Bible command in 1 Corinthians 7:2: "Let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband".

Or as Jesus himself taught: “And He answered and said, ‘Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? (Matthew 19:4-6)

But it was the bishops who let the Anglican laity and clergy down.

I have long been supicious of the Anglican episcopate. I think a lot of them are just dressup queens, more in love with their vestments and displays than with the Bible.

I doubt that most of the recent archbishops of Canterbury even believed in God. Runcie clearly did not At least the present Cantuar seems to believe in something

The Anglican Church is teetering on the brink of a conservative walkout after church leaders narrowly voted down a bid to define marriage as being exclusively between a man and woman.

In a boilover at the first Anglian General Synod to convene since gay marriage became law in 2017, a 24-strong panel of metropolitan archbishops and senior diocesan bishops held out against the majority of clerical and lay delegates to sink the controversial motion. Even then, the two members of the so-called House of Bishops who abstained could have turned the vote that went down to the wire there, failing 12-10, after it sailed through the houses of clergy and laity on Wednesday.

In aggregate, the statement sponsored by the conservative Archbishop of Sydney, Kanishka Raffel, affirming orthodox church doctrine that marriage was of a man and woman and condemning ceremonies to bless gay nuptials, passed 133-86 before the bishops exercised their casting vote.

A bitterly disappointed Archbishop Raffel warned the church in Australia was at the “tipping point” that caused its counterparts in the US, Britain, Canada, Brazil and New Zealand to splinter over same-sex marriage.

Describing the situation as “perilous” for the church, he told The Australian: “What we have seen over the last 20 years or so in mostly Western churches is where people have lost confidence in the goodness and trustworthiness of God’s word as it has been expressed in Anglican liturgy and practice for 500 years … those churches have fractured. We don’t want that. But we know what has happened in many countries and I guess it is perilous in that sense.”

The chair of the Australian arm of the Global Anglican Future Conference, Bishop of Tasmania Richard Condie, said a shadow church had been set up as a “lifeboat” for those who left. Entire congregations and their priests could shift across to Gafcon’s nascent Diocese of the Southern Cross.

“I am not a prophet to say what I think will happen next, except to say what has happened everywhere else this bridge has been crossed,” Bishop Condie said. “People who hold a deep conviction about this matter have left their Anglican Church … because it is of such seriousness.

“I expect there will be people in the Anglican Church of Australia today who will feel that pressure.”

The Anglicans’ day of reckoning on same-sex marriage has been coming since Australians voted for it in a national plebiscite nearly five years ago and was put off twice when the usually triennial General Synod had to be cancelled in 2020 and last year because of Covid-19. Church conservatives backed by the wealth and numbers of the powerful Sydney Diocese fought tooth and nail to have the parliament-like assembly reinforce the orthodox position that only heterosexual couples could be wed by a priest.

But progressives argued that denying a blessing to gay couples who wanted their civil vows recognised was cruel and un-Christian and would leave the church out of step with mainstream culture and inclusive social values.

The infighting is set to continue, as conservatives reacted with anger and shock to the defeat. Some predicted the dioceses of the 12 archbishops and ranking bishops who voted against the same-sex statement would be the first to be hit by defections.

In a personal statement to the General Synod, Archbishop Raffel said the national church’s federated structure and processes were at risk. “We may very well become a church where every clergyman relates to his bishop in the 23 dioceses,” he told delegates.

“And in that case we ought to stop wasting each other’s time by gathering in this way.”

Speaking against the statement ahead of Wednesday’s vote, vicar Shane Hubner of St Peters Anglican Church, Box Hill, in Melbourne’s east, said the notion that marriage was the union of a man and woman was “deeply painful” for him to accept when he had two gay siblings.

He could not reconcile his experience with them and a statement seeking to deny God’s blessing. “It is deeply painful … to have discussions where I have to state that the church I serve does not recognise the blessing of God in their relationships,” he said.

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https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/conservatives-crushed-as-anglicans-vote-on-samesex-marriage/news-story/12e74c3189f3186b2983b3b7a8c29515

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A $741m home resilience scheme that will allow Queensland properties to be raised, repaired and retrofitted - or voluntarily bought back - has opened to homeowners

This will be gladly greeted by Brisbane flood victims in Rocklea and elsewhere

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk plugged the $741m package, which is joint funded by the Commonwealth, as she gave a weather update on flooding across the state due to heavy rain over the past 24 hours.

Ms Palaszczuk said Queenslanders whose homes were damaged recently could register now for the scheme as "for the second time in three months, widespread heavy rain is leading to floods and loss of life".

"What’s worse, these events are becoming more frequent and more severe," she told parliament.

"While we cannot stop the rain from falling we can help the people of our state recover and be better prepared for whatever comes next. "That is why I am pleased to announce the launch of our $741 million Resilient Homes Fund.

"She said it was the largest home resilience program of its kind to ever be delivered in Australia.

"Queenslanders whose homes were damaged by floods will be able to access grants to rebuild more resilient homes, raise homes or buy back homes at high risk," she said.

She said it was under a similar scheme that "Grantham was literally moved to higher ground" following the 2011 floods, and that town had escaped disaster again in February because of it.

"Those who choose to stay can gain access to grants that replace floor coverings with more flood-resilient finishes like tiles or polished concrete," Ms Palaszczuk said.

"Power outlets can be raised.

"Buy backs will be on a case by case basis based on a range of factors including the frequency and severity of flooding and future flood risk."

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/parliament-live-palaszczuk-govt-faces-grilling-over-underpressure-health-system/live-coverage/0748b7edd34fd220d9e6b47938b1b3b7

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Seven surprising changes to the way Qld. children will be taught at school in 2023

Students will be taught about tax and superannuation, Australia’s women’s movement, domestic violence and how to “make active choices” as part of a curriculum overhaul being rolled out next year.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority on Tuesday unveiled its new “stripped back and teachable” curriculum coming in 2023.

Mathematics and STEM programs were given a vast overhaul while English and physical education programs will have sweeping changes.

A “Deep Time indigenous History” has been added to the curriculum as a compulsory component of Year 7.

The new curriculum will include the rollout of “making active choices” lessons in classrooms to probe Australian students to strategise how they can increase physical activity in their day-to-day lives as well as reduce sedentary behaviour.

The lessons around healthy choices regarding activity and inactivity will be introduced from Year 5 onwards.

The changes come off the back of alarming data in recent years by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which categorised 1 in 4 Aussie kids, 24 per cent, as being overweight or obese.

Here are seven surprising additions to the curriculum you may have missed.

Physical education

By the end of Year 1, students will have explored how to seek, give or deny permission respectfully when sharing possessions or personal space.

By the end of Year 8, students will examine how roles, levels of power and coercion and control within relationships can be influenced by gender stereotypes.

By the end of Year 10, students will have investigated how gender equality and challenging assumptions about gender can prevent violence and abuse in relationships.

History

By the end of Year 7, history students will understand more about the early First Nations Australians, their social organisation, cultural practices and their continuity and change over time.

By the end of Year 10, history students will have learnt about the significant events, individuals and groups in the women’s movement in Australia and how they have collectively changed the role and status of women.

Business and social science

By the end of Year 8, students will be taught about the importance of Australia’s taxation system and how it affects decision-making by individuals and businesses.

By the end of Year 10, students will have learnt about the importance of Australia’s superannuation system and how it affects consumer and financial decision-making.

Mathematics

Leading changes to mathematics and STEM, designed to prepare Aussie kids for the jobs of the future, was Year 1 students being taught to connect numbers to 20 – up from 10 – and order numbers 120, up from 100.

Percentages will also be introduced at Year 5 instead of Year 6 and line graphs will be taught in Year 5 science classes instead of Year 10.

But Year 1 kids will no longer learn to tell time on an analog clock, with fractions – including ‘time telling’ – pushed back to Year 2.

English

Under changes to the English components of the new curriculum, by the end of Year 10, students will no longer be required to “consolidate a personal handwriting style that is legible, fluent and automatic and supports writing for extended periods”.

By the end of Year 4, students will understand past, present and future tenses and their impact on meaning in a sentence.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/education-queensland/seven-surprising-changes-to-the-way-your-children-will-be-taught-at-school-in-2023/news-story/c936551616d0fd67f1a605e1c5844567

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Radical policies likely under a Labor government

If you read the mainstream press a lot – not that I’m recommending that – you might believe that Labor is hoping to win the election using a small-target strategy in which the policies being proposed are not too different from current government settings. It’s a common refrain.

But as they say, the devil is always in the detail. And, in this case, it’s often more important what isn’t said by Albo and his shadow ministers (maybe I should reverse that order) than what is said.

There is an important, forgotten element in the suite of policies that Labor is taking to the electorate and that is the ongoing compromises needed to keep the Right and the Left (and the various sub-factions) of the party from declaring civil war. While it’s easy to dismiss Albo’s external political appeal, he has demonstrated real political skills calming down the party, particularly the parliamentary wing, and maintaining a degree of stability.

After the Right’s Bill Shorten surprisingly lost the 2019 election, it could have been on for one and all. The Left, including Albo, never liked Shorten but tolerated him because they thought he was going to become prime minister. A new settlement was required, including new policy positions.

Even though the Left was in favour of many of the tax proposals Shorten had run with – think here removing cash refunds for franking credits, limiting negative gearing, lifting capital gains tax, higher taxes on trusts – it was widely acknowledged that the path to election would involve ditching them. Over time, this is what Albo achieved – there is really nothing remaining of the Shorten tax agenda in 2022. This left Albo with the task of finalising new policies that both the Left and Right could sign off on. That the Morrison government had abandoned any sense of fiscal responsibility was a plus – gone are the days (at least for the moment) of having to answer that pesky question: how are you going to pay for it?

In order to simplify the process, the factions were initially given certain portfolios – climate and education, for instance, were bagged by the Left. Defence and treasury went to the Right. Even so, the final policy positions were negotiated between the Left and Right so that the outcome looks like a small target – very little different from the Coalition’s policies, nothing too radical – but is actually the result of this compromise.

The importance of this insight is that were Labor to win office, particularly in its own right rather than as lead in a minority government, the actual policies enacted may look quite different from those presented to voters prior to the election.

There is also the point that the very vagueness of many of Labor’s policy documents leaves a great deal of wriggle room in practice. In other words, we don’t really know what to expect from a Labor government in terms of policy because of the skimpiness of the proposals being made public.

Take, for instance, industrial relations. Based on a few pages and using the theme of insecure work, Labor is in fact (potentially) proposing to make a number of radical changes to the regulation of industrial relations. The numbers are completely dodgy – all self-employed people are in insecure work, evidently – but that doesn’t really matter.

Labor is intent on killing off the gig economy to the greatest extent it can, ensuring labour hire firms have no place in the labour market and thwarting any further growth in casual employment. The fact that there are plenty of participants in the gig economy who are very happy with their arrangements, with gigs often undertaken in addition to day jobs, is neither here nor there for Labor.

Similarly, labour hire firms fulfil a useful role in providing short-term workers for companies as well as facilitating recruitment, training and induction. They don’t do a big job in the labour market – around three to five per cent of employed persons work for labour hire firms – but it is useful. They are important in parts of mining, particularly in Queensland.

But what gets Labor’s goat – or, in reality, the trade unions’ goat – is that labour hire workers are not very inclined to join unions. Ditto gig workers.

In addition to attempting to mandate higher wages – that always works well – Labor in government will alter the laws to impose a series of new restrictions on employers that are in keeping with the trade unions’ agenda. In all likelihood, the new Senate will simply wave through these legislative amendments.

Another area where the dulcet tones of Labor’s policy disguise quite radical measures is climate. Mind you, the government can largely blame itself for the loss of competitive political advantage in this area – as in the 2019 campaign – by signing on to the net zero emissions by 2050 pledge.

Labor’s line is that, given that both parties are heading to the same end point, it is simply quibbling with details to think there are any real difference in the climate policies of the two parties.

The reality is that there are important, impactful differences between the policies of the two parties that are likely to have consequences in the near term. The Coalition is sticking with the 2030 target of lower emissions of between 26 and 28 per cent (from a 2005 base) whereas Labor has opted for 43 per cent – not significantly different from its target taken to the 2019 election. (Confusingly, the Coalition claims it will achieve 35 per cent.)

One of the means whereby Labor will achieve its higher target is the Safety Net Mechanism to force Australia’s 215 biggest emitters to reduce their emissions or purchase (expensive) carbon credits.

But instead of providing clear guidance as to the rules that will apply across-the-board to these big emitters – mines, electricity plants, smelters, waste management facilities – Labor is proposing individual backroom negotiations with the Clean Energy Regulator. This is the antithesis of good policy but is one reason why the managers of these big emitters have been very quiet publicly during the course of the election campaign.

The bottom line is that Labor is happy with the description ‘small target’ in relation to its pitch to win government at this election. When in government, Labor is hoping to implement a range of radical policies – and well beyond IR and climate, including defence and border protection – of which the voters will have been largely unaware.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/assume-the-brace-position/ ?

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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Thursday, May 12, 2022

It now takes more than a decade to save a home deposit

This is fairly theoretical. Most families are small these days -- with one or two children -- so young people looking to buy should mostly have parents able to assist with the purchase in various ways.

But in cases where parental help is not available for various reasons, one certainly has to feel sorry for the young people involved. In their case they would be best to buy a small home unit as soon as they can. Time will then be on their side and they should later be able to upgrade to something better.

Our present era of high inflation makes it particularly imperative to buy something as soon as you can. Inflation will give you more and more equity in your dwelling, which actually makes you rather rich. I benefited greatly from inflation in the Gough Whitlam era. Gough effectively wiped out a large part of my debts

The share of household income needed to either pay rent or pay off a mortgage has also risen, the report, which measures affordability to the end of March, said.

It’s a bleak picture for long-term residents of regional Australia, who are facing a steeper jump in the ratio of house prices to incomes and a sharper deterioration in rental affordability than their city counterparts.

Despite early forecasts that the pandemic would send unemployment soaring and push property prices down, effective stimulus and ultra-low interest rates sparked a property boom. The shift to remote working also prompted a spate of sea-changers, putting pressure on regional housing markets.

“There’s been a broad-based deterioration in housing affordability over the past couple of years,” ANZ senior economist Felicity Emmett said.

“The deterioration in affordability has been much more marked in regional areas on average because we’ve seen prices and rents go up there generally at a faster rate.

“With the push to flexible working, capital city workers have been able to move to the regions. Often these are knowledge workers that are relatively highly paid, and so they’re able to afford to pay higher prices for homes or pay more for their rent.”

Nationally, the median dwelling value is 8.5 times the median household income, a record high and up from 6.8 since the pandemic. But across regional Australia, the ratio is 7.9 times, up from 5.9 pre-pandemic.

For someone earning the median capital city income and looking to tree-change into the median regional home, the ratio is only six times, making the move an attractive option for higher-income workers.

The house price boom has outstripped wages growth, so it takes longer to save a deposit on average.

For someone who could save 15 per cent of their income, it would now take a record 11.4 years to save a 20 per cent deposit for the median home. That’s an increase of 2.2 years since March 2020, the fastest gain in this metric ever.

Once a buyer manages to save a deposit, they will need to set aside a higher share of income to pay off their mortgage, with the portion of household income needed to service new mortgage repayments rising to 41.4 per cent, well below record levels but above the decade average of 36.5 per cent, and the third consecutive increase.

Potential buyers trying to save a deposit are also facing higher rents, with the share of income needed to service rent on a new lease lifting to 30.6 per cent, higher than two years earlier.

She said many first-home buyers are getting help with their deposit from parents or grandparents, although hard data remains scant.

“It’s increasingly becoming the case that whether you’re able to buy a home and become a first-home owner increasingly depends on what sort of job your mum and dad had, and I suppose the question is – is that really, as a society, what we want?” she said.

She doubted housing affordability would improve much this year when rates rise, as mortgage repayments will be higher and property prices are not likely to fall enough to move the needle.

Damien Walker, mortgage broker at Atelier Wealth, said some first-home buyers are bridging the deposit gap by turning to lenders that offer loans with a low 15 per cent or 10 per cent deposit and no lenders’ mortgage insurance.

Others are getting help from parents in the form of cash gifts or guarantor loans, and some are using the federal government’s First Home Guarantee scheme.

https://www.smh.com.au/property/news/it-now-takes-more-than-a-decade-to-save-a-home-deposit-20220511-p5aket.html

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Confusion about Anglican schools

In what sense is an Anglican school that rejects Anglican teaching in order to keep non-Anglican families happy still an Anglican school?

That’s the question Sydney Anglicans are wrestling with as opposition to Christian teaching on sexuality and gender grows.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported at the weekend that alumni and parents from Anglican schools had issued a letter complaining the Anglican church was ‘imposing its social conservatism on classrooms’.

In other words, they were worried that the Anglican church was instructing Anglican schools to be, well, Anglican.

Specifically, parents were upset about guidelines for schools on dealing with students struggling with gender identity.

The Anglican Diocese of Sydney has advised its schools to show compassion, reject bullying and abuse, and note that nobody was immune from ‘brokenness’, but to also tell students to ‘honour and preserve the maleness or femaleness of the body God has given you’.

All of which sounded a little too much like Anglicanism for Anglican school parents.

‘I feel awful for any student who has to endure this senseless attack on their identity,’ a transgender woman (who identified as an Anglican parishioner) told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Another parent told the Herald that most families at his daughter’s Anglican school were not religious, and that he worried ‘socially conservative’ forces were pushing the school ‘in a different direction’.

By ‘socially conservative’ he presumably meant Anglican. And by ‘different direction’ he evidently meant Christian.

If only those Anglicans wouldn’t be so Anglican, their Anglican school would be less Anglican so that non-Anglicans could enjoy it!

Judging by the reported comments of disaffected parents, it will likely come as a surprise for them to learn that Anglican leaders don’t take their cues from Libs of TikTok.

Church leaders base their doctrine on the teaching of Jesus who, among other things, told his followers: ‘Surely you have read in the Scriptures: When God made the world, He made them male and female.’

Jesus’ words align with science, but not with the new-fangled gender transformation fetish.

The Anglican Diocese has essentially reminded its Anglican schools – which include some of the most exclusive colleges in the country such as The Kings School and Abbotsleigh – that they are Anglican.

Sydney Archbishop Kanishka Raffel said the guidelines:

‘Emphasise care and compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria and give schools wide discretion to respond to individual situations while holding to a Christian view of the inherent goodness of our bodies, as each has been created by God.’

But parents are threatening to withhold fees if the guidelines – including that school principals and board members must endorse the Christian view of marriage – are not rescinded.

A gay parent whose daughter attends St Catherine’s asked: ‘How do you explain to a girl that the leader of your school is opposed to your way of being?’

Imagine his surprise when he discovers there are literally hundreds of state schools in Sydney that endorse LGBTQ+ ways of being. And his daughter can attend any of them for free!

Upset non-Anglican parents don’t want their children to go to non-Anglican schools. But nor do they want their children’s Anglican schools to be Anglican.

So they are determined to leave their children in Anglican schools where they will oppose Anglicanism until the Anglican school is Anglican in name only such that it becomes a non-Anglican Anglican school.

The angry parents have found some support among senior school staff.

One Anglican school principal was said to be ‘livid’ at being asked to endorse the Christian view of marriage.

Others said the requirement would reduce the already small pool of potential candidates for principals and compromise the quality of school leadership.

A ‘high achieving woman with a public profile’ reportedly withdrew from the board of an exclusive Anglican school rather than sign a statement of faith endorsing the biblical view of marriage.

The Herald reported this as a problem. I suspect the Sydney Anglican Diocese may view it differently. The statement of faith had the intended effect of weeding out a board member not committed to Anglican doctrine.

The woman told the Herald: ‘It’s going to limit new principals – you’ll end up with a whole set of socially engineered principals across Anglican schools in the Sydney diocese.’

If by ‘socially engineered principals’ she means Bible-believing Christians (can there be any other kind?) then she is right. And the Sydney Anglican Diocese, along with Anglican parents who sent their children to Anglican schools because they are Anglican, will be delighted.

The woman continued: ‘Restrictive ideas about sexuality should not be tied up in the statement of faith and the fact that they are speaks to something deeply concerning about the Sydney Anglican Church right now. To me, this is not Christ-like.’

I imagine Christ, who taught that marriage was between a man and a woman, would be greatly amused to hear that He is not Christ-like.

The Sydney Anglican Diocese is not laughing.

After all, what is an Anglican school if it is no longer Anglican? What value are grand sandstone buildings if they sit on nothing but cultural quicksand?

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/waiter-can-i-get-some-more-anglican-in-this-activism/

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Motion on transgender woman playing sport splits Queensland Parliament

Queensland Parliament has voted down a motion from Katter's Australian Party (KAP) that called on MPs to agree that allowing transgender women to play in women's leagues would "erode" their integrity and women's rights.

KAP leader Robbie Katter opened the short and tense debate by saying he was well aware the motion would attract "a lot of ire and a lot of anger".

"I think this is important for parents — I'm a parent of some young girls who will be hopefully participating in some sport one day … to imagine them 15 or 17 years old, post-puberty, competing against the odd person who might want to transfer to being female, that doesn't sit well with me," he said.

"That's not to deny that person an opportunity to play sport — they're welcome to play sport, and they should enjoy a great life in sport — but there's a distinct advantage when you cross over."

Mr Katter said it was important to introduce the motion, because voters needed to know where people stand on social issues in the context of the federal election. No-one from the LNP spoke on the motion, but when it came time to vote, the party supported it.

Mr Katter said he was trying to approach the subject "with the utmost respect for the other side of the argument". "You try and be tolerant of other people's views," Mr Katter said.

"But it seems always curious to me that you're not always afforded that same level of tolerance and always invoke the word 'bigot' and 'hate speech'.

"This is nothing against anyone who falls in that category of transgender — God loves them all and welcomes them all."

Katter's Australian Party's motion read:

That this House supports women's rights by agreeing that:

1. allowing biological men to play in female sport will erode the integrity of female sport;

2. anyone who supports biological men playing in female sport, irrespective of age group, level or code, is complicit in eroding the integrity of female sport and therefore women's rights;

3. based on their insurmountable physical advantages, biological males participating in female sport pose an unfair competitive advantage against, and/or safety risk against female athletes

'Attempt to cause fear and division'
Queensland's Sport Minister Stirling Hinchliffe said the government rejected the premise of the motion and would not be supporting it.

"This is not a debate about sport or women's rights, it's an attempt to cause fear and division and is unnecessarily dragging an extreme right-wing trope into this parliament," Mr Hinchliffe said.

"I'm surprised the KAP are using their relatively rare private members' motion opportunities on this issue, rather than something more relevant to regional Queenslanders.

"It's not the role of the state to determine who can and cannot participate in sport based on any factor and gender identity is one of those.

KAP's Member for Hinchinbrook, Nick Dametto, said the party's motion was about protecting women's sport, and he welcomed codes like the National Rugby League Women being pushed into the limelight.

At one point, Labor's Member for Pumicestone Ali King called out: "Women don't want your protection, we didn't ask for your protection."

One Nation's single member in the state parliament, Steve Andrew, voted in support of the bill and told parliament it was not about politics but women's right to compete fairly.

Both Greens MPs spoke against the motion, with party leader Michael Berkman calling it "repugnant". "It is completely unnecessary to drag this kind of disgusting conservative dog-whistling politics in here," he said. "I think it is telling that we are hearing not a single word from the Opposition to speak against it."

The motion was easily defeated, 49 votes to 33.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-12/qld-parliament-debate-kap-transgender-people-womens-sport/101058588

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A clean future or merely greenwashing? Critics claim Coalition's hydrogen plans are a 'fig leaf' for fossil fuels

Plans by the federal government to develop a "clean" hydrogen industry in Australia have been branded greenwashing by critics who say taxpayer money is being used to subsidise fossil fuel activities.

The government says every technology that could help decarbonise the economy should be available for use

The government has announced plans for a series of hydrogen hubs around the country as part of efforts to kickstart production of the fuel and decarbonise the economy.

About $500 million has been earmarked for hydrogen hubs for industrial centres in places including Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland and Tasmania.

But the spending has drawn fire amid claims much of the money would be invested in so-called blue hydrogen, which is made using natural gas rather than renewable energy.

The Australia Institute, a left-leaning think-tank, argued the funding defeated the purpose of building a hydrogen industry.

The institute's climate and energy program director, Richie Merzian, said clean hydrogen could "be one of two things".

"You can make it using renewable energy, which is a zero-emissions process," Mr Merzian said.

"Or you can make it using fossil fuels, which is a really dirty process." 'Might as well use the fossil fuels'

Climate Energy Finance director Tim Buckley backed the concept behind hydrogen hubs, which were aimed at putting producers of the fuel alongside big users such as industrial customers.

But Mr Buckley described as greenwashing the government's support for blue hydrogen, which he said was a "fig leaf" to hide the continuation of the natural gas industry.

The former investment banker said producing hydrogen from gas instead of renewable energy made no sense.

"At the end of the day, if you are going to make hydrogen from fossil fuels, you might as well just use the fossil fuels," Mr Buckley said.

"Why go through the extra processing steps, the extra cost, to use hydrogen?

"You might as well just use the gas, the coal, the electricity in the first place."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-12/federal-government-green-hydrogen-plans-labelled-greenwashing/101052282

Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Men need our support

Bettina Arndt

Over twenty years ago, Federal Member of Parliament Greg Wilton took his own life. The tragedy was the culmination of a series of events that highlight how poorly we deal with vulnerable men. Three weeks earlier, Wilton had been found ‘in a distressed state’ with his children in a car in the national park, apparently rigging a hose to the exhaust. It was widely reported as an attempted murder-suicide.

He spent time in psychiatric care, but with his Labor colleagues maneuvering to force him out of parliament and relentless hounding from the press, it wasn’t long before he tried again. This time he succeeded. On June 14, 2000, the 44-year was found dead in his car with the exhaust hose attached.

A few years earlier, Wilton had given a speech to Parliament pointing out that group most likely to commit suicide in this country were men like him – adult males struggling with marital separation. He mentioned extensive research that had emerged over previous years saying that, ‘Men kill themselves due to an inability to cope with life events such as relationship breakups of the kind I myself have suffered.’

In the two decades since then, that research has piled up. The case is now overwhelming that men facing relationship breakdown should be a key target of Australia’s suicide prevention policies.

There’s no way our health bureaucrats are going to let that happen. The March 2022 Budget allocated $2.1 billion to services for women and girls and just $1 million to ‘improve long-term health outcomes’ for men and boys. Isn’t that extraordinary? Somehow females are seen as deserving of 2,000-times more investment in their health than men, despite their more robust health resulting in four extra years of life expectancy.

What a tribute to the mighty efforts of our feminist health bureaucracy which for decades has strenuously ignored the enormous elephant sitting in their room – namely, the ever-increasing male suicide rate wiping out so many younger adult males.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for people aged 25-44. Male vulnerability is at the heart of the problem. Look at these statistics:

Men account for 3 in 4 of the lives lost to suicide.
7 of the 9 people who kill themselves every day are male.
There have always been more male than female suicides.
Over the past ten years, males have become even more at risk.
The male suicide rate is twice the annual road toll.

Men wiping themselves out is a hugely important health issue – yet there’s a very good reason why our politicians and feminist bureaucrats don’t want to go there. As Greg Wilton pointed out, the evidence is piling up that a key reason many of these young men are at risk is they are casualties of family breakups.

The consequent minefield that hits these men, who are frequently fathers, often proves unbearable. Most face some combination of stressful legal battles, false accusations, crippling child support payments; financial ruin and most importantly, the loss of their children.

Marty Grant could have been one such casualty. He had it all planned. The tough young farmer from the West Australian wheat belt had the wire around his neck. The other end was tied to a tree and the car ready to surge into motion. But he stopped himself. ‘I realised I couldn’t do it to my family and friends.’ Marty pulled back, drove himself home, packed a bag and set off to seek help from the local nurse.

I wrote about Marty many years ago in an article on bush suicide for the Australian Women’s Weekly, covering all the stresses these farmers were going through, including crippling drought, dropping commodity prices, succession problems. But it took some doing to persuade the magazine editors to let me tackle the major suicide research issue emerging at that time – family breakdown. It was the loss of his loved ones which pushed Marty over the edge. His partner took off because she didn’t want to be a farmer’s wife, and then the son from a previous relationship – a child Marty had cared for a decade as a single parent – went off to live with his mum. Marty’s family disappeared.

This was the type of story highlighted in research published around that time by the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University which found relationship breakdown to be the main trigger for suicide, with male risk four times that of females.

According to the researchers Drs Chris Cantor and Pierre Baume, men are most vulnerable in the period immediately after separation – with separation from children a major source of their despair.

That’s a red flag, crying out for suicide prevention intervention. Just think what usually happens when we discover one of these trigger points. Like mothers at risk of suicide due to post-partum depression. When that first made the news, support groups got to work, government funding started pouring in, and now prevention programs are everywhere.

Currently the federal government is targeting anorexic girls. Wham, the latest suicide funding promised $20 million for eating disorder treatment services. Then there’s indigenous suicide. Righty-o. They’ve come up with $79 million in the Budget for that one.

Yet for the last two decades, there has been absolutely no government funding to follow up Cantor and Baume’s work on vulnerable divorcing men, even though recent Griffith University research still shows relationship difficulties to be the major triggering life event, accounting for 42.5 per cent of suicides. The Australian Bureau of Statistics data lists relationship disruptions/problems as the key suicide psychological risk factors after self-harm, which is more a symptom of distress than a trigger.

But this key issue never features in the public narrative. Instead, we are presented with carefully constructed red herrings. Remember the lavish 2016 ABC television program, Man Up, which spent three episodes claiming we need to teach suicidal men to show their feelings? Hours of television about men having to learn to cry, but not a word about what they were crying about.

Then they announced a mental health expert, Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer, and followed up with $5.6 million from mental health funding to encourage men to seek help. Don’t they love this new diversion, focusing on encouraging men to rid themselves of their toxic masculinity and show their softer side?

But the fact is that even though many suicidal men have mental health problems, our authorities are strenuously ignoring the key event which might push them over the edge. Data from the Queensland Suicide register shows that 42 per cent of men who die by suicide have a mental health diagnosis but 98 per cent have experienced a recent life event, such as relationship breakdown.

Given the ongoing male suicide crisis, it is an absolute scandal that our suicide policies are still proudly ‘gender neutral’ with up to 4 of 5 beneficiaries female, according to analysis by the Australian Men’s Health Forum. Read the case AMHF makes for a male suicide prevention strategy here.

Yet finally there are tiny green shoots appearing midst the ongoing gloom. In January this year Suicide Prevention Australia, the peak body for suicide prevention organisations, announced that ‘it’s time to talk about male suicide prevention’.

‘Of the 3,000 lives tragically lost to suicide each year, over 75 per cent are men. They are our husbands and fathers, our brothers and uncles, our colleagues and friends,’ wrote CEO Nieves Murray, announcing they were pushing for an ‘ambitious male suicide prevention strategy’ guided by ‘the evidence’ and ‘addressing underlying issues that might lead men to the point of crisis’ and actually mentioning support for men in family courts.

The Morrison government announced last November that some suicide prevention funding would be targeted at-risk groups including men but didn’t manage to get this up before the election. No doubt the health bureaucrats have no interest in rushing this one through and it’s hard to imagine this happening if a Labor/Green government gets into power.

Look what happened after Pauline Hanson had the guts to speak out about false allegations and bias against men when appointed Deputy Chair of the recent parliamentary inquiry into family law. She was ripped apart in the media and her Labor/Green committee members stymied any hope of addressing these issues, despite hundreds of submissions documenting how men are being done over.

Tackling male suicide means highlighting the way the family law system is now weaponised against men. This will attract huge resistance from the feminist mob controlling our media, so adept at cowering politicians into inaction. But too many people now know and care about what’s driving so many men to take their lives. The time is right for a mighty campaign to galvanise public opinion and demand real change.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/men-need-our-support/ ?

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Qld Police belatedly back inquiry as part of historic DV reforms

Police have accepted a commission of inquiry into widespread cultural issues that are denying domestic violence victims justice just months after railing against the need for one.

Acting Queensland Police Commissioner Steve Gollschewski welcomed the government’s acceptance of the previously contentious recommendation to hold the inquiry, after Commissioner Katarina Carrol rejected it as unnecessary in December.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk on Tuesday accepted all 89 recommendations of Justice Margaret McMurdo’s first report of the Queensland Woman’s Safety and Justice Taskforce, which found perpetrators were being “emboldened” by police, lawyers and the courts in a scathing assessment of the failings of Queensland’s justice system.

Advocates and victims’ families, including those of Hannah Clarke and her children, Allison Baden-Clay, Doreen Langham and Kelly Wilkinson, sat in the parliament as Ms Palaszczuk announced the historic $363m, four-year investment to better protect women and children against domestic violence.

They include the criminalisation of coercive control, a four-month-long commission of inquiry – the details of which will be announced on Wednesday – and a raft of other watershed reforms.

“This is far-reaching, it is historic, and it is once again Queensland leading the way,” Ms Palaszczuk said.

“What we have seen is that some women have fallen through the cracks and we want to do everything we can to prevent that from happening,” she said.

Attorney-General and Domestic Violence Prevention Minister Shannon Fentiman said the government would take its time to get the reforms right, which would include greater training for first-responders, judges and court staff, the modernisation of stalking laws, expanding specialist DV courts, trials of “co-responder” models staffed with police and specialist domestic violence workers and the establishment of a disclosure register of serious domestic and family violence offenders for authorities.

Ms Fentiman said some of the reforms would go directly to stopping the mistaken identification of victims as perpetrators, which happened too often, including by refusing to award DVO cross applications and instead insisting a judge decide which party was most in need of the protection.

More than $15m will fund Respectful Relationship education in schools and more than $16m will be spent on an education campaign in the media to raise awareness of the dangers of non-physical violence and how people can respond to coercive control.

In Australia, one in four women will experience domestic violence at the hands of their partner but it may not be as visible as we think. Take a look at what makes up coercive control.

And $25.5m will be spent on training and new positions within perpetrator programs, so more staff can work with them to stop dangerous behaviour.

Mr Gollschewski said the police service accepted the reforms announced and would fully co-operate with the commission of inquiry.

“The QPS responds to most DFV incidents very effectively, however, we acknowledge there have been some instances where we have not gotten it right and our organisation welcomes the opportunity to learn and improve,” he said in a statement.

“Responding to incidents of DFV is often challenging and complex. The inquiry is an opportunity for us to understand and reflect on what we can do, within our Service, to better protect victims of DFV.”

It was a stark difference to Ms Carroll’s initial response in December when she said that while she did not “fear a commission of inquiry, I cannot support this recommendation”, that it was “not warranted” and would be “extraordinarily costly”.

It is understood since then, police have determined an inquiry could bring about much-wanted changes to time-consuming processes and paperwork unpopular with officers. They include extensive paperwork resulting from domestic violence call-outs and cumbersome processes such as requiring written statements from victims, rather than being able to use body cam recordings of testimony given on scene – a move that will soon be trialled.

Queensland Police Union (QPU) president Ian Leavers previously described the McMurdo report as “another woke, out-of-touch report by a retired judge that overreaches where it pertains to police”. But on Tuesday he said the union had changed its position.

“Initially, the QPU was opposed to yet another Commission of Inquiry,” he said.

“However, after I gave evidence at the recent inquest surrounding the deaths of Hannah Clarke and her children, and, having spoken with Sue and Lloyd Clarke, we have now formed the view that the inquiry will present a real opportunity to continue to push for genuine reforms that the QPU has been seeking for some time.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/police-courts-qld/police-belatedly-back-inquiry-as-part-of-historic-dv-reforms/news-story/0dfbffe4a0b0873aba63a494e7f9e78f

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Urban Forest tower proposed for Southbank scrapped

Plans for a 32-storey apartment tower that was heralded as being one of the world’s greenest residential buildings have been scrapped after the development was deemed unfeasible.

Brisbane developer Aria Property Group had proposed building Urban Forest, which would have featured “backyards in the sky”, in Southbank.

But it can be revealed the developer has scrapped its $300 million plans and late last week submitted a new development application to Brisbane City Council for a 12-level medical facility instead.

Aria’s Development Manager Michael Hurley said the company thought Brisbane “was ready for Urban Forest however unfortunately circumstances have conspired against us”.

“It is a disappointing outcome and a lost opportunity to pioneer subtropical design in a vertical setting,” he said.

The development was originally designed to have 32 storeys however council approved it for 20 levels late last year.

The company said while Urban Forest had been mooted as one of the greenest projects ever to be built in Australia, objections to the scheme coupled with an “overheated” construction market rendered the project unfeasible.

It’s understood legal action taken by the West End Community Association over the building’s height also contributed to the change of plans.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/business/qld-business/urban-forest-tower-proposed-for-southbank-scrapped/news-story/7cfe8e77d0b67ede5e13f7c21de1194c

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New curriculum: eco identity, dating and the three Rs
Mindfulness and positive self-talk will be covered

Children will be taught about their “eco identity’’, safe dating and giving clear sexual consent, in a new national curriculum that combines back-to-basics rigour in maths and English with “woke” schoolwork.

Aboriginal perspectives of a white invasion will be taught alongside concepts of a Christian and Western heritage in a more balanced bid to end the “culture wars’’, in the ninth version of the curriculum, published on Monday for classroom teaching from next year.

Respectful relationships will be taught from the first year of school, with teenagers instructed how to clearly give or deny consent to sex, and told about the “role of gender, power, coercion and disrespect in violent or disrespectful relationships”.

Mindfulness and positive self-talk will be covered in the new physical education curriculum, which explores the “eco-identity’’ of students.

Students are taught the virtues of a vegetarian diet – one activity is to prepare a presentation on food that has been “prepared sustainably’’, using local ingredients to cut down on emissions, using vegetarian or vegan dishes or kangaroo instead of beef, and not using single-use plastic for serving. They can use “nature experiences to understand how these activities can promote the development of eco-identity and positive sense of wellbeing’’.

To tackle a scourge of sexual assaults between high school students, teens from the age of 14 will investigate the legal requirements for their state or territory in relation to seeking, giving and refusing consent to sex.

To “enhance the safety and wellbeing of sexual partners’’, students in Years 9 and 10 will learn about “safe dating’’, including how to communicate feelings, respect boundaries and choices, and gain affirmative consent to sexual activity.

History lessons have been made more balanced and relevant to Australian students, with a new “deep time” strand focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and the impact of European arrival, including the concept of an “invasion’’.

“The occupation and colonisation of Australia by the British, under the now overturned doctrine of terra nullius, were experienced by First Nations Australians as an invasion that denied their occupation of, and connection to, country/place,’’ the document states.

Students will learn about the impact of British colonisation on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, “for example, dispossession, dislocation and the loss of lives through frontier conflict, disease, and loss of food sources and medicines, the embrace of some colonial technologies, the practice of colonial religion, and intermarriage’’.

The origins of Australia‘s democracy, and its Christian and Western heritage, will be taught explicitly, along with the diversity of Australian communities through migration.

In Year 10, students must study World War II, as well as a learning strand called Building Modern Australia.

Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt will be covered alongside Aboriginal history and culture, while history students will also learn about the Great Depression, both world wars – including the Western Front Battle of the Somme and the Armistice in World War I – as well as the Holocaust and the Cold War.

Climate change is only mentioned twice in the geography curriculum for Years 9 and 10, with students asked to investigate the “causes of human-induced climate change at the global scale and its impacts on Australia, Bangladesh and/or a Pacific Island country at the national scale’’.

The Coalition and Labor both support the new curriculum, which was signed off by federal, state and territory education ministers last month.

Its release coincides with a Labor Party plan to pay high-achieving school leavers to study to become teachers, following a Coalition pledge to weed out “dud” teachers through a literacy and numeracy test before they start a university teaching degree.

The 2022 curriculum is more clearly written than the 2014 version, and provides more practical outlines and examples of subject content for teachers to use in classrooms, with less jargon.

In English, children must be able to write letters, spell simple words and “experiment’’ with capital letters and full stops in the first year of school, when they are four or five years old.

By the end of Year 3 they should be reading fluently and writing compound sentences.

Civics and citizenship has been simplified for high school students, with more explicit teaching about the origins of Australian democracy, and its Christian and Western heritage.

Maths teaching has been simplified to focus on mastery of mathematical concepts in the early years, with kids in the “foundation year’’ of prep or kindergarten expected to count to 20, instead of 10, and to know the days of the week.

Students must be able to skip-count to 120 and add or subtract numbers to 20 by the end of Year 1, tell the time in Year 2 and recite their times tables in Year 3.

The outmoded digital technologies syllabus has been updated to include cyber security and privacy for the first time.

In high school, maths and science content has been aligned with exam questions for the Program for International Student Assessment, which measures the reading, mathematics and science knowledge of 600,000 15-year-old students across 79 OECD industrialised nations every three years. Australia has plunged to 29th place in mathematics – down from 11th in 2003 – and has slipped from eighth to 15th place in science and from fourth to 16th place in literacy.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which designed the updated curriculum, said it had been developed “with teachers for teachers’’.

ACARA chief executive David de Carvalho said the “more stripped back and teachable curriculum’’ would make teachers’ work easier.

“Teachers will be able to quickly and intuitively find relevant information, and lessons can be more easily planned,’’ he said.

MultiLit director of strategy Jennifer Buckingham, whose PhD research was on effective instruction for struggling readers, welcomed the new focus on teaching children to read and write through phonics – sounding out letters and sounds.

The curriculum has been published as 1.2 million students start sitting for the 2022 NAPLAN test

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/new-curriculum-eco-identity-dating-and-the-three-rs/news-story/4aebde2f0c03e29fd9d623c0506fb3b1

10 May, 2022

Federal election: Top high school graduates to be given $12k if they study teaching under Labor plan

This is pretty dumb. Teaching has long been known as an option of last resort for high school graduates. Getting the brighter graduates with more options into it is going to be a rarity.

It seems, though, that you only have to do a teaching degree to get the money. You are not obliged actually to teach. That might attract some takers. A teaching degree is notorious for low standards but it is probably no more futile than an Arts degree.

Some jobs (mainly in the government) require ANY degree. That's where Arts graduates go at the momnent. A teaching degree could end up the same

Anthony Albanese will on Monday announce the $146.5m plan, saying the incentives will lead to a “brighter future” for students and the nation.

“We want to make sure our kids get the best education they can,” the opposition leader said.

“That means we have to make sure they get the best quality teaching.”

If elected, 1000 students a year who obtain an ATAR of 80 or above will get $10,000 to study an education degree.

They would also get a bonus $2000 if they complete their placements at regional public schools.

Graduates who cash in could reap almost $50,000 over the course of their degree, typically four years, to spend how they please.

Only 3.3 per cent of students with an ATAR over 80 choose to study teaching.

The five-year scheme aims to double the number of high achievers becoming teachers to 3600 a year over the next decade.

Labor’s education spokeswoman, Tanya Plibersek, said lifting teaching standards would help stop the slide in students’ results.

“I want students competing to get into teaching like they do to get into medicine or law,” Ms Plibersek said.

“If we want a better future in Australia, we need a smart, skilled workforce so we can compete for jobs and growth with our neighbours.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/federal-election/federal-election-top-high-school-graduates-to-be-given-12k-if-they-study-teaching-under-labor-plan/news-story/01cc2736bbd3da7a406fe52cd42b72e2

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There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

The minerals needed to make electric car batteries have to be mined, and that produces lots of pollution and other problems

Electric cars, solar panels, large batteries and wind turbines — the technology needed to go green relies on what can be a dirty industry.

"It's absolutely ironic, but to save the planet we are going to need more mines," says Allison Britt, director of mineral resources at government agency Geoscience Australia.

The need for one of the biggest increases in mining the world has ever seen is forcing some tough choices and redrawing old battlelines between environmentalists and miners.

In Tasmania, a mine that's been leaking contaminated water for the past five years wants permission to expand into a wilderness area because the lead, zinc and copper it produces are vital for solar panels, electric cars and wind turbines.

King Island, famed for its high-end produce and rugged beauty, will soon be home to one of the world's largest tungsten mines.

Outside Darwin, an open-cut mine that will produce lithium vital for electric car batteries looks to be already impacting local waterways.

An electric vehicle needs about 200kg of minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium. That's six times more than a petrol-powered car.

A wind turbine needs four times more minerals than a coal-fired power station to generate the same amount of electricity.

King Island tungsten

Not everywhere is the battle to develop critical minerals so fraught.

King Island, off the Northern coast of Tasmania, is famous for its beef and cheese, oysters, kelp and crayfish.

Soon it will be famous for something quite different — one of the world's largest tungsten mines.

Demand for renewable energy and anxiety over China's dominance of the tungsten market will see the King Island mine reopen after 30 years.

It's a test of whether tourism and agriculture can happily exist alongside mining.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-09/renewable-energy-may-require-australian-mining-boom/101034914

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Morrison says schools not expelling gay students, doubles down on religious discrimination act

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says gay students are not being expelled from religious schools, doubling down on re-introducing the failed religious discrimination act (RDA) without extra protections for gay and transgender students.

The government attempted to pass the legislation earlier this year but shelved it after five of its own MPs crossed the floor to vote with Labor and the crossbench on amendments that bolstered the sex discrimination act (SDA) to give transgender students extra protections.

Mr Morrison had promised extra protections for gay students to accompany his religious discrimination bill but has since walked back from the pledge.

Today he said if the Coalition won government, he would introduce the religious discrimination act on its own and amend the sex discrimination act "sequentially".

"We've been having this conversation for about the last four years, and on each occasion it has been presented that apparently students are being expelled each and every day, each and every week, or each and every year," Mr Morrison said.

PM remains firm over religious discrimination bill
The Prime Minister says a re-elected Coalition government would push ahead with its long-promised religious discrimination law without making changes to protect LGBTQI children at the same time.

"There is no evidence [of that] because the religious schools themselves don't wish to do that. They don't wish to do it. This is an issue that is actually not occurring in these schools."

When pressed to reveal how much time there would be between the two bills, Mr Morrison would not specify. "They are different issues and that is my view," he said. "They're both important issues and the government's position is they'll be dealt with sequentially."

Earlier this year, just before the legislation was introduced to parliament, a Brisbane school was criticised for sending a letter to parents demanding they sign a contract affirming students identify as their birth gender and that homosexuality was "sinful".

The contract was withdrawn a few days later after backlash from parents and the wider community.

At the time, the Prime Minister said he did not support the controversial contract and reiterated his promise to protect gay children from discrimination.

Moderate Liberals want the government to pursue the religious discrimination act and changes to the sex discrimination act at the same time to protect vulnerable students.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese today pointed to a letter in which Mr Morrison promised to protect gay students at the same time. "I'm astonished he has walked away from that," Mr Albanese said. "We need to protect people from discrimination, whether its religious discrimination or on the basis of sexuality.

"If people don't think some young people are discriminated against and vilified, then that just does not reflect reality."

While being questioned by journalists today, Mr Morrison took aim at Labor for not supporting the legislation in its original form, rather than admitting his own party was split on the issue.

"I'm quite determined," Mr Morrison said. "People have learnt that about me. I don't give up on things. "I had hoped to pursue these issues in a bipartisan way. I'd very much hoped to do that. "But the issue was hijacked and the outcome was thwarted … it was hijacked by the Labor Party and the crossbench."

The Prime Minister was asked if he thought the moderate Liberal MPs who crossed the floor had changed their minds, or if he had written them off because they were under threat in their seats from independents and Labor.

"The issues that they were addressing were not related to the religious discrimination act; they were related to the sexual discrimination act, and we should be able to see those, we should be able to pursue them sequentially, as we set out," Mr Morrison said. "That's the government's policy. There's no change to the government's view here."

Moderate Liberal MP Katie Allen, who was one of the five Liberals who crossed the floor earlier this year, today would not rule out doing the same again, if there was no protection for gay and transgender students. "I will be very clear: I have a very strong view on this and I will not be changing my position," she said. "I believe that you can protect religious freedom and protect gay and trans students at the same time."

"That's the thing about political negotiations, it is always a negotiation and I will stick with my position, because I believe in the protection of gay and trans students."

Federal Labor supports new religious discrimination laws but Mr Albanese has not given a specific time frame for any accompanying protections for gay and transgender students.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-08/scott-morrison-says-schools-not-expelling-gay-students/101047808

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Interest rates: Big issue for the Federal election?

It’s one thing for the Reserve Bank board to set monetary policy independent of government. It’s entirely something else when the board intervenes to raise interest rates in the middle of an election campaign, especially when only a few months ago it insisted such a rise could not be justified before 2023.

The consequences for mortgage-holders on variable-rate home loans are immediate as banks rush to pass on the rise, and opposition leader Anthony Albanese, and shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers, haven’t wasted time in pinning the blame on Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg. Their attack is simple: the rate rise happened on the government’s watch, and it destroys the economic credibility of the Prime Minister and Treasurer.

Yet the Reserve Bank governor, Phillip Lowe, effectively gave the Coalition’s economic management a ringing endorsement. ‘During that (pandemic) period and especially during 2020, the national health situation was precarious, the economic outlook was dire, and it was clouded by a lot of uncertainty,’ Mr Lowe said. ‘In those unprecedented times, (the board) judged that the economic damage from the pandemic was likely to require that interest rates remain low in Australia for years. As things have turned out, though, the economy has been much more resilient than we expected. Which is clearly very welcome news.’ Indeed.

Just as is the national unemployment rate falling to four per cent, and projections of the Australian economy growing by four per cent (repeat after us, Mr Albanese, four per cent) are good news. Furthermore, the inflationary pressures the rate rise addresses are largely due to fallout from the Wuhan virus and the Russian war on Ukraine, and labour shortages, and are mild compared to the United Sates and other leading economies.

Instead of cringing under Labor’s cynically false attacks, the government should be counter-attacking with confidence. For a start, Mr Morrison and Mr Frydenberg know home mortgage rates are still historically low, especially compared to former treasurer Paul Keating’s 17 per cent monster in ‘the recession we had to have’. They can highlight statistical full employment being reached under their stewardship and, of course, that millions of jobs were saved by the short-term pandemic emergency intervention that was JobKeeper. And they can argue that only the Coalition can be trusted to pursue restraint on both sides of the inflationary equation: prices and wages.

On that last point, it wasn’t Mr Albanese’s policy launch – with the Sky News straplines at the bottom of the television screen giving more detail about his policies than did the Labor leader – that should alarm fiscal conservatives. Rather, it was his starring at a massive union rally in Brisbane the following day, where he surrounded himself with union heavies and Labor luvvies, all backing the ACTU’s shrill demand for ‘real wage justice’.

Still a son of the far Left despite his window-dressing, Mr Albanese as prime minister won’t preach wage restraint and risk being condemned as anti-union. His heart wouldn’t be in it. Even if Mr Albanese did want to show a bit of fiscal backbone, the ACTU wouldn’t let him, the militant unions wouldn’t let him, and his own caucus wouldn’t let hm. Inflation hurts but, as far as the Left is concerned, we can have it all, including a renewal of the price-wage spiral that so blighted the Australian economy and spurred unemployment in the 1970s.

To be truly effective in countering Labor, however, the Coalition needs belatedly to be honest with the electorate, and admit the tough times aren’t over. The next government will have to rein in, and cut, spending as well as pay back massive debt. It needs to be prepared to hold real wage growth in check. It must acknowledge growth alone, to raise enough tax revenue to fulfil every single item on electoral wish lists, is Alice in Wonderland fantasy.

If Mr Morrison and Mr Frydenberg can do this, they deserve re-election. Even if they fall short, they can then honourably set the tests under which their successors will be judged in three years’ time. This week is crunch time: if the government can win the economic management battle against a Labor leader who, on the campaign’s first day, exposed his economic ignorance, and a Labor party whose alternative economic policy is little more than one-liners and thought bubbles, it still has a chance of pulling this election off.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/crunch-time-3/

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Alan Jones says Australia will struggle to pay for roads, schools and hospitals as the government signs up to net-zero climate change policies

Alan Jones claims it will be an 'economic suicide note' if Australia continues to commit to net-zero climate change policies.

The veteran broadcaster cast the grim warning during his nightly program on the digital streaming service ADH TV on Wednesday.

'Going net zero will cost Australia,' the conservative media personality said. 'I've called it a national economic suicide note.'

Both The Liberals and Nationals agreed to an unlegislated target of net-zero emissions by 2050, following tense negotiations ahead of the COP26 UN climate change conference in late 2021.

Labor is aiming for a 43 per cent emissions cut by 2030, exceeding the government’s forecast figure of 35 per cent, but falling well short of a 75 per cent pledge by the Greens.

Jones said he 'hoped' residents in the Hunter Valley or 'resource-rich' Western Australia were 'making their voices heard' as the net-zero policy would essentially phase out coal.

'If net zero becomes etched into the national psyche, which I fear it has thanks to weak-kneed politicians on both sides, their jobs will be gone,' he continued.

The broadcaster then begins questioning what the country would be able to pay for in the near future as both Liberal and Labor 'stick to going net zero'.

'How do we build better roads? How do we build more schools and hospitals? How do we afford to pay for those on welfare? How do we afford better conditions in aged care?' he says.

Jones argues that Australians forgot that exporting resources and minerals 'pays for nearly all of this stuff'.

'Politicians who've never read a book or a piece of legislation are trying to eradicate coal from the Australian economy, thereby creating a poorer Australia.'

After discussing the suggested impacts of net zero emissions in the Hunter Valley, Jones turns his attention to North Queensland, where there is a high proportion of jobs in the resources sector.

He cites research conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs that suggests ending resource-related projects already in development would 'stop the creation of 125,000 jobs' in the region.

The IPA's report also alleges that '274billion in unrealised economy activity' and 'over 478,000 jobs' would be lost across the country if Australia heads towards net zero.

'The depressing thing is that most major parties are on board with this nation-destroying nonsense,' Jones added.

Jones' comments come as Nationals senator Matt Canavan declared a net-zero target 'dead' as Prime Minister Scott Morrison reaffirmed his party’s pledge as 'absolute policy'.

Mr Morrison on Wednesday defended the government’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, following comments made by a coalition candidate who described it as not binding.

Senator Canavan went further, telling the ABC: 'Net zero is dead anyway. Boris Johnson said he is pausing it, Germany is building coal and gas infrastructure, Italy is reopening coal-fired power plants – it’s all over.'

Colin Boyce, the LNP candidate for the Queensland seat of Flynn, labelled the commitment 'flexible' and noted 'wiggle room' within it, a view Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce described as 'completely understandable'.

The comments prompted Labor to demand the prime minister clarify the government’s position.

'Scott Morrison has a job to do today. Is net zero a firm commitment of the government? Or is it simply a flexible guideline as the candidate for Flynn has said?' opposition energy spokesman Chris Bowen told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday.

Mr Bowen said the coalition was saying one thing on climate change in seats such as Hinkler in Queensland, and another in Higgins in metropolitan Melbourne and Queens Park in eastern Sydney.

'They want to be on both sides of the stream – well they can’t be.'

Mr Morrison claimed Mr Boyce was talking about the pathway to net zero, rather than the strength of the pledge. 'He wasn’t talking about the commitment itself, he has clarified that,' he told reporters in Townsville. 'Our commitment to net zero by 2050 is a commitment of the Australian government that I made in Glasgow. It is the government’s absolute policy.'

Mr Boyce earlier said the net-zero pledge would not be legislated, although moderate Liberal MP Dave Sharma has previously described it as binding.

'It leaves us wiggle room as we proceed into the future. Morrison’s statement that he has made is not binding,' Mr Boyce told the ABC on Tuesday.

Mr Joyce acknowledged the government was on a pathway to net zero, but insisted major export sectors such as coal could not be exited immediately.

'We have acknowledged that, along that pathway, it is not a lineal form,' he told reporters in Shepparton while campaigning in central Victoria.

'We understand that for this nation’s economy to prevail, we cannot just step aside from our second biggest export or our third biggest export – that would be completely and utterly economically irresponsible.'

Asked whether Labor’s own climate targets were designed to appeal to voters in a number of marginal seats, Mr Bowen said the party’s targets would be sold nationwide.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10783873/Alan-Jones-says-Australia-struggle-pay-roads-schools-hospitals-net-zero-policy.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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May 09, 2022

It's time to vote for change from the Greenie paralysis

Viv Forbes

Politics has drifted a long way left since the days of Menzies and Fadden. Starting with Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Don Chipp, and Bob Brown, there has developed a monotonous uniformity in mainstream Australian politics.

Over the years, a green slime has infected all major parties – they now differ in details, but not in principle. This greening of politics has reached the stage when a politician like Malcolm Turnbull has trouble deciding whether to join the Greens, the ALP, or the Leafy-green Liberals.

The green revolution started with support for preserving cuddly wildlife, then progressed to ‘No-Dams’, ‘Lock-the Gate’, and ‘Save-the Reef’.

Then they added ‘global warming’ to their political agenda. When global temperatures did not obey their scary narrative, they changed to ‘climate alarm’ and added ‘wild weather’ to support their ‘kill coal, cars and cattle’ agenda. Then came Saint Greta and her Extinction Rebellion. All these scares were designed to panic people into supporting a deep-green anti-industry mindset. Even their ‘Build-Back-Better’ means ‘Build-Back-Green’.

Then the Covid scare created a Brave New World controlled by a National Cabinet armed with never-ending jabs and a lock-down/track-and-trace mentality. They have learned that most people can be locked down, spied upon, and rationed. Climate and energy lockdowns are now discussed behind green doors. There is now little difference in principle between Liberals, Labor, and Greens – they all promote emissions targets, climate alarm, and endless green slogans.

Bowing continually to United Nations dictates and constant ABC/Greens/Climate Council propaganda, their Net Zero policies have multiplied electricity costs, harmed processing and manufacturing industries while defacing our grasslands, farms, and forests with wind towers, solar ‘farms’, access tracks and spider webs of power lines that carry no power for much of the time. Now they propose to pollute our coastal waters with these unnecessary and unreliable industrial monstrosities.

It is time to vote for real change – use the power of preferential voting to break Liberal/Labor/Green Power by ranking all parties and candidates and put the greenest last.

Check out Topher Field on how to use Preferential Voting to get the best candidate elected:

Libs and ALP are both on the nose. It looks unlikely that either of them will hold a majority of seats. But if voters are not disciplined in how they vote, a bunch of deep greens posing as independents will grab seats and hold the balance of power. They will naturally support a radical Green/ALP coalition.

With thoughtful and disciplined behaviour at the ballot box (for both Senate and House of Reps) we can stop this green revolution.

First job – identify the worst candidates and parties. Preference them last on both House of Reps and Senate ballot papers when you vote.

The most dangerous candidates in this election are The Sneaky Greens – they pose as ‘independents’ but are being supported by climate crazy millionaires and, if elected, will reappear in their deep green uniforms. Unless you know better, put all ‘independents’, Climate 200, and GetUp! supported candidates last.

Have a look here and here to see what they plan.

Just above them put the declared Greens and their allies in the ALP. Then select all Liberals above all of the Green/ALP alliance.

Then focus on who should get your top votes. Choose your numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 etc candidates from the Freedom-Friendly-Minor-Parties giving preference to whoever you like from the parties below:

Campbell Newman, Topher Field, and the Liberal Democrats
Pauline Hanson, George Christensen, and the PHON Candidates
Clive Palmer, Craig Kelly, and United Australia Candidates
Bob Katter and Katter Australia Party
Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, and National Party Candidates
Number every square all the way down to Unknowns and the climate crazy ‘independents’.

For the Senate (which may have a large complicated white ballot paper) it is safer and easier to number every square above the line, using the same party ranking rules as above.

It requires discipline to save Australia at this late stage.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/its-time-to-vote-for-change/

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Covid Qld: Medical specialists challenge state’s vaccine mandate

A group of specialist doctors and GPs have become the first medical practitioners in Queensland to launch a legal challenge to the Chief Health Officer’s Covid-19 vaccination mandate.

With no end in sight to vaccination mandates, the 11 doctors will ask a judge to reverse the direction requiring them to be fully vaccinated to work in hospitals and other healthcare settings.

They claim it has affected their ability to continue to practise as medical practitioners.

Their Supreme Court judicial review application follows court challenges to vaccination mandates by police, nurses, ambulance officers, teachers, childcare centre workers and prison officers, still before the court.

The group includes gastroenterologist Dr Andrew McIntyre, obstetrician gynaecologist Dr Lucas McLindon, child psychiatrist Associate Professor Peter Parry, radiologist Dr Sally Johnstone, neurosurgeon Dr David Johnson and anaesthetist, Dr Paloma Van Zyl.

It also includes GPs Dr Camilo Guerra and Dr Andrew Robert Angus, an unnamed GP, an unnamed paediatrician and one other doctor whose health professions could not be confirmed.

Dr McIntyre, who has not worked since December because of the vaccination mandate, said he was unvaccinated and the majority of other doctors involved in the claim were unvaccinated.

He said some of the doctors involved were fully vaccinated and still working, having felt they had to do so in order to keep jobs, but all were opposed to the Covid-19 vaccination mandate.

“We are not anti-vaxxers. We are anti the Covid-19 response,’’ he said of the group challenging the mandate.

“The whole emergency declaration and mandate needs to be heavily reviewed.’’

The application says each doctor has suffered a detriment to their ability to continue to practise as medical practitioners, which has been removed, limited or entirely prevented as a result of the direction.

It claims Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard did not have jurisdiction or authorisation to make the March 12 public health direction requiring workers in healthcare settings, including public and private hospitals, to be fully vaccinated.

The application, filed by law firm NR Barbi, alleges there was no probative evidence or other material to justify the decision, which it claims was an improper exercise of power.

“This group of doctors are suffering financially. I do know some are fairly desperate, financially,’’ Dr McIntyre said.

He said he had been forced into involuntary retirement by the mandate but he had been able to get other vaccinated doctors to continue working in his Sunshine Coast day surgery.

“I’ve had a huge loss of income. I’m mandated out. I can’t work. It’s forced retirement,’’ Dr McIntyre said.

“Previously I did very specialised procedures at private hospitals, but I can’t now and those services are no longer available at some of those private hospitals.’’

Dr McIntyre said one of the other specialists involved in the legal case had offered very specialist services that only a few doctors could do.

Some of the doctors who had already had Covid-19 had a short-term exemption from vaccination, while others who were unvaccinated had taken long service leave.

He said there were up to 40 other doctors who supported the legal challenge, including some financially, but who were not prepared to put their names to it, for fear of reprisal.

Dr McIntyre said the health practitioner regulation agency, AHPRA, had threatened to deregister anyone who said anything contrary to the government’s vaccination narrative.

“We feel we need a proper debate and the only way to get a proper debate is to go to the Supreme Court. It’s a pretty sad situation,’’ Dr McIntyre said.

Dr McIntyre said he and his daughters have had Covid-19 and one of his daughters, a radiographer, had also been “mandated out’’, but was now working in another business.

Dr McIntyre said he would like to see a Royal Commission into the government handling of the Covid-19 response.

Lawyer Natalie Strijland, who represents the doctors, said they were all intelligent, articulate, clever medical professionals.

“We are lucky to live in a country where persons affected by these decisions have the legal right to seek a judicial review determined by a competent court.’’

A Queensland Health spokesperson said Covid-19 continued to pose a risk to the community and disproportionately affected healthcare workers and health support staff.

“The vaccine mandate for healthcare workers is in place to ensure health services can continue operating in as safe a manner as possible,’’ the spokesperson said.

“It is a measured approach, balancing the safety of staff, patients, visitors and the wider community.

“Any changes to existing mandates and/or restrictions will be communicated to the public.’’

Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said she could not comment on the matter before the court, but said: “As we have throughout the pandemic, we will follow the health advice because this is what has kept Queenslanders safe.’’

She said the Government continued to encourage Queenslanders to be vaccinated.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/police-courts-qld/covid-qld-medical-specialists-challenge-states-vaccine-mandate/news-story/42f152d9d53270b7723bf0e88657a1e4

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A lucky escape from abortion

Brisbane mother was told during pregnancy that her little Brianna had a terminal brain condition and was advised to terminate

“I was devastated, but I am her mum and it is my job to look after her, so there was no way I was terminating. Whatever the future held for her, we would deal with it together. From then I was referred to a palliative care team to plan for her death,” she said.

“There was a chance that Brianna would live only a few hours, so in that moment when she was reached to me, I wanted to hold on to her forever and freeze the moment.”

The mother of six says that every time she looks at the photo she can’t control her emotions and tears flow.

“The doctors were wrong. Brianna had been misdiagnosed with Pontocerebellar hypoplasia. She is perfectly healthy and is the cheekiest, bossiest little girl you could meet.

Ms De Regt has been pregnant eight times and has lost two babies, one just before her pregnancy with Brianna.

“I went into that pregnancy having lost baby Noah at 20 weeks. I had to deliver him in a ward that had mothers who had just birthed healthy babies. That was tough,” she said.

Even with the dire prognosis she was given for Brianna, the mother vowed to keep positive and did everything possible to have a healthy baby. I put affirmations on the wall of the hospital when in labour that said You are Loved and You are Strong. During pregnancy I meditated, did acupuncture, saw a naturopath and changed my diet to green juices and healthy foods. I tried so hard for her to be born healthy.”

Following Brianna’s miracle turnaround Ms De Regt was pregnant with twins, Sadly, one of those twins died early in the pregnancy.

Ms De Regt is a warrior mum, never having had any pain relief for any birth. “My pregnancy song with Brianna was Bob Marley’s Every Little Thing’s Going To Be All Right and that is how I try to live.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/mothers-day-picture-special-the-first-moment-i-laid-eyes-on-baby/news-story/526e23ff3acbd55591911cc9ced12f09

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Inclusion put before fairness and safety, say exercise science professors

A trio of exercise science professors have called out major Australian sporting organisations — including the AFL and Cricket Australia — for prioritising inclusion over “fairness and safety” in transgender policy decisions they believe could destroy the integrity of women’s sport.

The now retired academics Helen Parker, Beth Hands and Elizabeth Rose authored two papers, published in the International Journal of Sport and Society in January, which argue for the “protected female category in sport” and say the existing biological research has been ignored by major Australian sports. This showed that male athletes have unfair physical advantages in sports when competing head-to-head against females.

In March the academics, who taught at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, wrote a series of letters to the leaders of nine major sports — including Cricket Australia, the AFL, Hockey Australia, Tennis Australia and Netball Australia — urging their boards to undertake a review of their transgender policies in the light of the readily available biological evidence presented in their papers.

Their first peer-reviewed paper addressed the “biological perspectives, fairness and physical safety in women’s sport” and their second covers the “implications for female competition integrity” and delving into the issues that they believe could undermine female sport.

Parker, who was also the first female commissioner on the Western Australian Football Commission, says they have been surprised to have not heard back from a single sport since submitting the information, which draws on the research of world-leading sports scientists and biologists.

“I’m concerned that there hasn’t been an acknowledgment that this information has come through,” Parker said. “My request was that the board take on the information and discuss the issue of trans women in sport at least at board level again, and ask: ‘Is our policy of transgender participation appropriate now that we have this biological information?’

“I hope that the rise of elite trans women athletes like US swimmer Lia Thomas and the UK cyclist Emily Bridges is really a wake-up call and alert sports boards to really look at what they‘re trying to achieve in terms of advancing girls and women in their sport.

“If they are going down this transgender inclusion role, then they really have not only dropped the ball, they’ve basically made a balloon out of the issue and just let it float away. It looks as if they’re not serious in their custodianship of their code and advancing women’s sport.”

Since Thomas’s historic win at the US College championships, which now has her aiming for the Paris Olympics, followed by Bridges’s bid to qualify for the Commonwealth Games this July, several world sporting bodies have begun working on policies on the inclusion of elite trans athletes.

Asked what their policies are, Swimming Australia said they had asked FINA to come up with a ruling for all countries while the world cycling body, the UCI, moved to block Bridges from continuing to compete, preventing her from qualifying for the Wales women’s cycling team.

The sports professors believe that while trans children should be free to choose what category to play in, post-puberty young athletes should be limited to a category of their biological gender not their social identity, particularly in the interest of “safety” in contact sports because science proves males’ strength and power becomes too great.

In their papers, the sports scientists singled out governing bodies such as the AFL, stating they had “wilfully or naively overlooked, ignored or dismissed” published sports science literature, like the report that instigated World Rugby’s ban on transwomen playing “female rugby” and its decision to prioritise the safety of players.

“One would expect that other football codes in which players collide and tackle would take notice. However, it is intriguing that the 2020 Gender Diversity Policy of the AFL does not appear to be cognisant of any of the biological research,” they write.

“In advocating TW eligibility in its female code, the sport’s policy clearly discriminates against natal female players in presenting two facts of biology as being myths.”

“These promoted myths are; ‘Transgender players are a safety risk on the field’ and ‘Transgender women players will dominate cisgender women players because of testosterone (AFL, 2020, 4).”

“Extensive research cited in both World Rugby (2020) and UK Sports Councils (2021) policies debunk the first ‘myth’ and endocrinology research by Sonksen et al. (2018) and Coleman (2017) showed that testosterone is the androgynous hormone that from puberty especially builds muscle, skeletal, cardiovascular tissues in males to develop athletic capacity exceeding female capacity.”

Under the title “Level Playing Field”, the women point to the research from experts such as Dr Emma Hilton, a prize-winning developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, whose research details how trans women athletes will always have a physical advantage over their female counterparts.

“So big is the gap, there are 9000 males between 100m world record holders Usain Bolt and FloJo (former women’s 100m champion Florence Griffith Joyner),” Hilton has said. “So early does the gap emerge, the (Rio) female 100m Olympic champion, Elaine Thompson, is slower than the 14-year-old schoolboy record holder.”

The professors say that while the argument “often advanced” by advocates of “inclusion” is that as there is “no true level playing field” in any sporting competition because of different physiques, skills, and drive among athletes, adding the male biology to the mix creates insurmountable advantages.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/inclusion-put-before-fairness-and-safety-say-exercise-science-professors/news-story/94782e274badf1829b3b6481f42d0727

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Activists masquerading as educators

The recent news from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) that fewer and fewer students are choosing to study higher mathematics at Secondary school is yet another black mark against our education system.

Unfortunately, things are hardly better in Literature.

Victoria, which leads the way in progressive education, has seen students ditching literature in their droves. Over the last three years, the subject has dropped outside of the top 20 VCE subjects, with students preferring to study arguably less useful subjects such as ‘Food and Technology’ and ‘Media’.

This isn’t surprising given that the VCE’s booklist for literature in 2022 is heavily weighted toward modern texts that reveal a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with Marxism, Identity Politics, and Critical Race Theory. One-third of all texts on offer were published within the last 20 years, neglecting the remaining 5,000 years’ worth of literary history.

Students should be reading books by world-renowned authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell. Instead, they are reading about ‘power, gender, and obsession’ in Jeanette Winterson’s racy novel The Passion. Oscar Wilde is overlooked in favour of Shelagh Delaney’s exploration of ‘sexuality, homophobia, and racism’ in her production A Taste of Honey. Then there is Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home from the Wars that challenges ‘binary understandings of power’. Books like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which plumbs the depths of the human condition, have been replaced with Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise denouncing the ‘abuses of capitalism’.

When great books manage to make the cut, they are taught through an ideological lens. For instance, students studying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will look at the ‘obsessions of Georgian England’ and the ‘emergence of consumer culture’. In Tim Winton’s non-fiction work The Boy Behind the Curtain, ‘colonisation, capitalism, and politics’ are emphasised as key themes alongside ‘masculinity, gender, and family’.

Literature should not be used to send a political message to students. When learning is replaced with ideology, it undermines education. The study of literature should be about teaching students to think critically, not indoctrinating them with a progressive worldview.

Australian literature is notably absent from the 2022 VCE booklist.

While one-third of the texts were written by Australians, only half were actually set in Australia and the majority of these were poems. This reflects a dubious trend in education in which the idea of a global identity is promoted while the idea of an Australian identity is actively questioned.

Students should be reading classics like The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, or one of Banjo Paterson’s famous poems. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, which looks at the birth of a distinctly Australian identity in the lead-up to Federation, also deserves to be on the list. Even films such as Ladies in Black are of value because they address the rich cultural impact of immigration from Europe in the wake of the second world war. These works are all listed on the Institute of Public Affairs’ Australian Cannon and are classic pieces of literature that construct a vivid picture of the Australian way of life.

The problem is far greater than the booklist itself. Activists masquerading as educators have infiltrated Australian schools. They have successfully been destroying the pre-existing model of education and imposing their own. The choice of texts in this year’s booklist for Victorian students is an undisguised exercise in social engineering which robs students of their cultural heritage.

Victorians are being sold short.

Students from Queensland and New South Wales will read many of the great books missing from Victoria’s VCE program. For instance, the QCE literature booklist offers texts like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Queensland students have a much broader range of top-quality works that does not include pointed summaries pushing a progressive agenda like in Victoria. The New South Wales HSC English program, which also involves the study of literature, looks at Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Short Stories by Henry Lawson, and Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This comes after a concerted effort in New South Wales to overhaul the Year 11 and 12 English syllabuses to include more ‘classic’ texts in 2017.

The solution for Victoria is simple. Give students the opportunity to read works of substance that look at the universal human experience rather than focusing solely on the issues faced by minority groups. More students would study literature if more classics with relatable life lessons were on the booklist, as is the case in New South Wales and Queensland.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/activists-masquerading-as-educators/

Liberalism is based, at least in part, on the idea that we should be free to follow our own will and that anything that limits our will is an unjust constraint that should be remedied by political action or by personal empowerment or by technological innovation. The liberal faith is that there will be "progress" toward these ends.

This is not a belief system that encourages individuals to recognise that there are constraints built into the nature of reality that we must acknowledge and prudently consider when making our life choices. Instead, the mindset of many of the women that Kevin Samuels interviewed was that a decent person should be rewarded by getting what they wanted. These women did not consider what they might contribute to a relationship; what men might be looking for in a woman; what stage of life they were at; where they stood in terms of attractiveness; and what it was realistic to expect of men in terms of employment status or finances or looks.

And here's the thing. As a generalisation women are not meant to be good at providing the reality principle. What we look for from women is emotional warmth, a talent for homemaking, the nurture of young infants, and some of the more appealing soft and sensitive qualities of the human personality. It is mostly a responsibility of men to provide the stable structure within which the feminine qualities can successfully operate and long-term, faithful relationships can be secured.

Men do not have the same authority in society to carry out this responsibility that they once had. What we can do, however, is to try to model a masculine personality which is tough enough to hold people (including ourselves) to account and to insist on the reality principle, even in a culture that sets itself against the idea that our lives should be ordered to an objective good and to a reality that exists outside of our own will and desires.

In the meantime, the chaos of modern relationships is likely to get worse

Is he right? Are women not good at being realistic in their lives? I would have thought that women are the supreme realists and that it is men who get lost in abstractions

I have had a few comments on Mark's ideas previously

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Albo plots against Australia’s self-employed

There’s one seemingly small ‘bit’ in Labor’s election policy that should scare the hell out of Australia’s two million-or-so self-employed independent contractors.

Put simply, Albanese’s Labor intends to close us down.

Sound extreme? The ALP Secure Jobs Plan (one of the few clearly stated policies) says:

‘Labor will extend the powers of the Fair Work Commission to include ‘employee-like’ forms of work…’ Labor intends to attack ‘…new forms of work such as gig work.’

It’s clear what this is about. The history is known. The ‘justification’ Labor uses is well documented. The motivation is clear and the self-interested parties to whom Albanese must kowtow are obvious.

What Albanese plans to do is invent new law that says that self-employed people are a ‘little bit’ an employee, like being ‘a little bit pregnant’. It’s complete nonsense. It defies common sense, but whoever said that politics is about common sense?

If introduced, such laws would attack, even smash, the incomes of people who choose to be their own boss via self-employment.

We know this will be the result because this is what happened in California in early 2020. California introduced a law called AB5. The political spin was that it would ‘protect’ self-employed people. Except it was a job killer which hit the most vulnerable self-employed people. Think of single mums running their own hairdressing business from home … closed down!

There are thousands of examples. Large numbers of Californian self-employed people have had to leave California to continue earning an income. IT contractors, virtual assistants, and self-employed truckies are just some examples.

Way back in 1996, the United Kingdom created a ‘little bit pregnant/employee’ independent contractor law that’s been ‘asleep’ for a while and rarely used. With the introduction of drive-sharing, the UK transport union decided to use this law to declare that Uber drivers are a ‘little-bit’ employees but still independent contractors. It’s thrown common law into chaos in the UK.

In the most recent Australian High Court ruling on employee versus independent contracting (2022) the Court has, however, declared that the UK-type laws are not part of Australian law. This is why Albanese and his Labor crew will need to invent new law.

Labor’s policy is to do this in the name of ‘secure’ work. Labor says that ‘insecure’ work is increasing and a major problem. Labor has been caught out running a beat-up on this and their claim is not supported by the facts. Casual work has actually declined. The size of the self-employed workforce is stable, even down a little as a percentage of the total workforce.

The Albanese plan is entirely a repeat of the disastrous Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal introduced by the 2012 Gillard Labor government. It took until 2016 for it to be fully implemented. When it got rolling, it was about to put 50,000 self-employed truckies out of business. The Small Business Ombudsman said it was totally dodgy. The High Court said that constitutionally it was potentially suspect just before the Turnbull government repealed the law in 2017, thereby saving those jobs.

Labor’s and the unions’ near-hysteria on the ‘evil’ gig economy is silly. Research by the Victorian Labor government showed that only 0.19 per cent of the Australian workforce earned their full-time income through gig work. For everyone else in gig work, it’s top-up income. The alleged ‘crisis’ call by Labor is a smokescreen for something else.

Further, the International Labour Organisation, a United Nations body, declared in 2006 that national laws should not interfere in commercial relationships. Independent contractors operate through the use of commercial contracts. That’s how ‘we’ work. This is the basis for the Australian Independent Contractors Act which provides core protections for independent contractors. And that Act requires that independent contractors should not be paid less than employees.

So here is what Labor promises with an Albanese-led government. They are determined to create a law to harm independent contractors. To do this they will need to do a range of things.

They need to copy the Californian laws that have ripped apart the livelihoods of huge numbers of people. They need to create the common law chaos that’s happening in the UK.

They need to go against Australia’s international obligations under ILO labour law principles and ignore, or somehow get around, constitutional issues on this matter.

They need to reintroduce the anti-self-employed truckie laws but apply these to every independent contractor in Australia, thus threatening the jobs of some two million self-employed people.

Effectively, Albanese is running a policy to prop up a declining union movement.

With union membership down to 9 per cent of the private-sector workforce, unions are running dead in the water. And they are looking for excuses and someone or something to blame. For Albanese’s Labor the ‘solution’ is to attack the jobs and incomes of self-employed people.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/albo-plots-against-australias-self-employed

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Facebook deliberately blocked Australian government and health care pages last year: report

The social media platform Facebook deliberately blocked pages of Australian government and health care services accounts last year as part of its effort to fight the passage of the media bargaining code, the Wall Street Journal has reported, citing whistleblowers and internal documents.

Based on Facebook documents as well as testimony filed to US and Australian authorities, whistleblowers claim that the platform, owned by Meta, “deliberately created an overly broad and sloppy process to take down pages”.

Legislation for the world-first media bargaining code, which requires platforms to reimburse Australian media companies for news content they share, was opposed by the US-based companies such as Facebook and Google.

Immediately after the final legislation was passed in Canberra in February 2021 Facebook blocked Australian media pages for a matter of days. At the time, Facebook said the inclusion of government and hospital sites was “inadvertent”.

The Facebook documents were submitted by whistleblower complaints filed with the US Department of Justice and the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission. They were also shared with members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal reported.

At the time, content on Facebook pages from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, News Corp newspapers such as The Australian and The Herald Sun and all ABC content were made unavailable.

The effort extended as well to pages for local governments and medical authorities.

Facebook disputed the conclusions of the WSJ report.

“The documents in question clearly show that we intended to exempt Australian government Pages from restrictions in an effort to minimise the impact of this misguided and harmful legislation,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone, referring to the media bargaining code.

“When we were unable to do so as intended due to a technical error, we apologised and worked to correct it. Any suggestion to the contrary is categorically and obviously false.”

The Facebook documents, seen by the WSJ, were filed as complaints with the US Department of Justice and the ACCC on behalf of a Facebook employee who worked on the project by Whistleblower Aid, a Washington, DC-based non-profit.

“Facebook maintained a chokehold on the channels the Australian government and key community groups use to communicate with the public,” said Andrew Bakaj, who is representing the anonymous whistleblowers.

“When its interests were threatened, Facebook didn’t hesitate to squeeze. Hard.”

The whistleblowers claim that Facebook took “deliberate steps to hide key information about plans for the takedown even from its own employees,” according to a statement from the group.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/facebook-deliberately-blocked-australian-government-and-health-care-sites-last-year-report-20220506-p5aj0u.html

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Wishy washy "conservatives"

James Allan

This past Friday night, Australia’s best legal organisation, the Samuel Griffith Society, was having its yearly conference in Sydney and our first night speaker was none other than Mark Latham. His speech was a tour de force, aimed squarely at the NSW Liberal party. Listeners didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as Mr Latham went through chapter and verse of the failings of the NSW Libs – and to be abundantly clear I mean the failings solely in terms of having caved in to wokeness, identity politics and the new religion of ‘diversity’ (which is just new clothes for the old affirmative action and quotas religion). Any conservative who listened to Latham would never again say that New South Wales has the best state government in the country. Heck, I suspect many would find it tough ever to vote for these virtue-signalling Libs In Name Only whatever the alternatives on offer.

Let me give you just some of Latham’s examples. But be warned, it’s better to read what follows on an empty stomach. Who out there knew that NSW has the fastest falling school academic results in the world? They do. You know, things like basic maths, writing, reading, grammar. But at least, mocked Latham, ‘the NSW Cabinet is fully versed in the new LGBTIQAP alphabet’. (And I hope I got those letters correct and that my computer didn’t auto-correct or something.) Latham mentioned the many complaints his office received from parents about the Umina Beach Public School, for instance, and its running of ‘a gender fluidity class for its Year 2 students, telling seven-year-old boys they can be girls, and vice versa’. Well, we know how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would deal with that. But not in NSW. Latham pointed out that the reaction of the National party Education Minister (yep, National party???) was to defend the school and praise the implementing teachers. Sort of beggars belief doesn’t it?

Relatedly Latham pointed out that last year the Upper House Education Committee he chaired recommended to the Perrottet government that where gender issues have arisen for a child at any NSW government school, the parents must have an automatic right to be told what’s happening. Somehow making the audience laugh when most of us wanted to barf, Latham recounted how Premier Perrotet (the supposed conservative) ‘not only rejected this [recommendation], but said that the children themselves have a legal right to tell the school to keep their parents in the dark’. Can that possibly be true, I asked myself? I’d spend every dollar I had to keep my kids out of schools like that. And I’d stick pins in my eyes before I voted for a party like that.

There were plenty more examples of the same sort of ‘capture’ by the forces of stupidity and wokeness. Rainbow cake-cutting and flag-raising ceremonies. Training modules in reconciliation, critical race theory and degendered language. ‘Safe spaces’ for Depart-ment of Education aboriginal staff. (I actually think it’s the kids in the schools who need the safe spaces from the curriculum and some of the teachers.)

Then there were the examples of Matt Kean’s turning of the NSW electricity grid upside down. (Blackouts, here you come, baby!) And Mark, using data supplied by the parliamentary library, pointed out that Minister Kean’s carbon abatement program will (on their generous presuppositions, I’d add) reduce global surface temperatures by 0.00055 degrees Celsius. And wait for it – that temperature reduction of basically zero is over the next century. So it’s a 0.00055 degree reduction by the year 2122. This is empty virtue-signalling at gigantic cost. Or, as Latham claimed, it’s the new secular religion of Liberal and National parties.

I won’t go into some of his examples as regards Attorney-General Mark Speakman, including his disgraceful ‘positive consent’ laws for sex based on what can in the politest terms going only be described as being based on some of the most dubious data going. So the NSW Coalition are not just delivering wokery and green fanaticism. They are today’s Puritans – Cromwell’s latter-day Roundheads, to use a reference no one educated in NSW will remotely understand.

As I said, it was a truly splendid performance; a sort of Mark Steyn account of how the world is ending but yet the way it’s presented makes you laugh despite yourself.

Here’s the thing. It’s something I’ve been saying for a while now. Pauline Hanson is a nice, well-meaning woman. I think her policies are better than those of the Libs. But she’s not up to the job. If Mark Latham were to become leader of One Nation federally, and bring his Ron DeSantis-type bravery and willingness to speak truth to the forces of political correctness, Australia would be the better for it. I think the One Nation vote would shoot up to 12 or 15 per cent within months.

I think this would place the same sort of pressure on the Coalition that Nigel Farage’s Brexit party placed on a then very wayward Tory party in Britain, thereby driving the lefty cuckoos largely out of the nest. It’s the best way forward as far as I can see because things are hardly much better at the national level.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/outsider-experience

https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/election-2022-live-scott-morrison-and-anthony-albanese-updates/live-coverage/5c03c0932482ca5312d3387fd86d0cff

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Struggling school students to be blocked from teaching degrees

As 15,000 angry NSW teachers marched in the streets demanding pay rises of up to 7.5 per cent on Wednesday, the federal government announced $40m in extra funding to recruit hundreds more engineers, lawyers, tech experts and tradies into classrooms.

Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert said 700 more mid-career professionals would be retrained through the Teach for Australia program, to enter classrooms next year and in 2024 if the Coalition were re-elected.

He said he was concerned that at least a quarter of maths teachers in Australia were not qualified to teach the subject, and that one in 10 university graduates in education courses were failing the literacy and numeracy test that was required to graduate.

Mr Robert said his 12-year-old son had been able to answer some of the maths questions that 10 per cent of university graduates got wrong. “I was reading out example questions to our sons at the weekend and my boys were answering them,’’ he said.

“The test is designed for the top 30 per cent of (school leavers) and we can’t have the people looking to teach our students failing it.’’

Sample questions include: “This year a teacher spent $383.30 on stationery. Last year the teacher spent $257.85 on stationery. How much more did the teacher spend this year than last year?’’

Many of the literacy questions are multiple choice, to check comprehension and identify spelling errors.

Mr Robert said a re-elected Morrison government would seek consensus from the states and territories to mandate that students pass the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) as a condition of starting their university degree.

Under existing arrangements, undergraduate teachers can sit the test at any time during their degree, but cannot graduate until they pass. But Mr Robert said university education faculties should only enrol students who had already passed the test.

“Ten per cent of our teaching graduates are failing on basic literacy and numeracy,’’ he said. “Ten per cent (of those) are failing it not once, not twice, but three times.’’

Mr Robert also announced $13.4m to change teacher accreditation standards, to halve the time it takes mid-career professionals with a university degree to retrain as school teachers.

The federal government would need state and territory approval to change the graduate diploma of education from two years to one.

Mr Robert said two years of retraining was a barrier for workers wanting to switch careers into teaching.

“One year to learn the pedagogy of teaching at university is enough,’’ he said. “You could get a whole bunch of older tradies who aren’t on the tools anymore to do a one-year graduate diploma and teach industrial art (in schools).’’

A re-elected Morrison government would also fund 60 workers to retrain as teachers through La Trobe University’s Nexus program, which combines a Master of Teaching with part-time work as “paraprofessional teachers’’ in hard-to-staff schools in Victoria.

And $10.8m would be spent to develop new micro-credentials to upskill existing teachers in teaching reading through phonics, explicit teaching methods, and managing disruptive students.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/struggling-school-students-to-be-blocked-from-teaching-degrees/news-story/726bcd0ae1f415af0e9d6daa57466e88

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Football cheer squad given list of BANNED words that are never to be chanted during games

Collingwood's cheer squad has been issued a list of banned words which are never to be uttered by supporters at AFL games featuring the Magpies.

The extraordinary step follows recent cultural awareness training for club members, where many terms deemed offensive and racist were clearly outlined.

The training was part of the club's Do Better report, as Collingwood look to promote the importance of cultural difference to their fans.

In the online Zoom presentation, run by Collingwood's Indigenous programs manager Deb Lovett, specific reference to terms which are offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were explained.

An example was the term 'Aborigines', which is deemed derogatory by many Indigenous people.

'The purpose for cultural awareness training is to ensure all people of Collingwood uphold the club values to provide a welcome and inclusive environment for all,' the club said in a statement.

'Collingwood's cheer squad all agreed and were open to having a code of conduct and all members signed a 'Declaration of Commitment' which states their obligation to uphold club values, to provide a welcome and inclusive environment, and exhibit appropriate behaviour on game days.'

The Do Better report, released by the Magpies on February 1 last year, is an independent review that challenges Collingwood to take a leadership position in Australian sport by confronting racism.

It was released after a number of former players, notably Brazilian-born defender Heritier Lumumba, publicly accused the club of systemic racism stemming from his time with the team from 2005-2014.

His allegations were dismissed by influential club figures such as former coach Mick Malthouse and McGuire - but were confirmed by his ex-teammates such as Chris Dawes and Leon Davis.

On Tuesday, Lumumba bristled at talk of the cultural awareness training sessions, stating the club 'cannot be trusted to pursue genuine reconciliation with its past' before accusing the club of 'continued misconduct'.

Collingwood said the cultural awareness training had been part of a wider attitude to learning more about race.

'Feedback of cultural awareness training has been positive with members of the club enthusiastic to educate themselves further and be a part of the club's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community programs and initiatives.'

'Our people have been open to listening and learning about how we create a welcoming and safe club environment for all,' the Pies said in a statemen

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/afl/article-10783827/Collingwood-cheer-squad-given-list-BANNED-words-never-chanted-games.html

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Fair Work adviser questions whether Labor can raise wages

An adviser to the workplace umpire over its annual wage increase has questioned the credibility of Labor’s promise to boost Australians’ pay, likening it to “political games” while underscoring the independence of his role.

Labour economist Mark Wooden, an expert panel member for the Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review, said the last thing the body wanted was “governments telling us what to do” after Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to back an increase in the national minimum wage.

Anthony Albanese has been accused of playing “political games” by saying Labor can raise wages.
Anthony Albanese has been accused of playing “political games” by saying Labor can raise wages. CREDIT:ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN

“As a member of the independent umpire, I’m very comfortably relieved the governments of the day don’t pressure us to make a particular decision,” he said.

“Anthony Albanese is saying we will raise wages, which I think is very interesting since the only lever have to pull is wages of the public service ... when he says he’s raising wages, it’s just political games.”

The Coalition-appointed panel member did, however, clarify there were certain policies, such as Labor’s ‘same job same pay’ policy, that could influence wage growth.

Labor’s industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke hit back hard at Wooden, accusing him of intervening in an election campaign.

“I’m deeply concerned that this intervention by an individual involved in deliberating on the minimum wage jeopardises the integrity of the wage review process,” Burke said.

The Reserve Bank of Australia’s looming interest rate decision has placed cost of living front and center of Morrison and Albanese’s campaign messaging.

“The Productivity Commission has made clear that the submissions that matter come from the government, unions and business. This government’s refusal to support wage rises for a decade means Australians are now finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.”

Industrial Relations Minister Michaelia Cash also challenged Labor on its commitment, saying the Morrison government had given a “comprehensive submission” to the annual wage review. “This is in contrast to Mr Albanese and Labor who, while falsely claiming to have a plan to lift wages, have failed to provide a submission to the Review when provided an opportunity to do so.”

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to back an increase in the national minimum wage above the rate of inflation despite the household expenses of Australians ballooning and mortgages taking a hit.

In the thick of an election campaign focused on the cost of living, Morrison said it was the role of the workplace umpire to set the wage floor and he did not have “special magical powers” to give Australians a pay rise.

“We’ve always believed that the Fair Work Commission should make the decision independently of the government based on the evidence. That’s why they are appointed for that purpose,” Morrison said after promising the Coalition would create 400,000 more small businesses if re-elected.

“Now, we’ve always taken the same position when it comes to the decisions of the Fair Work Commission. They make their decisions based on the best information they have and we provide that information to them to assist them with their decision, and we always have and we intend to continue to follow that.”

The commission is in the midst of its annual minimum wage review, which will lock in a basic hourly rate for low-paid workers, currently sitting at $20.33, and affect the pay of other workers on higher industry awards.

The federal government has already made a submission to that process, saying the outcome of the review “should support the economy and labour market, balancing improving living standards for Australians with ensuring the viability of employing businesses”.

“The Australian economy is recovering strongly from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the recovery forecast to continue and drive further employment growth. However, the ongoing pandemic, Russian invasion of Ukraine, strained supply chains and rising inflationary pressures all present risks to the global and domestic outlooks,” the April submission says.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/prime-minister-refuses-to-back-increase-in-minimum-wage-20220505-p5aiqt.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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May 05, 2022

Youth crime out of control in the Northwest of Western Australia

I am old enough to know the background of this problem. The "youth" concerned are Aboriginal youths and they are a problem nationwide. Ever since the missionaries were eased out of running Aboriginal settlements, civility in those settlements has steadily declined.

I remember elderly Aborigines who grew up under missionary supervision. People who know only the present crop of young Aborigines would be amazed at how Westernized they were. They behaved in a way that was remarkably similar to white expectations. So Aborigines can be adaptively socialized, given good examples of how to behave.

And nobody has come up with a management strategy which is remotely as fruitful as what the missionaries offered. The strategy mentioned nowadays is basically a strategy of desperation. They hope to get aboriginal youth away from the cities and back into the countryside within existing Aboriginal communities. Getting the problem out of sight is the proposed solution.

Accommodation in Aboriginal communities is normally these days provided by some government body and providing more of that in the "bush" communities is proposed. How you are going to incentivize the youth to return to their communities is not explained. A lot more than housing is needed to socialize problem youth. A whole-of-life management programme is needed to civilize them.

But such treatment would be "paternalistic" so cannot now be contemplated. Dysfunction among Aboriginal youth will continue

The WA Government has announced a $40 million package to address youth crime. Community leaders are divided about whether it will deliver tangible change. There are calls for more than one on-country residential facility as an alternative to detention

"It was a beautiful town when I came here, everyone got on well with each other, but over the last two years, the crime rate has just grown and grown, it seems to be out of control," he said.

"The last one [break in] was pretty serious, they actually damaged a whole door…we had to close for a whole day so we lost a day's takings…the overall cost will be major."

He said there was an urgent need to find an answer. "It seems the youth are running the streets," he said. "Everyone in town is scared."

Mr Moore's business is one of a growing number of businesses in the Kimberley caught up in a spate of property damage and crime being blamed on young people.

The WA Government announced a $40 million package on Tuesday aimed at addressing escalating youth crime in the region.

The announcement included increased funds to expand the Target 120 program – which supports young people who are at risk of becoming lost to the criminal justice system – to nine more locations across the state.

The package also includes $15 million for a new dedicated residential facility to house at-risk youth on-country, a measure that community leaders have lobbied for over many years.

It's a move that's been welcomed by Social Reinvestment WA — an Aboriginal-led coalition of 25 not-for-profit organisations.

Coordinator Sophie Stewart said the package was a start in addressing underlying root causes of the offending and more effective interventions.

"We do need an alternative to incarceration for young people in the Kimberley and for that matter also in the Pilbara," she said.

"With the reports of the alarming conditions and human rights abuses at Banksia Hill, we're really glad to see the state government prioritising initiatives that will keep children out of prison."

Ms Stewart said keeping children close to country, community and culture would be a key part of the solution.

She said close consultation at the grassroots level would be key to the success of the new measures. "What we know is that whatever the facility ends up looking like it needs to be a therapeutic space that provides opportunities to build pathways for their future," she said.

She said there needed to be an opportunity for a job, further schooling and training as well as a therapeutic and rehabilitative space for young people living with trauma.

"For these initiatives to be successful the state government has to work in partnership with local communities and lived experience people in the design and the delivery," she said.

Regional Development Minister Alannah MacTiernan has flagged Myroodah Station as a possible site for the new residential facility.

Pandanus Park resident Patricia Riley said basing the new facility in a remote area was "a great approach". Ms Riley said getting children out of major towns such as Broome and Kununurra would ease some of the challenges being faced on the ground.

"These parents go out into town and they end up staying there and then dragging their family into town, the kids get bored and get up to mischief…these poor kids they just want attention," she said. "They've got no choice but to be in town because of their parents, so it's a good idea to take these children out back onto country.

She said communities needed programs and employment delivered properly to address what people needed.

Wyndham-East Kimberley shire president David Menzel said the government should consider developing more than one on-country residential facility in the region.

"I'm not sure whether that's singular or plural at the moment but it needs to be plural," he said. "There needs to be several options to get people out of some of the chaos that is their normal life.

"Give them somewhere where there's a bit of a breather so they can get a bit of time out, have some support systems around them to work through some of the issues."

While the package has been welcomed by some in the community as a step in the right direction, others were concerned it wouldn't be enough to address the region's complex and deep-rooted juvenile crime problem.

Nirrumbook Aboriginal Corporation chief executive Joe Grande aid the government was 'following chicken feed' instead of working with the community to tackle core issues.

His Aboriginal-run capacity building organisation mainly derives its membership from the Dampier Peninsula region, north of Broome.

"What about the money they've already spent?" he said. "The reality is that until we all collaborate, real collaboration, true collaboration with government, then we're all going to be working in isolation from one another."

Broome Shire Deputy President Desiree Male said it remained to be seen if the programs would be enough. "Having this not work is not an option," she said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-04/mixed-community-response-to-kimberley-crime-funding/101037590

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Rose de Freycinet stowed away on her husband's ship 200 years ago. Her remarkable journey still matters

More than 200 years ago, a 22-year-old French woman cut off her hair, disguised herself as a man, stowed away on a ship, and became the first woman to document a circumnavigation of the world. But her story was almost lost to the world, thanks to male editors and censorship.

And it might have stayed hidden forever, were it not for a modern push to bring women's perspectives to the fore.

It was 1817 when Rose de Freycinet, disguised as a man, boarded her French naval husband's ship, the Uranie, and hid in a special cabin he had prepared for her.

Her husband, Louis de Freycinet — the namesake of the picturesque Freycinet Peninsula on the east coast of Tasmania — had become the first person to map Australia's coastline as a sub-lieutenant of French naturalist Nicolas Baudin.

His was a small wooden ship with 120 men on board and having a woman embark was strictly illegal. So he pretended he needed an extra officer's cabin and made a few refurbishments.

"Rose had to stay hidden until they were out of territorial waters, and then there was some danger that when they landed in French territory, the officials there would arrest her," Ms Falkiner, the author of Rose: The extraordinary journey of Rose de Freycinet, says.

But rumours about her presence aboard the ship spread through France, and even reached the Royal Court. "The King said something like 'well, perhaps the less said, the better'", Ms Falkiner says.

Ms Falkiner says the officer's reactions were mixed but that some weren't happy. Women were thought to bring bad luck to ships, and the Uranie's navigator Gabriel Lafond, who wrote about the voyage more than two decades later, says she was an "apple of discord" among the crew and officers.

So, while she spent two and a half years onboard the Uranie, Rose rarely appeared on deck. Instead, she kept to her cabin, teaching herself to play guitar, learning English and doing needlework.

She was also an intellectual companion for Louis and supported him by researching the places they were destined to visit.

Rose's presence was largely unacknowledged by those onboard. "Everybody had to pretend that Rose wasn't there — because officially she wasn't there," Ms Falkiner says.

This included the ship's artists Jacques Arago and Alphonse Pellion, who were tasked with visually documenting the expedition.

"Quite often they did two versions of paintings, a private version where Rose was visible and then another one, which was censored.

"There are actual drafts where there's a line drawn through the figure of Rose, so the engraver could leave her out."

Although she was cut from the official records of the expedition, Rose kept a journal documenting the voyage.

The journals were addressed to her friend Caroline de Nanteuil back in France. Ms Falkiner says there's a lightheartedness in many of Rose's observations. They included banter about foreign fashion, social norms and the various dignitaries she encountered along the way.

In early 1820, after rounding Cape Horn, the southernmost headland of Chile's Tierra del Fuego archipelago, the Uranie was damaged in a storm.

Louis decided to make for the Falkland Islands where the boat could be repaired, and their supplies restocked from the wild cattle and pigs on the island.

Though they reached the Falklands and navigated into French Bay as planned, the Uranie would never make it back to France.

"There was a subterranean rock that wasn't marked on their charts, and they ran straight into it," Ms Falkiner says.

Louis managed to run the ship aground on the beach. Rose's journal details how he instructed everyone to remain on board to save essential items, despite enormous waves lifting the vessel up and dropping it onto the sand.

He managed to salvage many of the scientific papers and natural history specimens onboard, as well as the guns and barrels of brandy.

He also ensured no lives were lost, though the struggle to survive on the island had only just begun. Everyone had to live in makeshift tents, made of old boat sails, and endure freezing temperatures, living off the land and rationing their dwindling supplies.

Fortunately Louis survived. And after two long months, the castaways were rescued by the crew of an American whaling boat.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-04/writing-women-like-rose-de-freycinet-back-into-history/100929074

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Seaweed farm proposal for Eden aims for Australian-first commercial kelp crop

Those behind a plan to build Australia's first commercial ocean seaweed farm off the NSW south coast say it would create a "brand new industry" and feed a growing appetite for the product.

Auskelp have submitted a proposal to build a 200-hectare lease at Disaster Bay, south of Eden, which would grow kelp for food, cattle feed, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Kelp are large brown algae seaweeds which grow naturally in the colder waters off the coastline.

High in protein, it can be cooked like other greens or used in supplements.

The leases will harvest two main species found in southern NSW, golden kelp (Ecklonia radiata) and Durvillaea, commonly known as southern bull kelp.

Auskelp CEO Christopher Ride said the development would tap into a massive market for both human consumption and agriculture.

"It's never been done in New South Wales waters before. In fact, has never been done in an ocean farming setting in Australia at all," Mr Ride said. "It's a brand new industry."

The company has received an aquaculture permit from the Department of Primary Industries for the ocean lease but the project is contingent on seeking approval from the Department of Planning and Environment as a State Significant Development.

"We've got at least 12 months to go before we can start to put test beds in Disaster Bay for production expected to be in the beginning of 2025," Mr Ride said.

Emerging industry with big plans

Agrifutures published an Australian Seaweed Industry Blueprint which estimated the industry could be worth $1.5 billion by 2040, employing 9,000 people.

But lead author Jo Kelly, from the Australian Seafood Institute, highlighted the industry was currently "small, fragmented, and disparate".

The report estimated in 2020 the gross value profit of the entire Australian industry was less than $3 million and the workforce less than 40 full-time equivalents.

AusKelp's Christopher Ride said the industry was held back by regulations and risks of investing in an emerging market.

"I think the reason it hasn't been done before is because we've got quite a lot of regulation to overcome, and rightly so to protect our ocean environments," Mr Ride said. "There's a high level of risk associated with going through the regulatory process, which takes many years to then really work out whether this is viable at scale."

It is estimated seaweed populations have reduced by 40 per cent across the world over more than two decades.

The company predicts a 200-hectare seaweed array could sequester 3,600 tonnes of carbon every year. "It has a whole lot of extraordinary benefits, and the beauty of kelp is that kelp is the most environmentally form of aquaculture and agriculture," Mr Ride said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-04/australias-first-ocean-kelp-farm-in-eden-to-farm-seaweed/101036178

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Queensland authorities warn about 'life-threatening' risk of catching both COVID-19 and the flu

After getting her flu jab, Health Minister Yvette D'Ath said she was concerned about the "life-threatening" risk of Queenslanders being struck down with both viruses at once this winter. "We're expecting a big flu season this year," she said.

"We are already seeing more flu cases this year than we had for the whole of 2021. Some people will end up getting COVID and influenza and this is of great risk.

"I know a lot of people who went out last year and got the flu shot simply because they were concerned that they may get COVID and flu. That risk is even greater now."

Eight more people died in the state with COVID-19 in the latest reporting period and 7,668 new cases were recorded. There are 504 people being treated in hospital with the virus, including 21 in intensive care.

'COVID-19 and influenza seems to be particularly severe'
Chief Health Officer John Gerrard said more than 800 flu cases had already been confirmed in Queensland this year – up from the 296 cases recorded for the entirety of 2021.

"As we had suspected, as our pandemic measures have relaxed, we are seeing increasing numbers of cases of influenza and we are likely to see a significant wave of influenza on top of COVID-19 this winter," Dr Gerrard said. "The combination of COVID-19 and influenza seems to be particularly severe."

Dr Gerrard urged Queenslanders to get a flu shot and to be up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines.

"Influenza … can be a severe disease," he said. "I'm particularly concerned because all of our immunity will have waned over the last two years. Our general immunity is low and the virus is here and it's beginning to spread. "If we get it, it's likely to be more severe."

Dr Gerrard said Queensland's hospitals were preparing for "a difficult winter". "We always knew this was going to happen," he said.

"Queensland had to open up at some point and when it opened up, new viruses will be introduced. "The last two years have been very aberrant. We've had very little influenza, a very low death rate over the winter … because we've been protected from the virus. "But that couldn't last forever."

Ms D'Ath said 120 new paramedics were due to start this month in Queensland to help the state deal "with the winter surge" of infections.

"We are embarking and working on a broader workforce strategy to attract and retain doctors and nurses and other health professionals across the state," she said.

"We are constantly recruiting. Every state is struggling with workforce shortages."

Flu shots are free for children aged from six months to less than five years and for people aged 65 and over.

They are also free for pregnant women, Indigenous Australians aged six months and older and people with chronic health conditions.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-04/queensland-warning-vaccinations-severe-flu-season-covid-looms/101036564

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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May 04, 2022

NT Police in turmoil over suspended cop who criticised commissioners over Rolfe case

Politically correct police leadership hits back at criticisms of itself. They breached their own guidelines by hounding officer Rolfe. They were prepared to throw a good officer to the wolves in order to placate Aborigines. The officer would not even have been charged if the deceased had been white

The Northern Territory Police Force is in turmoil after a veteran officer was “brutally” suspended for publicly criticising how his commissioners had treated constable Zachary Rolfe over the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker.

Sergeant Mark Casey, who has served in the NT Police for 25 years, said he was “devastated” and “terrified” after being suspended without pay on Saturday for alleged “serious breaches of discipline” related to his “personal behaviour and public views”.

The suspension notice, signed by Assistant Commissioner Michael White, asserts that Sergeant Casey committed three breaches: improper conduct, personal use of social media and breach of the force’s code of conduct.

The 45-year-old from the digital forensic unit was suspended just hours after an opinion piece he wrote was published by local online news outlet NT Independent.

The article detailed “concerns” he held about the actions and “integrity” of NT Police executive members including Commissioner Jamie Chalker.

“This concern relates to the authoritarian management as a whole and specifically in relation to the charging of Constable Zach Rolfe,” he wrote.

“It is time for someone to stand-up and allow the discourse to happen, rather than sitting in fear, waiting for someone else to take action.”

Sergeant Casey said he had initially written the article “purely as a vent”, to privately process his growing frustration about how the Rolfe matter was handled, before deciding to have it published.

Sky News Darwin Bureau Chief Matt Cunningham says the ICAC is considering an “independent inquiry” into the… arrest of Constable Zachary Rolfe, after he was found not guilty for the murder of Kumanjayi Walker in 2019. “I think Michael Richards, the new ICAC commissioner…he’s made it clear that More
“I’d been speaking to quite a lot of police and they were all saying that something needs to be done but they were all too scared and fearful of the repercussions,” he said.

Sergeant Casey said he had expected to face disciplinary action for publishing his opinion piece. “I expected the intimidation and the bullying in response, but I underestimated how brutal it was going to be,” he said.

“I did initially feel relief (after publication) but being suspended without pay has been devastating.”

Suspending him without pay has incensed colleagues, who say the NT Police disciplinary system is unfair because other members – including senior officers – have been suspended on full pay while being investigated over more serious matters including alleged murder, rape and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Sergeant Casey, who has spent most of his policing career investigating fatal crashes, has never worked with or met Constable Rolfe, who in March was acquitted of all charges related to Walker’s death.

“He was by all accounts a competent, enthusiastic police officer and a good person,” Sergeant Casey wrote. “He has risked his life to save not one but two strangers from raging flood waters and risked his life to apprehend a violent criminal. If a police officer does the wrong thing, typically their colleagues will not support them, but in this case, everyone is supporting Zach.”

An internal police broadcast, sent to police members on Saturday night stated that the alleged breaches related to Sergeant Casey’s “personal behaviour and public views that do not align with the oath taken” when he joined the force more than two decades ago.

Sergeant Casey has seven days to respond to the suspension notice and is “very worried” about losing his job. “It’s not something that I wanted to do but I felt it needed to be done,” he said.

“The culture is that everyone is too scared to speak up and do the right thing. I think that’s a culture that needs to change.”

The matter is now being investigated internally by the professional standards command and has been referred to the NT ICAC and NT Ombudsman.

The NT Police Association said it “will provide ongoing support”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nt-police-in-turmoil-over-suspended-cop-who-criticised-commissioners-over-rolfe-case/news-story/0df0919b892e40a00c783de08bdf30c0

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Federal election 2022: Whipping up homeowner hysteria a risk for Labor

Aside from Anthony Albanese catching Covid, an interest rate rise was probably the next most predictable thing to have happened during the election campaign.

But Labor’s tactical decision to create hysteria around it and blame Scott Morrison for the central bank’s own failure to get ahead of the inflation curve early could just as easily backfire.

While the first rate rise in more than a decade – and the first in an election campaign since 2007 – may not appear to be good news for the Prime Minister or mortgagors, it’s not fantastic news for the Opposition Leader either.

And feverish predictions of doom around a return to a normalised rate settings could have the reverse effect of what Labor is seeking to achieve politically.

Labor Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers discovered the potential for this type of self-harming overreach when he was forced to quickly retreat from his use of the “Morrison recession” in 2020 when describing the economic downturn during the pandemic.

This was laughed at in voter focus groups at the time.

The language Labor is now using in framing interest rates as the third pillar of a “triple whammy”, Morrison-inspired “crisis” has a similar potential to jar with people.

By elevating it as a key platform of attack, Albanese only draws attention to Labor’s own policy prescription. It invites a bigger question as to how Labor would do a better job.

The idea that somehow by electing a Labor government, interest rates would somehow stabilise is fanciful. And in the process of whipping up panic about it, the opposition may very well scare people away from Labor.

While some homeowners may well be anxious, with a cascade of further rate rises now on the horizon, most will be savvy enough to realise that an emergency cash rate of 0.1 per cent wasn’t going to last. The party had to end some time.

You’d have to have been living alone on a remote Pacific atoll to have been surprised by this.

The risk for Albanese is that fuelling anxieties will only add to an electoral fear of the unknown.

According to one Labor MP, it shouldn’t be forgotten that six of the seven most mortgage-heavy electorates are held by Labor.

If Morrison gets the language right, uncertainty over economic conditions could further expose Albanese’s small-target strategy which has left Labor without a comprehensive economic strategy of its own to deal with the problems on which it now seeks to capitalise.

But then again, this is all predicated on an assumption that the Coalition can carry the political argument.

Morrison is unlikely to try to steer away from this topic over the coming days in the belief that it is a good space for him to be in. The Prime Minister may not be popular, but Labor would wrongly assume that a lot of voters don’t give credit to the government for protecting their jobs and small businesses during the worst days of the pandemic. While Labor sees it as more grist for the mill in its attacks on Morrison personally, in doing so it draws attention to its own lack of remedial policy.

The Prime Minister on the other hand is trying to build a platform based on a sentiment that the government got Australians through the last crisis – so they will get them through the next.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/federal-election-2022-whipping-up-homeowner-hysteria-a-risk-for-labor/news-story/80646fe3626a84675dc416c0388d2e97

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Hidden traps of Labor’s housing plan revealed

The pitfalls of Labor’s scheme to help low income earners into their own home have been uncovered amid warnings future interest rate hikes could leave some with ‘negative equity’.

Homebuyers who use Labor’s shared equity housing scheme will be slugged with extra repayments to buy the government out if their household starts earning more than $120,000 per year.

The policy would mean low and middle income earners face extra cost of living pressure to cover the cost of their house if their wages increase — or dis-incentivise them to strive for a better salary.

Labor was under pressure to detail the $329m scheme in a media conference where Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese used the word “plan” more than 30 times but was not able to answer how much more money voters would have in their hip pockets under his plans for government.

Defending his “Help to Buy” strategy in the face of attacks from the government, Mr Albanese said it had been backed by a number of industry bodies.

He labelled criticism from the Prime Minister “desperate” and “extreme,” referencing a 2008 interview where Scott Morrison – then a new backbencher – labelled shared equity schemes a “good opportunity”.

The Labor leader passed most specific questions on the policy to his housing spokesman at a Tuesday news conference, but said he had a “comprehensive plan to assist people to buy” and a “comprehensive plan to increase supply”.

Labor also has a $100 million policy to increase emergency housing for women and children escaping domestic violence.

“This is a suite of measures which, taken together, will take pressure off people who are struggling with housing,” Mr Albanese said.

Opposition housing spokesman Jason Clare said the policy would help families “pass on their wealth to their kids rather than passing on nothing because they’re renting for the rest of their life”.

Revealing more detail about the housing plan, Mr Clare said that anyone who got a pay rise taking them above the eligibility threshold would have a two-year grace period, then face extra payments to buy out the government’s stake.

He said that would also apply to kids who want to inherit their parents’ home when they pass away.

Mr Clare said one in six people who have signed up to a similar scheme in Victoria have already bought out the government’s stake.

Mr Albanese was in the seat of Robertson, on the NSW Central Coast, spruiking his policy with 21 year old Lydia Pulley, who wants to get into the market.

The dental receptionist and student earns a combined $92,000 per year with her partner.

She said there was “no other option” for her to get into the market than Labor’s plan, although she did say that she would have to “look into” the strict rules which would prevent her from handing down her home to her kids.

The three bedroom home she rents in East Gosford for $550 a week is valued at $1.07 million according to Core Logic data, putting it above the price cap for Labor’s “Help to Buy” plan. She said she would likely have to move further away from her job to buy a house cheap enough.

Meanwhile, first home buyers have been warned that applying for loans under government guarantee schemes could put them at risk of negative equity if multiple interest rate rises see house prices fall.

It comes amid warnings of a house price correction if the cash rate continues to climb.

SQM Head of research Louis Christopher expressed concern for those using the 5 per cent deposit required for the existing First Home Guarantee scheme.

“I can see a situation where the Sydney or Melbourne housing market is going to correct by more than 5 per cent in this cycle,” Mr Christopher said.

Buyers considering Labor’s “Help to Buy” policy were delivered a similar warning.

The low deposit would leave borrowers vulnerable, RateCity research director Sally Tindall said.

“Property prices are expected to drop, potentially by up to 15 per cent in some areas over the next couple of years. Anyone with a 2 per cent deposit could fall into negative equity in the blink of an eye,” Ms Tindall said.

Those in negative equity may be unable to repay the bank if forced to sell their property, an outcome that will become more likely as costs rise with inflation.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/federal-election/federal-election-2022-hidden-traps-of-labors-housing-plan-revealed/news-story/9ede9238bf9a2c0c62c4021400014953

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Analysis: Rate rise was inevitable – but impact on the election is not

The Reserve Bank raising the cash rate will have some impact on the election, but not to the extent of 2007, writes Matthew Killoran.

Interest rates rising again were inevitable. They were at emergency levels for the pandemic and that emergency has passed.

But that doesn’t mean this was news Prime Minister Scott Morrison, or homeowners, wanted to hear less than three weeks before an election.

There are many people who will have purchased a home, at inflated prices, on earlier forecasts from the RBA that interest rates would not be raising until 2024.

But circumstances changed and interest rates went up and will again and again before the year is done, likely reaching 1.5 per cent.

With grocery prices on the rise, petrol prices edging back up despite the fuel excise cut, this is just one more pressure on the family budget.

The fact is, the are still at historically low rates and Dr Lowe said he had to move because the economy was doing well.

That will be cold comfort for many people. A generation of homeowners who have never experienced a rate rise are going to have to learn to tighten their belts in the coming months and years.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/analysis-rate-rise-was-inevitable-but-impact-on-the-election-is-not/news-story/fa71017cb4263b5d481d19952edd61bf

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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May 03, 2022

Life will be cheaper under me: Albanese vow for better future

Where is he going to get the money to pay for all this?? We are not told. Empty promises

Anthony Albanese has promised to change Australia “for the better” and deliver reforms that play to traditional Labor strengths, providing cheaper childcare, power bills, electric vehicles, medicines and mortgages if he wins the May 21 election.

At the ALP campaign launch in Perth on Sunday, the Opposition Leader claimed Labor was the only party that could deliver significant reform and set up a three-week fight with Scott Morrison over cheaper housing, higher wages, cost-of-living pressures, integrity and health.

Mr Albanese, who was introduced by West Australian Premier Mark McGowan as the “next Prime Minister of Australia”, told 600 supporters including former prime ministers Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd that “only Labor has a plan for a better future”.

He used Labor’s new Help to Buy housing policy, in which the federal government provides up to 40 per cent of the purchase price of new homes for 10,000 low-and-middle income earners, to claim that an Albanese government would help renters “achieve the great Australian dream of home ownership”.

The housing policy, allowing low-income earners to buy a house with a 2 per cent deposit, was attacked by the Prime Minister for putting home ownership into the hands of the government and potentially ripping equity away from homeowners.

Speaking in the marginal Liberal-held seat of Swan, Mr Albanese rolled out a series of new policies focused on wooing swing voters ahead of the election, including plans to close the gender pay gap, build more electric vehicle charging stations, provide cheaper medicines and set up a $1bn fund for developing critical minerals into batteries. “Labor has real, lasting plans for cheaper ¬electricity, cheaper childcare, cheaper mortgages, cheaper medicines and Medicare (and) better pay,” Mr Albanese said.

The Labor leader’s cheaper electricity claim is based on ¬medium-to-long-term renewable energy projections in Labor’s Powering Australia plan, while costings for his $5.4bn plan to make childcare more affordable for 96 per cent of families has been questioned by the Coalition.

Labor’s cheaper medicines pledge came after Mr Albanese trumped Mr Morrison’s promise to slash the price of prescription drugs by $10. Labor says it will cut drug prices by $12.50.

With Labor maintaining its small-target strategy and election-winning lead over the Coalition in Newspoll, Mr Albanese recycled Labor’s personal attacks on the Prime Minister and urged Australians to “vote for hope and optimism over fear and division”.

“Are we going to stride forward – or instead are we going to slide back? Are we going to risk three more wasted years? Scott Morrison says you don’t have to like him, but it’s better the devil you know,” he said.

“Well here’s what Australians do know … they know he failed on bushfires and they know he then failed on floods. They know he didn’t order enough vaccines and then didn’t order enough rapid antigen tests.

“They know it’s harder to see a doctor. It’s harder to buy a home and the cost of everything is going up but their wages aren’t. They know aged care is in crisis … that’s the devil you know.”

Mr Morrison will take the cost-of-living fight to Labor on Monday and pledge to make 50,000 older Australians eligible for seniors’ health cards, giving them access to more affordable health care and medicines.

Under a $70m investment over four years, the Coalition will ¬increase the singles income test threshold from $57,761 to $90,000 from July 1. The couple’s threshold will rise from $92,416 to $144,000.

“This means more senior Australians could save hundreds of dollars, including up to $428 a year for access to a monthly script for vital medicines and a refund for medical costs if you reach the Medicare safety net,” Mr Morrison said.

“This is the first major change, outside of indexation, to the ¬income threshold of the commonwealth seniors’ health card in over 20 years. Every dollar counts, especially for older Australians who are no longer working.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/life-will-be-cheaper-under-me-albanese-vow-for-better-future/news-story/11ae6e07334f6d03e15a989f22efb8ec

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Censored, but not forgotten

Late last week, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation dropped another election cartoon. The series has gained both notoriety and infamy for its cutting political commentary that (in a rarity for this hypersensitive world) is genuinely funny. Social media collapsed when the series first aired, as leftwing commentators were left horrified by their reaction – apologising profusely to their followers for the crime of laughing.

Yes. In the modern era you have to apologise for finding something funny.

Very few political figures have escaped the wrath of the cartoonist’s pen, with some of the best depictions being made at the expense of fellow ‘freedom friendly’ party candidates – whether it’s Bob Katter’s perfect cackle, the Clive Palmer Star Wars reference, or Barnaby Joyce looking as though he’s been pulled out of the nearest patch of dirt.

The series has gotten away with harsh truths – remarkable in a world where editors have to self-censor every breath in case they get dragged before a bureaucratic committee. The cartoons have also been educational, letting voters in on a few nasty tricks that politicians would rather be kept a secret.

Now, the cartoon has managed to offend the fragile feelings of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). They issued a complaint that saw the cartoon either removed or censored across various social media platforms.

Twitter originally left the video up, but wouldn’t allow anyone to like, comment, or retweet.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/censored-but-not-forgotten/

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Jewish leaders condemn antisemitic Melbourne student union

A group of prominent Jewish leaders have condemned a motion passed by the University of Melbourne’s student union after it pledged support for the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, sparking fears it could have a flow-on effect across university campuses.

The student union passed a wide-ranging motion on Friday condemning Zionism as a “racist colonial ideology” and pledging its support for the BDS movement, urging the university leadership to endorse an academic boycott that would cut ties with Israeli institutions, researchers, and academics that support the “Israeli oppression of Palestinians”.

The Australian understands the union is the first student representative body to pass a motion formally supporting the BDS movement in the country.

The motion, which was passed 10-8 by the student council on Friday, stated the union’s endorsement of the BDS movement had been “long overdue” and would encourage other student bodies to adopt similar resolutions in solidarity with Palestinians.

“Students in Palestine and around the world have been key participants in the fight against the illegal occupation of Palestine, protesting, organising, and creating a discussion on respective campuses … it’s long overdue for a clear and firm stance by UMSU on these crimes,” the motion read.

Jewish leaders blasted the union for creating a “fictitious” and “one-sided narrative” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, describing the resolution as “perverse” and “blatantly anti-Semitic”.

Jewish Affairs Council director Colin Rubinstein said on Sunday that the language of the motion was something that could have been expected from “Hamas or Hezbollah … not from the student union of an esteemed centre of learning here in Australia”.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry chief executive Peter Wertheim said it was possible other university student councils “would follow suit” and adopt a similar “anti-Semitic” motion, but added that it would be a mistake to conclude there was a “broad student consensus behind these views”.

Adelaide University’s student representative council is considering a similar motion to UMSU, while the University of Western Australia’s student guild last year altered its support of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, suspending its clause condemning calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.

In February, Sydney University’s student body passed a motion supporting the boycott of the Sydney Festival but has not passed a formal motion supporting the BDS movement.

Mr Wertheim said the ability of a handful of student activists to pass through “propagandistic and racist resolutions” highlighted the urgent need for universities to adopt and apply the remembrance alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism.

The Australian sought comment from the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide student unions, who were unavailable to reply.

The Anti-Defamation Commission says acts of anti-Semitism in Australia have reached “pitch fever” following reports vandals had defaced the Lilydale Eagles Soccer Club in Melbourne, drawing Nazi swastikas on the club’s oval.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/jewish-leaders-condemn-student-union-support-for-palestinians-as-antisemitic/news-story/399464ffbcfd5ceec8757116abda2930

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Children told to stop eating HAM SANDWICHES in ridiculous 'warning' note sent home to parents in school newsletters

Primary school students have been urged to 'ditch the ham sandwich' in leaflets inserted in their newsletters and send home to parents.

Leaflets from the Cancer Council telling kids to stop eating ham sandwiches have been put into public school newsletters by teachers in NSW.

'Ditch the ham sandwich' is the Cancer Council's latest anti-meat edict and follows on from a previous leaflet telling children to have a 'meat-free Monday'.

But both parents and pork producers have defended the humble ham sandwich and railed against the 'politically correct message'.

However, Channel Nine's U.S. correspondent, Amelia Adams, admitted she 'wasn't surprised'. 'It's such a nanny state back there,' she told Karl Stefanovic during a Today show cross on Tuesday morning.

A pork company owner said the Cancer Council leaflets go 'too far'.

'Ham is actually a product which has been developed over the last 5,000 years and people have eaten it through the ages without any problems,' David Bligh of Bringelly Pork and Bacon told News Corp.

'I think sometimes these politically correct messages can go a little bit too far and not be as practical as they should be.'

A Cancer Council spokeswoman said the leaflets are part of a health campaign to get children eating better food.

'Because there is strong evidence that eating processed meats and too much red meat is associated with increased risk of bowel cancer, our cancer prevention messages advise everyone to limit their processed meat consumption and cut down on red meat,' she said.

She added that schools sent the messages to include with material sent home with pupils, were not under any obligation to do so.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10775019/School-children-told-meat-free-Monday-pork-industry-blasts-woke-vegan-edict.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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May 02, 2022

Green hydrogen is coming of age

It's the only reasonably feasible method of large-scale energy storage

Green hydrogen is expected to be a massive industry of its own in the next decade, used to generate electricity, fuel vehicles, and produce chemicals and heat, but how far do we have to go before we see this coming into play?

A convergence of political, technological, economic and climate factors have propelled the clean fuel to the forefront of net-zero solutions around the globe, including in Australia, where interest has been growing since the release of the National Hydrogen Strategy in 2019.

In countries such as Germany, the UK, China, and America, tens of billions of dollars have been invested by their governments to accelerate the production of green hydrogen, which is created from electrolysis powered by renewable electricity, such as wind and solar.

The electrolyser is the capital kit or equipment which converts green electricity and water into hydrogen, with industry experts flagging the sequential doubling in installed electrolyser capacity as proof its adoption is accelerating faster than even most bulls would have expected.

For example, the largest electrolyser in the world by install capacity doubled to 10MW in Japan back in 2020, before doubling again in 2021 to 20MW at the Bécancour project in Quebec, Canada.

As green hydrogen continues its trajectory from cottage industry to mainstream manufacturing, we will likely see a ramping-up in electrolyser capacity installed – with more GW capacity coming online.

In hard-to-abate sectors like long distance transport, chemical manufacturing, and iron and steel production, green hydrogen’s deployment is recognised as a key transition pillar to reach net zero emissions.

Australia has made much about its green hydrogen ambitions but has committed little actual funding.

Instead, the Morrison Government has shown its support by investing in various things such as a network of hydrogen technology clusters in major cities and regional towns across Australia.

With funding awarded by National Energy Resources Australia (NERA), the idea is each cluster will establish a thriving green hydrogen industry and identify supply chain investments.

The Government has also entered into a series of partnerships with Germany, South Korea, and Japan to explore the possibility of future hydrogen exports.

There has also been an abundance of non-binding announcements coming in thick and fast by companies looking to play a part.

One such company is Fortescue Future Industries, whose latest agreement with European utility business E-ON has been described by experts as representing a ‘seismic shift’ in the commercial scaling up of green hydrogen.

The two companies plan to work together to replace one-third of Germany’s Russian gas imports with 5 million tonnes per annum of renewable green hydrogen.

However, the market is still quite nascent with the majority of the current 90 or so projects currently in the feasibility and demonstration stages though the industry has not only scaled up in terms of the number of projects in the pipeline but also in terms of the average size.

Several ‘gigawatt’ scale projects have been announced in Australia, though they are still subject to final investment decisions and would come into operation from 2025 onwards.

Only a handful of projects have moved beyond the trial phase – such as with AGIG’s Hydrogen Park in South Australia, which has been operational since mid 2021.

Experts in the field say there is broad recognition across the Australian market that to capitalise on the hydrogen opportunity, partnerships/JVs need to be established across the hydrogen value chain.

And ultimately, to accelerate investment, a ‘renewable gas/hydrogen’ target would need to be established in Australia.

With supply chain and energy security being more important than ever, thanks to rampant fossil fuel inflation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is no doubt momentum for decarbonisation will continue.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/stockhead/stockhead-why-green-hydrogen-isnt-just-a-load-of-hot-air/news-story/868d441b7f95e701fd4afee3b063a9a1

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'Husband' and 'wife' are now on the offensive words list

An Australian university has apologised after a transgender student objected to an online list of terms deemed offensive to minorities, which includes various gay slurs as well as the words 'husband' and 'wife'.

Flinders University in South Australia removed their harassment and discrimination guidelines after the complaint, agreeing the list was 'no longer suitable'.

The main gripe from the transgender community was that the list considered the term transsexual 'appropriate' when it is now regarded as an 'outdated and offensive'.

Another sticking point was the reference to the 'condition of trans-sexualism'.

The World Health Organisation stopped considering being transgender as a 'mental health condition' in 2019.

It remains unclear why 'husband' and 'wife' were ever included on the list and how the university came to conclusion the words could cause offense or be deemed discriminatory.

A staff member who saw the Facebook post the next morning reviewed the contentious guidelines and offered an apology saying the list would immediately be updated.

'We agree that the content on the website is inappropriate,' a statement by Finders University said.

'We are taking immediate action to remove it and will engage with students and the wider diversity community on our campuses to review the content.'

'Equality, diversity and inclusion are fundamental values that we are committed to upholding in words and in practice – it is clear that improvement is needed and we still have work to do. 'We commit to doing this work.'

Jane Russo of Transcend, a national support group for transgender people, said the terms used by Flinders University were very dated. 'We've gone beyond this kind of language,' she told the Advertiser. 'When it comes to husband and wife it really comes down to a matter of personal choice.

'As for transsexual – it is a mix of language which misconstrues sexuality and gender.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10772573/Flinders-University-apologises-outdated-harassments-discrimination-guidelines.html

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Welcome to Net Zero: Australian Households are warned to brace for rising power bills as wholesale electricity prices more than double

Wholesale electricity prices are more expensive this year compared to 2021 with the price hike expected to be passed onto families already struggling with cost of living pressures.

Households are being warned of higher power bills in 2022 and 2023. Official figures reveal electricity prices have doubled in the past year – setting up another cost of living fight between the Prime Minister and Anthony Albanese – who have both pledged to keep costs down.

Households battling the rising cost of living are being warned to brace for skyrocketing power bills as electricity prices more than doubled over the past year.

The report from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) shows wholesale electricity jumped 141 per cent to $87 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in the first quarter of 2022, compared to $36 MWh at the same time last year.

In Queensland alone record demand saw wholesale prices surge to $150 MWh for the quarter – the second highest rate the state has seen for any quarter in over 20 years.

The prices are expected to flow onto consumers with the wholesale price of energy accounting for 30 to 40 per cent of a household’s power bill.

Stream more local news live & on demand with Flash. 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends 31 October, 2022

The AEMO said the combination of coal generator outages, an increase in demand due to heatwaves and costly fossil fuel production were behind the latest price hikes.

Violette Mouchaileh, AEMO’s Executive General Manager Reform Delivery, said northern-states were hardest hit because of coal-fire outages putting pressure on supply.

“Wholesale prices in Queensland and NSW were again significantly higher than in southern states,” Ms Mouchaileh said.

“This was due to the larger price-setting role of black coal generation and system security constraints limiting daytime electricity transfers from Victoria into NSW, despite an average energy price difference of $48/MWh.”

The latest figures come as an election debate ramps up over the pressure of the rising cost of living.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has claimed his government has delivered “affordable, reliable energy” and warned power bills would be driven up under Labor’s energy policy.

“That’s why over the last two years we’ve been able to cut the cost of electricity by 8 per cent, and since I became prime minister it’s fallen by over 9 per cent,” he said on Thursday.

“When Labor were in power, electricity prices doubled. They increased by over 100 per cent, an average annual increase of over 12 per cent.”

Meanwhile, Labor's Jim Chalmers said the energy spike is a "cost of living crisis" which happened under the Morrison Government.

“Power prices are going up, healthcare’s becoming harder to access and harder to afford, groceries are going through the roof, petrol is unaffordable for a lot families right across the board, there are cost of living pressures and this is a cost of living crisis on Scott Morrison’s watch," he said in a Friday press conference.

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/households-are-warned-to-brace-for-rising-power-bills-as-wholesale-electricity-prices-more-than-double/news-story/95384c60c1bfa54a3f70afec0fb68930

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Election 2022: Don’t mention the climate wars

Anthony Albanese has had his “never, ever” moment of this year’s federal election campaign: “There will be no carbon tax, ever,” he vowed on Wednesday under pressure during a radio interview.

Julia Gillard, as Labor prime minister in 2010, was there before him: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” And in 1995 John Howard, then opposition leader, responded to an aggressive journalist asking if there would “never, ever” be a GST: “Never ever. It’s dead.”

Albanese’s pledge was driven by a recognition that the impact of a carbon price in whatever form was no longer theoretical but a political reality. As well, it is a sign that subcontracting out the climate change attack on Liberal MPs in affluent inner-city electorates to Greens warriors and Climate 200 “teal” activists is not a complete answer for Labor. There is still the same challenge of being able to promote climate action in the city while protecting jobs outside the city.

It also was a tacit admission that Labor is failing on explaining its policies and how they would work – not just to the general voting population but to specific areas of pivotal political importance.

At the halfway mark of the campaign and on the eve of Albanese’s campaign launch, which will contain the detail of policies three years in the making and likely involve US Democrat-style infrastructure spending as well as social support in housing and childcare, there is a need for more rigour from Labor.

Apart from the small-target strategy leading to a paucity of major detailed policy, there has been an inability to explain how the policies would work and what they would cost. Since the budget, central promises and policies from Labor such as the guarantee of 24-hour nurses in aged care, border protection, carbon pricing, China’s aggression in the Pacific, new agricultural visa limits and a wage rise for health workers have been paused, reworked, confused and poorly explained.

While Albanese spent seven days in Covid isolation at home his B team, particularly would-be deputy prime minister and defence minister Richard Marles, badly handled the potential impact of the price for carbon offsets for 215 industries – including 15 coalminers in the crucial Hunter Valley of NSW.

For a week before Albanese acted, the issue of job losses for mining communities in the Hunter had festered as former resources minister Matt Canavan campaigned for the Nationals in the seat of Hunter, where long-term traditional Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon is retiring. Local Labor MP for Shortland Pat Conroy, the party’s assistant climate change spokesman, and MP for Paterson Meryl Swanson both played down the threat of Labor’s policy of using the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to hasten the pace of emissions reduction and force companies to buy carbon credits to offset carbon emissions.

Anthony Albanese will rejoin the labor campaign trail today – when the Opposition takes it pitch to lower the cost of…
Conroy said the coalminers were exempt and Swanson said they would “work out” a convenient arrangement. Both were wrong and both were contradicted by Chris Bowen, the climate change spokesman. Marles, who is also employment spokesman, couldn’t explain the policy when it was announced and criticised six months ago for the potential to close businesses and oust 100,000 workers, and this week he simply couldn’t answer the questions.

As the Coalition moved into a strong regional phase of the campaign with Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce out in the bush and out of the headlines and Scott Morrison announcing the creation of 450,000 regional jobs over five years, in Queensland the coalminers’ fears were growing and spreading.

In response to Labor claims it was the same scheme introduced by Tony Abbott to get the removal of the carbon tax through the Senate, Morrison said: “What Labor is doing is binding them on this and issuing penalties on those companies so they couldn’t be more different. What Labor has is a tax, a sneaky carbon tax on traditional industries in this country, and that’s not good for regional Australia. It is not good at all.” Whitehaven Coal chief executive Paul Flynn said he feared Labor’s strengthened safeguards mechanism would be a “carbon levy by stealth” and it was not true it was the same as the Coalition’s safeguard mechanism.

“The fact the ALP sees such an enlarged role for the Clean Energy Regulator in negotiating with impacted facilities suggests some in Labor are only just beginning to turn their minds to what this policy might look like in practice and what the impacts could be across the economy,” Flynn told The Australian.

Sky News reporter Julia Bradley says Labor is keeping an “incredibly tight lid” on the movements of Opposition…
By not being on top of detail, not being able to carry an argument and, most crucially, not being able to say what the policy would mean until after the election, the Labor team was not just endangering the seat of Hunter – which was saved for Labor by One Nation preferences in 2019 – but also other seats in NSW and more broadly in Queensland and resource-rich Western Australia.

Labor needs to win seats in Queensland and to hold seats such as the Hunter if it is to have any chance of realising Albanese’s aspiration of a majority Labor government. That’s why Albanese had to cut the Gordian knot of a carbon tax from his home in inner-Sydney’s Marrickville.

When political leaders make firm declarations during election campaigns, the matter of most immediate importance is not whether they will be believed or whether they will breach the pledge – what is most important is why they said it. After years of avoiding absolute declarations, dodging tricky questions or batting away aggression why does a leader feel compelled to break all the election campaign rules and make an absolute promise that may have to be broken in some form in the future?

It’s because they believe they have no choice, that the issue is absolutely important in the electorate, is crucial to ensuring victory, and there needs to be an irrevocable denial to kill the debate.

Albanese and Morrison are revisiting the climate wars between the major parties when a bipartisan policy of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 would have seemed to be grounds for a neutralisation of the debate after decades of political infighting.

When Albanese released the ALP policy six months ago he said it was time to “put the climate wars behind us (and) unite around a common vision”. “We can become a renewable energy superpower,” he said. “Over the last decade the Coalition has announced over 20 energy policies and not landed a single one. Business has missed out on certainty, and Australians have missed out on jobs.”

The reason for the revisitation is because the common 2050 target means the implementation of the policy, the pace of change, the incentives or punishments used to achieve targets and the balance between jobs created and lost is now a real argument with real impacts on industry and workers.

It is not just a two-way fight between the ALP and the Coalition but also has the Greens and Climate 200 teal independents cannibalising each other and Labor as they try to oust inner-city Liberals such as Josh Frydenberg and Tim Wilson in Melbourne and Trent Zimmerman and Dave Sharma in Sydney. At appearances in his own electorate of Kooyong and neighbouring Liberal-held seats, the Treasurer was not asked about regional jobs threatened by carbon pricing but whether net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 was still Coalition policy and would transgender women be allowed to use new sports facilities.

At the other end of the fight Coalition and Labor MPs face challenges from One Nation and United Australia Party, which campaign on both the major parties selling out regional workers. Morrison’s continued commitment this week to his policy of net-zero by 2050, agreed at the Glasgow climate change conference last year, has cost the Coalition a lot of support among conservative voters.

So, Albanese and Morrison are still in the climate wars, it’s just that the dichotomies between city and regional areas are greater, there are more players and a carbon price – which Gillard had the foolhardy bravery to call a carbon tax – is much, much closer.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/election-2022-dont-mention-the-climate-wars/news-story/1f102a1551b3b6984035aa2d14b3c192

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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May 01, 2022

Elite Greenies are out of touch

It’s easy to bang on about vehicle emissions when everything you need is on your doorstep. What about people whose school or doctor is hours from home, asks Vikki Campion.

If a nanny cares for your children, a maid cleans your clothes, a chauffeur drives your car, or a cleaner fixes the house, you are better off than most. Tick all, and congratulations, you have a brilliant resume representing Climate 200.

Harbourside heirs and heiresses will never know what it is to choose between the $8/500g mince and a $1.75 can of lentils because of budget instead of any moral ideal.

The dilemma is not what restaurant to go to, but which bill to pay.

Wealthy circles become smaller, as more of those around them become staff. Time for coffee to talk politics is easier to find when others are doing the housework.

With skyrocketing power prices from the closure of coal-fired power stations, people who could not change a tyre are apparently changing the climate.

I would never expect Wentworth’s so-called independent teal candidate Allegra Spender, who went to the $34,000-a-year private girls school Ascham and then Cambridge, to understand. Nor would I expect Warringah’s Olympic skier Zali Steggall, who grew up in the French Alps.

The galling thing is that apart from the beautiful luck of the life that fell in their lap, they believe they have the right to purchase politics as well.

Put it on the shelf between the macadamias and the Veuve.

But from North Sydney’s independent Kylea Tink, originally from Coonabarabran, I expect more.

Ms Tink backed a road user tax “charging on the odometer” in a Sky candidates forum on Thursday, claiming the biggest death rate is due to vehicle emissions, compared to “only 1200 of road accidents”.

Please, Kylea, go home to Parkes, to your old neighbouring town of Baradine where the “daycare” is a neighbour’s place and the people with the oldest, most fuel-inefficient cars, most likely to break down, live the furthest from town in the cheapest houses.

Tell Baradine, with a median household income of $771 a week, who get one X-ray day per week — otherwise, they have a four-hour return trip to Dubbo — that they need to buy an electric car, and that they will have to pay a road user tax “on the odometer”.

You patronise them by saying rural and regional communities “are incredibly resilient”, like a person thrown out of a boat by necessity is a good swimmer or drowns.

At the Baradine shop yesterday, the shearer paid $3.95 for two litres of milk and $3.95 for a no-name basic loaf of white bread. In North Sydney, the bread equivalent was $1.70 at Woolworths, while the same 2L milk was $2.60.

People in Baradine are paying Harris Farm prices for home brand.

Surely Ms Tink, a publicly-educated rural high school student, knows deep down how a policy like that would be taken at home.

A policy that works for the inner-city rich with light rail on their doorstep leaves us in the dust.

Regionalisation Minister Bridget McKenzie tried explaining this at the national Press Club this week and, perhaps proving her point, all questions from the media focused on climate change in Canberra instead of the bush.

Charging by the odometer, kids won’t go to school, doctors’ appointments will be put off, conditions allowed to worsen, and the poor become impoverished.

We can see the 100 per cent increase in wholesale power prices now, directly attributable to the closure of coal-fired power stations and the jagged road to renewables. Wasn’t all power going to become cheaper?

Shortly after a joint press conference with two Climate 200 candidates, Ms Tink denied being supported by Simon Holmes a Court, even though his website discloses he does.

The price of her support in a hung parliament, she said, would be vehicle emissions standards.

Go home to Baradine and tell that to the people whose median weekly household income is one-third of North Sydney’s. Who, between tyres, rego and third party insurance, can barely afford the car they have now, let alone buy an EV. Who put off car services in the same way they stretch out haircuts. The Climate 200 Cafe has hairdressers all the way to
the ferry.

If you are a dad who goes to work every day and has three kids at home, do you think Ms Spender or Mr Holmes a Court understands your stress? Who can take a couple of years off? Others can’t take a gap year followed by a sabbatical on paying power bills because someone else will cover for them.

If you fight with your partner about using the dryer because of the electricity bill, then welcome to the world of the rest of us.

What power you should use, what car you drive, what views you should hold and, oh, which school your child is booked into.

Welcome to Climate 200.

What separates the major parties from the independents is their life experience.

The LNP have Phil Thompson and Jim Molan, wounded veterans; Llew O’Brien, Peter Dutton, Jason Wood, Pat Conaghan, all former cops, and doctors, teachers, graziers, farmers, small-business owners — people whose life has not been cushioned by generational wealth.

Most importantly, they have people out of sight of the Harbour Bridge.

Why does no one think we are getting a carbon tax with a new focus-grouped name? The independent issues will become policies for people who hear little about the broader circumstances of life.

Labor is not getting 76 seats on its own — a vote for them is for putting the elites into power. And the elites don’t think about household problems.

Climate is only a big issue when money isn’t.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/vikki-campion-climate-200-elites-are-out-of-touch-with-real-australia/news-story/b7a7e418f1c60385616fcdec8ee93681

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NSW government ministers have slammed 'woke' inclusion training seminars. Colleagues were told to not use word 'mate'

NSW government ministers have slammed a 'woke' inclusion training seminar after they were told they should not refer to each other as 'mate'.

The NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet conducted a series of 'diversity and inclusion' consultations this week.

The program listed a number of workplace changes including bans on drinking alcohol in the office, yelling at colleagues and gossiping about staff.

The seminars are estimated to have cost taxpayers $202,000.

Some ministers have criticised the 'Respect at Work' consultations and labelled them as 'PC insanity', 'straight out of 1984' and 'mumbo jumbo'.

'I use 'mate' all the time – it's as Australian as you can get. How can it be offensive?' one told The Daily Telegraph.

Another added: 'We're not allowed to have individual opinions. We have to engage in group thought … This is straight out of 1984.'

All staff must be invited out to after-work drinks to ensure 'inclusivity' while work tasks must be fairly divided between senior and junior colleagues.

The seminars lasted three-and-a-half hours and were run by an external 'diversity and inclusion' consultant.

The sessions were aimed at fostering 'inclusive leadership', 'unconscious bias and mindful inclusion', 'gender equity' and 'cultural inclusion'.

Ministers were also taught how to properly report allegations of sexual abuse to the department.

A Department of Premier and Cabinet spokesman said the consultations were held in response to a report into bullying and harassment.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10771481/NSW-government-ministers-told-not-use-word-mate-woke-inclusion-training-seminar.html

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Another statue under attack

Proud premier or unprincipled pariah? That is the verdict about to be delivered on William Lodewyk Crowther, 137 years after this death.

The 15th Tasmanian premier was a lauded naturalist and valued surgeon, praised for his free treatment of the poor.

However, the man enthusiastically cheered after his death in 1885 as “a grand old doctor and premier” had an indelible stain on his reputation.

In 1869, embroiled in an unseemly competition to secure the remains of William Lanne, seen then as the “last full-blood” Tasmanian Aboriginal man, Crowther was accused of severing and stealing Lanne’s skull.

Even at the time, such acts were beyond the pale, resulting in an inquiry and subsequent loss of Crowther’s hospital position.

Now the Hobart City Council must decide whether his actions of 1869 warrant the removal of his statue in 2022.

The large, elevated sculpture that dominates a corner of Hobart’s busy Franklin Square was erected in 1889 by “a grateful public and sincere personal friends … to perpetuate the memory of long and zealous political professional services rendered to this colony”.

“Perpetuate no longer” is the cry from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, which is demanding the monument to a “grave robbing … racist” be “removed and destroyed”, an option on the table as the council deliberates its future.

“Crowther’s statue symbolises the atrocities committed against Aboriginal people of the time because of their race,” said the centre’s campaign manager, Nala Mansell.

“Anyone who supports the glorification of such racist and barbaric actions by demanding the statue remains can only be seen as supporting such actions.

“Anyone with any sort of conscience would understand why the statue of Crowther needs to be removed and destroyed. His actions were solely based on his racist idea that Aborigines were somehow inferior.”

The council funded a series of “truth telling” art installations at the statue last year, with some alleged historical inaccuracies. Acting lord mayor Helen Burnet said the council must now decide the statue’s permanent fate.

“The project has revealed a strong desire from the community for further information in Franklin Square about William Crowther, William Lanne and the interaction between them,” she said. “The future of the monument will be determined by the council following extensive consultation with relevant individuals and organisations.”

Ms Mansell and others would like to see Crowther’s statue replaced with a memorial to Lanne, a popular figure and pioneering whaler also known as “King Billy”. This would belatedly afford Lanne the respect he was so heinously denied by Hobart’s “gentlemen” bone hunters after his death on March 3, 1869.

Crowther wanted Lanne’s remains for the Royal College of Surgeons, London, while colleague George Stokell wanted them for the Royal Society of Tasmania.

According to accounts, Crowther invited Stokell to his house at 8pm the day after Lanne’s death. While Crowther’s wife kept Stokell talking, Crowther and his son Bingham were in the “dead house” removing Lanne’s skull. Stokell and Royal Society allies responded by severing Lanne’s hands and feet and later exhuming and stealing what was left of his body, de-boning it and drying the bones on the hospital roof.

Despite the grisly saga, some historians are fiercely opposed to the removal and destruction of Crowther’s statue.

“It’s an outrageous suggestion,” said local historian Reg Watson. “History is a science and should remain free from political influence. There are aspects of Crowther’s career that were shady but he’s part of Tasmanian history.”

A compromise could be the creation next to the statue of a monument or plaque that memorialises Lanne and explains Crowther’s ill deeds. “But it has to be historically correct, and free of political input,” Mr Watson said.

Fellow historian Scott Seymour agreed. “We can’t remove these people from history, regardless of how much we’d like to,” Mr Seymour said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/grisly-history-could-topple-tasmanian-premier-william-crowthers-legacy/news-story/843cc0716917572a4a7649668beea055

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Election 2022: $50bn hit if Labor axes construction watchdog

Anthony Albanese’s plans to abolish the construction watchdog could deliver a $50bn hit to the economy, add to inflation and cut up to 4000 jobs a year, according to an independent report detailing the costs of removing the industrial relations safeguards for the critical sector.

The damning findings into Labor’s pledge to dismantle the Australian Building and Construction Commission found that the policy would have significant impacts for rebuilding the post-Covid economy but also damage key sectors including housing, defence and health while undermining plans for a sovereign manufacturing revival.

It would also add to inflationary pressures and lead to an estimated $10bn blowout in the cost of state infrastructure pipelines, which would be borne by the taxpayer.

The report by Ernst & Young and commissioned by Master Builders Australia warned that abolishing the ABCC would severely impact housing costs and have an inflationary impact from rising industrial action across critical sectors that rely on construction.

Its findings will further fuel the Coalition’s election attacks over Anthony Albanese’s pro-union industrial relations policy and raise doubts about Labor’s claims to address inflationary pressures.

The report modelled three potential impacts ranging from a low to high range. The high range suggests economic losses of up to $75bn by 2030.

The mid-range scenario would result in a fall in the output of the construction sector of about $16.3bn by 2025 and a decline in overall economic activity of $18.4bn by 2025.

It predicts a fall in manufacturing output of $4.8bn by 2025 and $13.1bn by 2030, and a decline in services output of $5.9bn by 2025 and $19.5bn by 2030. The flow-on effects to the broader economy would be significant, it warned, considering the key role the sector plays in the productive capacity of the economy.

“To the end of the next decade, and based on the potential industry impacts, abolishing the ABCC could lead to significant economic losses,” the report said. “Output in the construction sector could fall by around $35.4bn by 2030 as higher cost inflation makes fewer projects possible, and capital is reallocated to other economic activities. Overall economic activity could decline by $47.6bn by 2030 as higher costs and lower productivity act as a handbrake to other sectors.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/election-2022-50bn-hit-if-labor-axes-construction-watchdog/news-story/7300ffa18f1dfe43507463d915e86dd3