This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 October, 2020
Football association bans the Australian national anthem from major series
The NRL has abandoned the national anthem for the game’s biggest showpiece event, the State of Origin series.
It will be the first time in 40 years the anthem will not be played before the kick-off when the series begins in Adelaide on Wednesday night.
The independent commission made the controversial decision at a meeting on Wednesday after consultation with the chairmen of the NSW and QLD organisations.
The explanation given was that the event is not a contest between international countries.
However the NRL has confirmed the anthem will remain for grand finals and Test matches.
The anthem became a huge issue in the NSW camp last year when Blues stars Latrell Mitchell, Cody Walker and Josh Addo-Carr spoke out before the game about their refusal to sing.
The Daily Telegraph understands the NSW Rugby League was against scrapping the anthem but bowed to the wishes of the NRL.
While Indigenous Blues opted against singing the anthem last year, NSW stars including captain Boyd Cordner, Jake Trbojevic and Damien Cook said they would sing the Australian national anthem “loud and proud”.
NSW Origin coach Brad Fittler had vowed to support any indigenous Blues players who wish to remain silent for Advance Australia Fair in 2020, saying: “Our anthem, it definitely needs work”.
Earlier this year, the ARL Commission scrapped the national anthem at the annual All Stars match on the advice of the game’s indigenous players.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/sport/nrl/nrl-bans-the-australian-national-anthem-from-state-of-origin-series/news-story/d2261b7542ac498d3e444be53edb8868
Coronavirus: Sad side-effect is our meek acceptance of Premiers’ power grab
And so the recovery begins. Lily-white Victorians are emerging from their homes, their forearms shielding themselves from the sun as they take tentative steps. Young children are discovering there is another world outside their five kilometres radius.
Cafés and restaurants on Carlton’s Lygon Street are chockers, families amble through the botanical gardens, crowds flock to St Kilda beach, and in the city’s south-east region marauding gangs will once again commit home invasions and carjackings.
Normality will not be restored overnight, however. Paradoxically, the absence of circling police drones will keep many awake who are accustomed to hearing their sound. Likewise, it will be a disconcerting experience for motorists to drive without stopping at checkpoints to produce papers. People will chat with their neighbours over the fence as opposed to reporting them to the authorities. East Germany made the transition, and surely Victoria can. Assuming of course there is no third wave.
Artists, musicians, and poets are probably writing peans for the Andrews government. You can expect soon to hear actor Magda Szubanski will be narrating the upcoming production “Dan, the Musical” in honour of the Victorian Premier.
The official Victorian version of the state’s recovery will make for amusing reading.
Yesterday Health Minister Martin Foley claimed the state’s contact tracing system had withstood the “stress test of the real world”; while Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton maintained it was the best in the country. Spare us. This is the same department which only two months ago was using spreadsheets, pen, paper, and fax machines for contact tracing.
It would be premature to talk of Australia having beaten COVID-19, but not so to talk about the virus’ legacy. Sadly, it is a depressing one overall. To begin with, it has shown how ill-suited a federation is to deal with the crisis. Unlike New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who presides over a unitary system of government, the preferred approach of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his cabinet largely meant naught when it came to the issue of a co-ordinated response.
Even calling our country a federation is a stretch. We are at best a confederation. Apart from NSW, the states have become fiefdoms. Almost overnight, being an Australian meant nothing if you attempted to cross a state border. South Australia, for example, at one stage was denying entry to Victorians in border towns who needed lifesaving medical treatment in Adelaide, while at the same time making plans to fly in 800 foreign students to its three universities.
Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein even ordered all non-Tasmanians to leave the island in March, declaring “I make no apologies for working hard to keep Tasmanians safe”.
Presumably he does not plan to expel GST allocation, which makes up 40 per cent of the state’s revenue.
A panicked response that leads to an arbitrary closure is one thing. But premiers playing to populist sentiment in closing their borders is another, as demonstrated by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in her re-election campaign. As someone with a reputation as a vacillator and a mere figurehead, she seized on the virus to portray herself as a resolute leader. In doing so she shut out far north NSW residents, many of whom are dependent on Queensland hospitals for treatment.
In his maiden speech to Western Australia’s Parliament in 1996, a young Mark McGowan made much of his background as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy, a role in which presumably he put aside provincial yearnings. “It was Labor that successfully led this nation through the darkest days of both World Wars,” he said, lauding in particular the leadership of Prime Minister John Curtin.
As leaders, both Curtin and McGowan shared a couple of traits. Both were elected by the citizens of WA, but neither was born or raised in that state. That is where the similarity ends. Curtin was a principled man who unified the country under his leadership. Conversely, McGowan has opportunistically used the greatest threat to Australia since World War II to pick a fight with the rest of the country, having closed WA’s borders since March, even to residents from states and territories that have long recorded no cases of community transmission of the virus.
McGowan has insisted he is acting on health advice. But being a parochial braggart, he gave himself away earlier this month with his audacious declaration that opening WA to South Australia and the Northern Territory would bring no economic benefit. “All we would do is lose jobs, were we to open to those states,” he said. “They’re only saying all this for very self-interested reasons because we have higher incomes and people who are more used to travelling and therefore we will have more tourists from West Australians go to the east.”
As they say, if you wish to ascertain a man’s character, give him power.
Every Australian has a constitutional right to cross state borders, but that means little if the federal government does not act against those who would infringe it.
By and large, the Morrison government has only made token efforts to defend this right, instead relying on a proxy, that being mining billionaire Clive Palmer, who has initiated proceedings in the High Court against the WA Government.
According to Attorney-General Christian Porter, the Commonwealth simply wanted to realise “moderate middle ground” when it intervened when the matter was before the Federal Court, but he later withdrew from proceedings. It was both pusillanimous and disheartening. As such, any subsequent protest by Morrison against state closures merely emphasises his government’s impotence.
But only a fool would leave it to governments to protect civil rights, and this is an area where Australians have let themselves down badly. This virus has proved the anti-authoritarian element no longer exists in the Australian psyche. We have largely accepted questionable restrictions on our liberty but have condemned journalists who have insisted leaders account for these decisions. As evident in polling regarding support for border closures, premiers such as McGowan and Palaszczuk have delighted in our malleability.
And it is not just the politicians who increasingly exercise control over our lives. Thanks to the creeping effect we largely accept that officials in the form of anti-discrimination tribunes and human rights commissioners will regulate our behaviour. Now the virus has accelerated the rise of the bureaucratic class. Who could forget Queensland’s chief health officer Jeannette Young, who, having blocked interstate relatives from attending funerals, decided to admit Hollywood actor Tom Hanks because “entertainment and film bring a lot of money into this state”. Excuse me?
That is not to say that everything that follows this virus is bad. For example, it is refreshing to see people have little time for the climate change evangelists and rent-seekers. Yes, I am talking to you, Zali Steggall, the federal MP and self-proclaimed “climate leader” who is desperately seeking relevance. And for us OCD types, it is joyful to see the proliferation of automatic soap dispensers.
But perhaps the most evident legacy is the burgeoning government debt, which is expected to rise to $1.5 trillion by the end of the decade. We simply cannot continue this taxpayer-funded largesse. Instead we need innovative ideas to instigate an economic recovery.
On that note, it is vital when deciding that issue to utilise those parts of industry that have been dormant because of the virus. My big idea is to lobby Parliament to allow the deportations of non-citizens in cases when the person commits an offence that results in six months or more imprisonment (currently the minimum is 12 months).
This could be the answer to Qantas and Virgin’s recovery. Just think: we would need to commission an entire fleet of planes for the trans-Tasman route alone. I am not sure what is the most attractive proposition: the recovery of our airline industry or the thought of Jacinda losing it. What is your big idea?
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/coronavirus-sad-sideeffect-is-our-meek-acceptance-of-premiers-power-grab/news-story/fd7f2a9b961dc78fa1d4baae35873edd
Lloyd's insurer Apollo to stop underwriting Adani coal mine from Sept. 2021
Adani is big enough to self-insure
Lloyd's of London firm Apollo has written insurance for Adani Enterprises' Carmichael thermal coal mine which expires in Sept 2021 but is not planning to provide any further insurance for the mine, according to a memo seen by Reuters.
Carmichael has provoked controversy in Australia because it would open up a new thermal coal basin at a time of growing concerns over global warming, in a region that is in need of jobs.
Adani has begun construction at Carmichael, which will start by producing 10 million tonnes of coal per year together with an associated rail project, and expects first production in 2021.
"We participate in one construction liability policy in respect of Adani Carmichael...this particular policy terminates in September 2021 after which we will no longer provide any insurance cover for this project," chair of Apollo Syndicate Management Julian Cusack said in the memo.
"We have recently declined to participate in an additional policy relating to the port and rail extension and have agreed that we will not participate in any further insurance policies for risks associated with this project."
Cusack confirmed to Reuters via LinkedIn that he had written the memo. Adani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many insurers, mainly in Europe, have scaled back their exposure to coal.
Lloyd's of London, which has more than 90 syndicate members, does not have an overarching policy on coal, though the Stop Adani campaign says 17 Lloyd's insurers have ruled out insuring the mine.
"It is encouraging to see that 27 major insurers, including those which have previously underwritten this disastrous project - like Apollo - are now refusing insurance to Adani," said Pablo Brait, campaigner at Australian action group Market Forces.
"The project will help open up a massive new thermal coal basin in the midst of a climate crisis...any insurer that provides coverage for Adani's coal operations in Australia is seriously risking its reputation."
https://www.miningweekly.com/article/lloyds-insurer-apollo-to-stop-underwriting-adani-coal-mine-from-sept-2021-2020-10-28
Australia defies international pressure to set emissions targets
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he will not be dictated to by other governments' climate change goals, declaring he is not worried about the future of Australia's exports despite four of the country's top trading partners adopting net-zero emissions targets.
China, Japan, Britain and South Korea, which account for more than $310 billion in Australian annual trade between them, have all now adopted the emissions target by 2050 or 2060, ramping up pressure on Australia's fossil fuel industry. Coal and natural gas alone are worth more than 25 per cent of Australia's exports, or $110 billion each year.
"I am not concerned about our future exports," Mr Morrison said on Wednesday. "Australia will set our policies here. Our policies won't be set in the United Kingdom, they won't be set in Brussels, they won't be set in any part of the world other than here."
As the Prime Minister spoke in Canberra, the South Korean President Moon Jae-in was addressing his own parliament in Seoul announcing his country would also pursue a net-zero target by 2050.
"Transitioning from coal to renewable energy, the government will create new markets, industries and jobs," Mr Moon told the National Assembly on Wednesday.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a phone call on Tuesday encouraged Mr Morrison to take "bold action" on climate change and "emphasise the importance of setting ambitious targets to cut emissions and reach net zero".
Responding to the UK government's version of the phone call, Mr Morrison said Mr Johnson understood that Australia would make "sovereign decisions" on the targets it set.
"It shouldn't come at the cost of higher prices for the daily things that our citizens depend on," he said.
"One thing the British Prime Minister and I agree on is that achieving emissions reductions shouldn't come at the cost of jobs in Australia or the UK."
Major Australian export companies such as Rio Tinto, BHP, major agriculture groups and multinational food companies are pursuing carbon neutrality, which experts say is a move to avoid being stung with trade tariffs or charges by countries that have set net-zero targets.
The Morrison government has argued it will comply with the terms of the Paris climate agreement by reaching net zero by sometime in the second half of the century but has not set a firm target.
Mr Morrison claimed on Wednesday that Australia's emissions had fallen by 14 per cent since 2005, compared to 1 per cent for New Zealand and 0 per cent for Canada. The comparison of emissions reduction between different countries has been disputed with differences over methods and the use of carryover credits. Mr Morrison said the world would "not really make a lot of progress" without widespread renewable technology to ensure developing economies like India and Vietnam could also reduce emissions.
"Our record on this speaks for itself. When we make commitments in Australia's interests then we will meet those commitments as well," Mr Morrison said.
But top scientists contend that for Australia to honour the Paris agreement - which requires countries to follow the best available scientific advice on how to limit global warming to less than two degrees — the country must reach net-zero emissions before 2050.
The federal government’s opposition to commit to reaching the target by 2050 also puts it out of step with all states and territories, which are pursuing carbon-neutral goals.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-defies-international-pressure-to-set-emissions-targets-20201028-p569ed.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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29 October, 2020
'We're full!' Overwhelming number of Australians say the country doesn't need any more immigration as voters reject 'leftist elites'
An overwhelming majority of Australians oppose high immigration, fearing it could affect their way of life, a study has found.
Before the pandemic saw the border closed to non-citizens and non-residents in March, Australia's net annual immigration rate was approaching 200,000.
Australia's population also surpassed the 25million mark in August 2018 - 24 years earlier than predicted in the federal government's inaugural Intergenerational Report of 2002.
With Sydney and Melbourne among the world's least affordable housing markets, 72 per cent of respondents have told The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) Australia was full.
The survey of 2,029 people was taken in October and November 2019 - four months before Prime Minister Scott Morrison closed Australia's border to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Half the people polled wanted a reduction in immigration, fearing it caused more pollution and congestion.
Study authors and sociologists Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell said rapid population growth before the pandemic had worried a majority of Australians, who regarded both major parties are representing the interests of 'leftist elites'.
'High immigration was responsible for the deterioration of the quality of life in Australia's big cities, as well as stressing its natural environment,' they said in an opinion piece for News Corp.
'Moreover, at least half the electorate do not support the progressive cultural values that left elites (including Labor’s leaders) regard as legitimating high immigration. 'This is a key finding since it shows that there is only lukewarm support for the core Big Australia strategy of high immigration.
'We can say with confidence based on our and other surveys that half the electorate are prepared to say, within the safety of an anonymous survey, that immigration should be reduced.'
Former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd a decade ago declared himself to be a supporter of a 'big Australia', with business leaders also favouring high population growth.
His Liberal predecessor John Howard two decades ago increased net immigration levels to the six-figures, putting them well above the 20th century average of 70,000 a year.
The TAPRI survey however found people no longer believed it was 'possible' to accommodate more immigrants.
'The conditions that made it possible to sustain a Big Australia and ignore this concern no longer exist in the post-Covid environment,' the study read.
'If the Coalition, or Labor, does try to revive a Big Australia many of these voters would respond readily to any attempt to mobilise them.
Australia's population stood at 25,715,134 as of October 27, 2020.
The survey found that most respondents who took a stance against more immigration were not university educated, while those with a degree were more likely to back immigration.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8882601/Overwhelming-number-Australians-say-country-doesnt-need-immigration.html
While our schools coach kids in social activism, literacy takes a back seat
School students are being groomed for social activism while too many are still functionally illiterate as they leave the classroom.
A new OECD report shows that Australia’s school system has an excess focus on students developing “awareness of global issues”.
Little wonder our students’ performance in the OECD-run Program for International Student Assessment has plummeted faster than almost any other country. More than one in five 15-year-olds don’t have the essential literacy and numeracy they will need to be successful in work or further study.
It provides yet further evidence that Australia’s school system has got its priorities upside-down. Of course we should encourage our children to be good global citizens. It’s heartening to know they are inclusive and aware of diversity. They report more positive attitudes about immigrants and embrace the perspectives of others than in most OECD countries.
The problem is that efforts of the school system to engineer increased “global competences” comes at a cost — namely the education of our young learners — and for two reasons.
First, there is only so much time in the school day and year. And Australian students already spend more time in the classroom than in most countries. The problem is that this time is not being used well. For decades, teachers and educationalists have warned that the school curriculum has become bloated and overcrowded. Flirting with fashionable but untested teaching trends, entertaining fringe educational issues and bringing woke causes to the classroom are all part of the problem.
Despite this obvious progressive march through the education system, concern over infiltration of those ideas into the curriculum and schools has been routinely dismissed as little more than “conservative hysteria”.
There are now multiple reviews of school curriculums under way across the country, but there is little hope the malign and wasteful influences will be struck out.
A central element of the Australian curriculum — which sets the pace for the states and territories — is the focus on so-called “general capabilities”. The competences that are taught and assessed include: personal and social capability; ethical understanding; and intercultural understanding — nice-to-haves, but surely not the centrepiece of schooling.
We need to focus on addressing our students’ literacy and numeracy deficits, with a drive for higher academic standards and expectations from our educators.
The second problem is that, while the curriculum has embraced global issues, it has resisted any effort to reinforce Australian ones. Our students are unfamiliar with our own history, how our democracy works, and have decreasing (or little) national pride.
They’re encouraged to identify as global citizens, rather than as Australians — witness the constant undermining of our national holidays and traditions. Students are often misled to believe our country is racist, sexist, and a selfish polluter. Our school system should educate away foolish misconceptions, rather than promote them in the name of postmodernism and critical theory.
It’s true that the continued pace of globalisation will mean our teenagers need more global awareness than in decades past. But the progressive left has twisted this to mean exclusion of nationhood. We need more, not less, emphasis on Australian civics and citizenship — something that successive governments have promised but failed to deliver.
Not only does the education of school students suffer, but so does their wellbeing.
It’s not standardised testing and end-of-school exams that has resulted in the heightened anxiety of our teens but rather the obsessive preaching of celebrity activists, such as Greta Thunberg, who are preoccupied with building students’ political activism.
We must put an end to the needless sacrificing of our young learners’ futures in service of progressive globalism. In its place, we need to remodel a rigorous and ambitious education system that doesn’t continue to ignore national aspirations and needs.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/while-our-schools-coach-kids-in-social-activism-literacy-takes-a-back-seat/news-story/f1ad98394a2a8043cbcdabc00e41e319
Negative prices: South Australia solar farms had to pay to produce in September
Perverse. Their output has no relationship to the need for it -- so it is often worthless
South Australia’s three large scale solar farms had to effectively pay to produce in the month of September – as the average price of solar power in the state’s grid fell to minus $9.70 a megawatt hour over the calendar month.
“Record low wholesale prices in September resulted in South Australian solar farms having to pay $9.70/MWh to generate,” the Australian Energy Market Operator notes in its latest Quarterly Energy Dynamics report.
Over the whole quarter, the volume weighted average price of large scale solar was $23/MWh, down some 62 per cent from the same time in 2019, while the average price for all electricity produced in South Australia for the quarter was $40/MWh.
There are several reasons for the negative price of South Australia solar – firstly the increase in output from large scale solar, as Bungala 2 finally reached full output, the continued rapid expansion of rooftop solar, which in turn is dramatically reducing operating demand in the middle of the day, and grid constraints which limited the amount of exports from South Australia into Victoria.
South Australia has three large scale solar farms, the 110MW Bungala One installation near Port Augusta, the neighbouring 110MW Bungala Two (which has only just reached full output after nearly two years of delays due to technical issues), and the 95MW Tailem Bend solar farm near the town of the same name.
Tailem Bend usually ducks negative pricing events, turning its output down to zero under the terms of its long term power purchase agreement with Snowy Hydro.
But the two Bungala solar farms, under long term contracts with Origin Energy, plough through the negative prices. The exact nature of the contracts is not known, but it is not necessarily a bad thing for either party, but it’s not a great market signal for more solar, or for more off-take agreements – although it is for storage.
Across the National Electricity Market, which comprises South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, NSW and Queensland, the average price for solar fell to $29/MWh in the September quarter, and the average price for wind fell to $38/MWh, both representing falls of around 50 per cent from the same period a year earlier.
AEMO’s QED report notes that curtailment of wind and solar farms across the NEM rose to 5.5 per cent in the September quarter, a result of the record levels of negative pricing events in South Australia and Queensland, and newly emerging system strength issues in north Queensland.
In Queensland, two solar farms and one wind farm were told of system strength issues that would cause their output to be reduced significantly, or down to zero, depending on conditions, and then another nine solar farms were told the same thing as new modelling unveiled new problems.
In Queensland, the average constraint for wind and solar over the whole quarter was 49MW, up from 5MW in the same period last year. Ironically, the situation was worsened by increased outages at the state’s coal fired generators. New synchronous condensers may alleviate that issue.
Economic constraints – the decision by generators to “self-curtail” in the face of negative prices – meant that on average there was 50MW of curtailment of wind and solar farms through the September quarter. AEMO says 70 per cent of that curtailment occurred in daytime hours between 7am and 7pm.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/negative-prices-south-australia-solar-farms-had-to-pay-to-produce-in-september-77375/
Queensland police say officer acted appropriately in incident that injured Brisbane refugee protester
The cops were trying to get him away from a fence he was trying to pull down
Queensland police say a video in which an officer appears to hit a refugee protester in the head at a Brisbane rally on Sunday makes the incident "appear far worse than it is".
But Jeff Rickertt, the man who was injured in the incident, rejected the police assessment of the incident as "complete nonsense".
"I felt the force of the blow. My initial reaction was that I'd been hit by a fist," Mr Rickertt said after being released from hospital on Monday afternoon.
He said a CT scan had found no serious head injury, and that he had a laceration on his ear and a dull headache but "otherwise I'm fine".
Tensions between police and activists had been building over a series of protests against the ongoing detention of refugees and asylum seekers at a hotel in the Brisbane suburb of Kangaroo Point.
Protesters provided the ABC with video of what some activists believed was a police officer hitting Mr Rickertt without provocation.
Mr Rickertt was standing by a fence that been erected around the hotel exterior. He was taken to the Mater Hospital after the incident.
"I was struck on the side of the head and for about two hours thereafter the side of my head and my ear were numb with the force of that impact," Mr Rickertt said.
On Monday, Acting Assistant Commissioner Brian Conners told a media conference he believed the actions of the officer were "appropriate".
He said the officer did not strike Mr Rickertt in the video and that the camera angle of the video made the incident "appear far worse than it is".
"The officer didn't strike the male person directly, he reached out with an open hand and grabbed the male person on the back of his clothing to pull him back from the fence," Assistant Commissioner Conners said.
He said other footage available online showed the incident from different angles and he encouraged people to review it. "The circumstances are what they are — review the footage."
One protester, Ruby Thorburn, said she was among the crowd on Sunday afternoon, standing one person away from Mr Rickertt.
Protesters told the ABC a group of 15 to 20 people were slapping their hands against the fence to make noise the men inside the hotel could hear.
"The man who had been targeted by the police officer wasn't actually touching the fence at the time, he had stepped back, and that's when I saw an extremely charged officer who sprinted up and hit him with full force on the left side of his head," Ms Thorburn said.
She said she stayed with Mr Rickertt while he was on the ground. "He looked really hurt. It was a terrifying few seconds when he hit the floor, because it was a really big thud.
"He was quite slow in responding. When he started to respond, we noticed that there was blood coming out of his ear and he was sweating and shaking a lot."
'Directions of police were ignored'
Superintendent Andrew Pilotto said the protest was unauthorised and that many in attendance "were not cooperating with police".
"Prior to the police moving in to safeguard that fence, quite a number of directions were given to protesters to release the fence, step back stand down and re-join the group, and those directions of police were ignored over a considerable period," Superintendent Pilotto said.
"A lot of these people are in police officers' faces for long periods of time, yelling at police officers, throwing things in their faces."
Mr Rickertt said he was not grabbed by the shirt or the neck, and was not near the fence when he was targeted. "I was also conscious throughout the whole process," he said. "I was very aware that I fell to the ground and I'm also very aware that I did not strike my head on the ground.
"The force of the blow to my head by the police officer was what caused the injury that I have."
Police are reviewing the matter internally.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/queensland-police-say-officer-acted-appropriately-in-incident-that-injured-brisbane-refugee-protester/ar-BB1ao0Jt
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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28 October, 2020
Cop to stand trial for murder after an Aboriginal teenager was shot dead as prosecutors allege he was right to pull the trigger once - but not three times
It's easy to miss when firing a pistol so it is normal to fire off a string of shots to ensure an effective hit. And a person who is hit often does not react immediately so may give the impression that further shots are needed to subdue him
All that is perfectly normal and unremarkable so why is this phony charge being levelled at the cop? It is just to placate black activists who are baying for blood. It reflects the huge racial sensitivities of the era. The authorities have to be seen as taking the death very seriously
The deceased was an habitual law-defying criminal so his aggressive behaviour was in keeping with his record. But because he was black there is a furore. He was released from prison in October last year after serving eight of a 16-month sentence for unlawful entry, property damage and stealing offences with the remainder suspended. But he had allegedly breached his parole by removing an electronic monitoring device, among other offences.
There was “face-to-face combat” between him and the two officers. One officer was reportedly stabbed, which allegedly led to the teen being shot.
A Northern Territory police officer who shot dead an Aboriginal teenager will stand trial for murder, with his lawyers arguing he acted in self-defence.
Constable Zachary Rolfe, 29, was charged with murder after shooting Kumanjayi Walker, 19, three times during an arrest in the remote community of Yuendumu in November last year.
The teen's death was protested at rallies around Australia in the wake of African-American man George Floyd's death in the United States in May.
Judge John Birch on Monday ordered Mr Rolfe to stand trial following a three-day preliminary hearing in the Alice Springs Local Court.
Prosecutors agree that the first shot fired at the teenager was self-defence, after the officer was stabbed and attacked with scissors.
But they claim the second and third shots, fired just 3.6 seconds later, were murder.
Mr Rolfe was part of a four-member elite Immediate Response Team that drove 290km from Alice Springs into the Tanami Desert to arrest Walker.
The preliminary hearing in September heard evidence that Mr Walker wounded Mr Rolfe and his partner Adam Eberl with a pair of scissors in a darkened room.
Mr Rolfe allegedly shot Mr Walker with a Glock pistol three times as Walker grappled with Eberl.
Prosecutors alleged the second and third shots were not justified, arguing the IRT 'disregarded' an arrest plan by Sergeant Julie Frost from the Yuendumu police station.
A criminologist said that two of the shots were 'excessive, unreasonable and unnecessary'.
The case comes amid rising tensions about the treatment of black and indigenous people by police.
Scientists all at sea with alarmist barrier reef warning
Fancy theories preferred to the real world
A new scientific paper, received with great fanfare among international media and Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, claims half the corals of the Great Barrier Reef are dead.
The paper is by academics at James Cook University’s ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. It is a scary headline. But is it true?
This finding is not based on any tried and proven method. Rather, the researchers from James Cook University have come up with a new method of statistical analysis based on a complicated “proxy” to estimate “colony size”.
The study itself was undertaken in 2016 and 2017, just after a coral bleaching event at cyclone-damaged reefs. If they had used traditional methods and longer time frames, it would likely be found that there is actually nothing wrong with the Great Barrier Reef.
Great Barrier Reef photographer Julia Summerling wrote recently about how a section known as North Direction Island, saying that the island’s corals were “savaged beyond recognition” due to Cyclone Ita in 2014, cyclone Nathan in 2015, and a coral bleaching event in the summer of 2016. So it was probably not the most representative time to be sampling. But the headlines are based on proxy measures from just a few reefs at that time.
She now says those areas have since recovered. “What I saw — and photographed — I could hardly believe. Young dinner-plate-sized corals were crammed into every available space on the limestone plateau as far as I could see, bristling with iconic fish life, from maori wrasse and coral trout to bumphead parrotfish and sweetlips. I swam a long way on the dive, checking to see how far the coral shelf stretched. The further I swam, the denser the coral fields became.”
For a new Institute of Public Affairs film, in January this year I visited the Ribbon reefs with Emmy award-winning photographer Clint Hempshall to follow the edge of Australia’s continental shelf to find and film coral bleaching. It was meant to be one of the worst-affected regions — 60 per cent dead from bleaching, which the same scientists say is caused by climate change. But we could not find any significant bleaching. We mostly found jewelled curtains of coral, appearing to cascade down underwater cliff faces. So colourful, so beautiful, all in crystal clear and warm waters.
The problem for Professor Terry Hughes, who co-authored the research, is that his study was undertaken in 2016 and 2017 then extrapolated out to cover other years. All of the research and subsequent media attention points to a narrative that the Great Barrier Reef is at risk of imminent collapse from climate change.
It was for questioning this claim, and the quality of science behind it, that Dr Peter Ridd was eventually sacked from James Cook University. Part of those claims by Ridd were that a lot of the science coming out of JCU’s ARC Centre for Excellent in Coral Reef Studies “is not properly checked, tested or replicated, and that is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions, and the fact is I do not think we can anymore.”
Neither James Cook University, nor Hughes, have ever rebutted Ridd’s criticisms of the research.
This is what objective observers need to put into context when examining Hughes’s most recent claims. Ridd also said: “I think that most of the scientists who are pushing out this stuff, I think that they genuinely believe that there are problems with the reef, I just don’t think they are very objective about the science they do. I think they’re emotionally attached to their subject and you can’t blame them the reef is a beautiful thing.”
One quick glance at Hughes’s Twitter account and you will find he is critical of the Morrison government’s gas-led recovery, cheerleading for a royal commission into the Murdoch media and constantly criticises the Adani Coal mine.
The new paper by James Cook University scientists claims both the incidence of coral bleaching and cyclones is increasing, but there is no evidence to support either contention. The available data from 1971 to 2017 indicated there has actually been a decrease in both the number and severity of cyclones in the Australian region.
Coral-bleaching events tend to be cyclical and coincide with periods of exceptionally low sea levels. As discussed in a new book, Climate Change: The Facts 2020, there were dramatic falls in sea levels across the western Pacific Ocean in 2016. These were associated with an El Nino event.
Until recently, coral calcification rates were calculated based on coring of the large Porites corals. There are well-established techniques for coring the Porites corals and then measuring growth rates. So why do Hughes and his colleagues stray from these tried and tested methods?
Since 2005, the Australian Institute of Marine Science has stopped using this technique to measure how well corals are growing at the Great Barrier Reef. The few studies still using the old technique suggest that, as would be expected, as water temperatures have increased marginally, coral growth rates have also increased.
But rather than admit this, key Great Barrier Reef research institutions have moved from such direct measures to new and complicated “proxies”. They thus have more flexibility in what they find because the measurement is no longer one that represents coral growth rates or coral cover.
As proxy votes are something delegated, this gives the researchers at JCU the potential to generate what might be considered policy-based evidence. And yet without question, the media reporting of the most recent research is that “there is no time to lose, we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions”.
Far too frequently, climate science has demonstrated noble cause corruption — where the ends justify the means. We will only know exact coral calcification rates, and changing trends in coral cover, when our once esteemed research institutions return to more traditional methods of measuring such important indicators of coral health and growth.
We need a return to real science that is based on real observations and real measurements and then we may find written in journals what we see in the real world when we jump off boats and go under the sea.
Elite $33,000-a-year grammar school enrages parents and students with new ecological uniform design - as it is slammed as being ‘reminiscent of wartime Europe’
Firbank Grammar School in the affluent bayside Melbourne suburb of Brighton last week unveiled an Eco Uniform designed from fully biodegradable materials like nut corozo buttons in place of plastic and 'upcycled polyester'.
Firbank touted the outfit - made in collaboration with designer Kit Willow - as the world's first sustainable school uniform but the big reveal on its Instagram page attracted criticism.
One unhappy student set up a petition to protest the design, saying the new uniform was 'reminiscent of wartime Europe', 'impractical' and 'unflattering.'
The petition has garnered almost 900 signatures since it was first launched over the weekend.
'I fully support sustainable uniforms, but please listen to the people wearing them to make the uniform appropriate for the 21st century,' one person wrote.
'I graduated 33 years ago and our uniforms were less, dare I say it "dowdy",' another added.
An e-brochure released by Firbank last week showed a complete overhaul to the existing uniform in both the senior and junior school - covering winter and summer - plus student sportswear.
Willow became a household name in Australia in the early 2000s before making a comeback with her KitX label in 2015 - a brand priding itself on sustainable materials.
The school's principal Jenny Williams told parents in an e-mail the school board would meet on Monday to review the feedback to the designs.
'Changing a uniform is one of the most controversial things a school can do,' she said in the email seen by the Leader.
'All I ask is you remember our values and respond in a manner expected from members of our community.'
Firbank is a co-educational school at primary level, and a girls-only school at secondary level.
AFL Grand Final sees Qld lockdown hypocrisy hit new heights
As political rallies go, it was one of the better ones, with live music, fireworks, television coverage and a wildly enthusiastic crowd of tens of thousands.
The venue was the Gabba and the event was the AFL Grand Final, presided over by an empress-like Annastacia Palaszczuk smiling benignly from the grandstand as a conga line of players and officials read from their cue cards and thanked the Queensland Government for allowing them to play footy in the Sunshine State.
Thirty thousand people poured into the Gabba, and it was plain to see from the broadcast that many of them were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, caught up in the euphoria of the moment.
The state’s strict entry restrictions for Victorians were bent so far out of shape as to be barely recognisable to facilitate this one game of Australian rules.
Taxpayer dollars had been thrown at the AFL to facilitate it.
When asked on which date the Premier would prefer the game to be played, she indicated that she would prefer October 24, precisely one week before the election.
October 31 would hardly do, as the polls would have closed.
Her Government’s ineptitude plunged the pre-COVID state economy into a debt spiral that will make the post-pandemic recovery that much more difficult, but it can help organise a football match.
We should be thankful for small mercies.
My mother didn’t watch Saturday night’s game.
She passed away quietly in her sleep the previous evening at the tender age of 93, God bless her, and is now in a better place.
We are in the process of organising her funeral, but when it is held those attending will, by state government decree, be limited to 100.
There will be hundreds more who will wish to pay their respects to a woman who touched so many in her long life, but they will be forbidden from doing so.
Tens of thousands can hug and celebrate and slurp beer in a football stadium, but only 100 can stand in prayer, 1.5m apart, in the respectful silence of a church. What towering hypocrisy.
We will never know how the number of 100 was decided upon.
************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
***************************************
27 October, 2020
Budget's infrastructure spend no quick cure for jobs
Economists haven’t been enthused by inclusion in the budget’s big-ticket stimulus measures of $11.5 billion in road and rail projects. Why not? Because spending on “infrastructure” often works a lot better in theory than in practice.
Economists were more enthusiastic about infrastructure before the pandemic, when Scott Morrison’s obsession with debt and deficit had him focused on returning the budget to surplus at a time when this was worsening the growth in aggregate demand and slowing the economy’s return to full employment.
Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe pointed out that, unlike borrowing to cover the government’s day-to-day needs, borrowing to fund infrastructure was a form of investment. The new infrastructure could be used to yield benefits for decades to come, and so justify the money borrowed. Indeed, well-chosen infrastructure could increase the economy’s productive efficiency – its productivity – by, for instance, reducing the time it took workers to get to work or the cost of moving goods from A to B.
Another motivation was the high rates of population growth the government’s immigration program was causing. More people need more infrastructure if congestion and shortages aren’t to result, and thus worsen productivity.
But much has changed since then. The arrival of the worst recession in many decades has changed our priorities. We’re much less worried about debt and deficit and much more worried about getting the economy going up and unemployment coming down. And we don’t want economic growth so much to raise our material standard of living as to create more jobs for everyone needing to work.
Because infrastructure involves the government spending money directly, rather than using tax cuts and concessions to transfer money to households and businesses in the hope they’ll spend it, it should have a higher “multiplier effect” than tax cuts.
But as stimulus, infrastructure also has disadvantages. Big projects take a long time to plan and get approved, so their addition to gross domestic product may arrive after the recession has passed. And major infrastructure tends to be capital-intensive. Much of the money is spent on materials and equipment, not workers.
In a budget we’re told is “all about jobs”, many economists have noted that the same money would have created far more jobs had it been spent on employing more people to improve the delivery of many government-funded services, such as education, aged care, childcare and care of the disabled.
Most of those jobs are done by women. Infrastructure is part of the evidence for the charge that this is a “blokey” budget, all about hard hats and hi-viz vests.
If there’s a TV camera about, no one enjoys donning the hard hat and hi-viz more than our politicians – federal and state, Labor and Liberal, male and female. And it turns out that “high visibility” is another reason economists are less enthusiastic about infrastructure spending than they were.
In practice, many infrastructure projects aren’t as useful and productivity-enhancing as they could be because they’ve been selected to meet political objectives, not economic ones.
Politicians favour big, flashy projects – preferably in one of their own party’s electorates – that have plaques to unveil and ribbons to cut. It’s surprising how many of these projects are announced during election campaigns.
An expert in this field, who keeps tabs on what the pollies get up to, is Marion Terrill, of the Grattan Institute. She notes that since 2016, governments have signed up to 29 projects, each worth $500 million or more. But get this: only six of the 29 had business cases completed at the time the pollies made their commitment.
So “politicians don’t know – and seemingly don’t greatly care – whether it’s in the community’s interest to build these mega-projects,” she says.
Terrill says the $11.5 billion new infrastructure spending announced in the budget includes a mix of small and large projects, such as Queensland’s $750 million Coomera Connector stage one, and $600 million each for sections of NSW’s New England and Newell highways.
The money is being given to the state governments to spend quickly, and it will be taken back if they don’t spend it quickly enough.
Which they may not, because the new projects go into an already crowded market. Federal and state governments have been pumping money into transport construction for so long that, even two years ago, work in progress totalled an all-time high of about $100 billion.
By March this year – before the coronacession – the total had risen to $125 billion, Terrill calculates.
In some states at least, the civil construction industry – as opposed to the home construction industry – is already flat chat. It’s hardly been touched by the lockdown and doesn’t need the support it will be getting. Just how long it takes to work its way through to the new projects, we’ll see.
Terrill notes that the bulging pipeline of infrastructure construction built up before the pandemic was all about responding to the high population growth we’d had for years, and imagined we’d have forever.
But the pandemic’s closure of international borders – and parents’ reluctance to bring babies into such a dangerous world - has brought our population growth to a screaming halt. The budget papers predict negligible population growth this financial year and next, with only a slow recovery in following years. That is, we’re looking at a permanently lower level of population, and maybe a continuing slower rate of population growth.
Terrill says that, rather than ploughing on, we should reassess all the road and rail projects in the pipeline when we’ve got a clearer idea of what our future needs will be. And when we have a better idea how social distancing may have had a lasting effect on workers’ future travel and work patterns.
What’s so stupid about mindlessly piling up further transport projects is that the glitz-crazed pollies are ignoring a real and long-neglected problem: inadequate maintenance of the roads and rail we’ve already got. No sex appeal, apparently.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/budget-s-infrastructure-spend-more-about-sex-appeal-than-jobs-20201022-p567oe.html
HSC maths enrolments still low
The number of students taking senior school maths has flatlined over the past 10 years, suggesting mathematics participation has "bottomed out" and universities may need to insist on the subject as a prerequisite to lift enrolments.
About one quarter of year 12 students over the decade did not take any HSC mathematics course, compared to just 6 per cent of students who opted out of maths altogether in 2000, figures provided by the NSW Education Standards Authority show. Of those HSC students who will sit their maths exams this week, more than half (30,757) are taking the standard non-calculus course.
Enrolments in advanced mathematics (16,966) and extension 1 (9060) are lower than they were 10 to 15 years ago despite today's larger overall HSC cohort.
The stagnant interest in HSC maths comes in spite of the NSW government's maths strategy which aims to increase the number of students studying mathematics in their final years of school, as well as the proportion studying higher level HSC mathematics, by 2025.
It also poses difficulties for the federal government's goal of producing more university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates.
There has been a spike this year in students taking the highest level extension 2 maths HSC exam, making it the largest cohort in eight years (3418), but it is still below the number of students who took extension 2 in 2010 (3529).
NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government was encouraging universities to introduce more prerequisites for their courses. It also made some form of senior school maths compulsory last year, and has hired specialist maths teachers in primary schools to build students' foundations.
"I want to reverse the trend of fewer students studying maths," Ms Mitchell said. "Maths challenges our students' to think critically and creatively, preparing them for whatever career they might choose after school."
Maaike Wienk, a policy officer at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, said enrolments in maths had not bounced back after sharply declining from 2000 and stabilising in 2010.
"We have basically bottomed out," she said. "But because it's been such a long term decline, I think people forget how it used to be."
In 2000, 94 per cent of HSC students took a maths course. That dropped to 78 per cent of students in 2005, 75 per cent in 2010 and is 76 per cent this year.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/we-ve-bottomed-out-hsc-maths-enrolments-flatline-over-the-decade-20201013-p564k5.html
Words mean nothing when those on the left use them in arguments
It’s easy to win an argument if you’re a leftist. All you need to do is change the rules of language as you go.
Plenty of allies will assist in this slippery enterprise. For example, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard famously claimed in 2012 that Liberal leader Tony Abbott hated women.
“The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office,” Gillard railed in parliament.
“Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he’s writing out his resignation.
“Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives. He needs a mirror.“
At the time, misogyny was defined as a hatred of women.
This seemed an unfair accusation to level against Abbott, whose mother, wife, daughters, sister and female colleagues have never known him to exhibit any gender-specific loathing.
So the Macquarie Dictionary stepped in to help, softening the meaning of “misogyny” to now indicate a mere implication of “prejudice” against women.
“Gillard‘s critics no longer have semantics on their side,” the Guardian’s Lizzy Davies gloated. See? It’s just that easy.
A similar politically-motivated alteration recently occurred in the US.
During her confirmation hearings earlier this month, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said that she has “never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference”.
“Like racism, I think discrimination is abhorrent,” Barrett concluded.
Readers unfamiliar with this issue are invited to detect any problem with Barrett’s words. It’s quite a challenge, because there is no problem. None at all.
But Barrett is a conservative and was nominated by US President Donald Trump, so a problem had to be invented.
Mazie Hirono, a Democrat senator from Hawaii, did just that.
“Not once, but twice, you used the term sexual preference to describe those in the LGBTQ community,” she reprimanded Barratt. “And let me make clear, sexual preference is an offensive and outdated term.“
Really? How so? And since when?
According to Hirono, the term “sexual preference” is “used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest that sexual orientation is a choice. It is not”.
But according to most people, and almost every dictionary, “sexual preference” just means “sexual preference”.
Immediately after Hirono’s outburst, however, Merriam-Webster updated its own dictionary so as to strengthen the case against Barrett – exactly as the Macquarie Dictionary had previously assisted Julia Gillard.
Their new definition reads: “The term ‘sexual preference’ as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to.”
Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski claimed the change was just a matter of routine.
But the cultural left doesn’t stop at changing definitions.
They’ll also change words and phrases, rebranding various unpopular commie concepts so those abominations may be more easily marketed.
That’s why “socialism” became “social justice”, “global warming” became “climate change”, “East Germany” became “Victoria” and “advanced confinement-grade dementia” became “Joe Biden”.
It’s also why “riots” became “peaceful protests” and “violent Marxist stormtroopers” became “Black Lives Matter”.
Words mean nothing to these people, except as shields or weapons. That’s “progressives” for you.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/tim-blair-words-mean-nothing-when-those-on-the-left-use-them-in-arguments/news-story/d4fdca22417e12bab083a4284b7a28bc
Isolation fuels ‘pandexit’ calls from Western Australia
Premier Mark McGowan has turned Western Australia into a fortress against infection. This has shielded his community from the worst of the pandemic but has increased its separation from the nation. In the words of the Premier, the state’s hard border closure has turned it into “an island within an island”. Not surprisingly, this has rekindled talk of Western Australia seceding from the federation. The movement is gaining momentum because of the success of its isolation, and friction with the commonwealth and other states.
Western Australia was a reluctant entrant to the federation in 1901. It was the last colony to join and did so late in the process. The colony was concerned that its economic position would be weakened by joining the nation, and that the federation would be dominated by the eastern states. The west feared it would not receive its fair share of taxation revenue.
Geography also played a role. Almost 3300km separates Perth from the east coast, an unimaginable distance for many people at the end of the 19th century. By contrast, London is 2500km from Moscow. New Zealand is much closer to Sydney, and yet it declined to join the federation.
After much disagreement and debate, Western Australia decided to unite with the other colonies at the 11th hour. It did so by a popular vote in July 1900, three weeks after Queen Victoria gave royal assent to the British law creating the new nation. This meant it was too late to include a reference to Western Australia as the nation’s sixth founding state.
The opening words to the British Act that introduce the Australian Constitution speak of “the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania” agreeing “to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth”. The omission of Western Australia was symbolic of its uncertainty. This has resonated over the years with the state’s politicians and leading citizens questioning whether a mistake was made and if the time had come to leave the federation.
Economic factors and political dissatisfaction have driven cycles of debate around Western Australia seceding. Mining magnate Andrew Forrest put forward the idea when the Rudd government proposed a mining tax that many saw as plundering the state’s mineral riches. A decade ago, the West Australian mines and petroleum minister Norman Moore also said that the unequal distribution of GST revenue had led to “rumblings of secession — everywhere you go these days, people are now talking about it”. He had “no doubt that Western Australia would be one of the most successful countries in the world if it was a separate country”.
These rumblings have grown again in recent times. The Western Australian Liberal Party passed a resolution at its 2017 state conference calling on the establishment of a committee to “examine the option of Western Australia becoming a financially independent state”. A poll taken this month found 28 per cent of Western Australians want to form their own country.
Others have expressed concern that calls for separation are growing louder. The federal member for Perth, Patrick Gorman, has warned against treating secession as a joke. He has acknowledged the growing support for the idea of Westralia and drawn a comparison with Brexit. In that case, unfavourable economic conditions and unresolved community dissatisfaction enabled a fringe idea to become a reality.
It is no surprise that the pandemic and Australia’s economic problems have restarted this debate. The closest that Western Australia has come to leaving the nation was 90 years ago amid the great depression. In 1930, a state government led by Sir James Mitchell was elected on a platform for secession. In 1933, he put a referendum to the people of Western Australia asking whether the state should withdraw from the commonwealth. People overwhelmingly voted to do so by a margin of two to one.
The state sent a delegation to London to petition the United Kingdom parliament to allow it to become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The British diplomatically took their time to respond. Two years later they decided not to entertain the petition because convention dictated that it come from the commonwealth and not an individual state. The commonwealth opposed secession, and so the push ended. The political movement then faltered as economic conditions improved and the commonwealth sent more money west.
The events of almost a century ago demonstrate the difficulty of any state leaving the federation. The problem for the proponents of separation is that federation is a one-way ticket. The constitution provides no mechanism for a state to leave the nation.
In the absence of a revolution, the only path to secession is to amend the constitution to permit a state to leave. The federal parliament would first need to approve the change, followed by the people voting at a referendum. A majority would need to vote yes, plus at least four out of the six states, including Western Australia. The political difficulties of achieving this make secession possible in theory, but impossible in practice. The bottom line is that Western Australians can only leave if the rest of the nation is willing to let them go.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/isolation-fuels-pandexit-calls-from-western-australia/news-story/63d8d9310d38b14b14976a0a48a99f47
************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
***************************************
27 October, 2020
Budget's infrastructure spend no quick cure for jobs
Economists haven’t been enthused by inclusion in the budget’s big-ticket stimulus measures of $11.5 billion in road and rail projects. Why not? Because spending on “infrastructure” often works a lot better in theory than in practice.
Economists were more enthusiastic about infrastructure before the pandemic, when Scott Morrison’s obsession with debt and deficit had him focused on returning the budget to surplus at a time when this was worsening the growth in aggregate demand and slowing the economy’s return to full employment.
Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe pointed out that, unlike borrowing to cover the government’s day-to-day needs, borrowing to fund infrastructure was a form of investment. The new infrastructure could be used to yield benefits for decades to come, and so justify the money borrowed. Indeed, well-chosen infrastructure could increase the economy’s productive efficiency – its productivity – by, for instance, reducing the time it took workers to get to work or the cost of moving goods from A to B.
Another motivation was the high rates of population growth the government’s immigration program was causing. More people need more infrastructure if congestion and shortages aren’t to result, and thus worsen productivity.
But much has changed since then. The arrival of the worst recession in many decades has changed our priorities. We’re much less worried about debt and deficit and much more worried about getting the economy going up and unemployment coming down. And we don’t want economic growth so much to raise our material standard of living as to create more jobs for everyone needing to work.
Because infrastructure involves the government spending money directly, rather than using tax cuts and concessions to transfer money to households and businesses in the hope they’ll spend it, it should have a higher “multiplier effect” than tax cuts.
But as stimulus, infrastructure also has disadvantages. Big projects take a long time to plan and get approved, so their addition to gross domestic product may arrive after the recession has passed. And major infrastructure tends to be capital-intensive. Much of the money is spent on materials and equipment, not workers.
In a budget we’re told is “all about jobs”, many economists have noted that the same money would have created far more jobs had it been spent on employing more people to improve the delivery of many government-funded services, such as education, aged care, childcare and care of the disabled.
Most of those jobs are done by women. Infrastructure is part of the evidence for the charge that this is a “blokey” budget, all about hard hats and hi-viz vests.
If there’s a TV camera about, no one enjoys donning the hard hat and hi-viz more than our politicians – federal and state, Labor and Liberal, male and female. And it turns out that “high visibility” is another reason economists are less enthusiastic about infrastructure spending than they were.
In practice, many infrastructure projects aren’t as useful and productivity-enhancing as they could be because they’ve been selected to meet political objectives, not economic ones.
Politicians favour big, flashy projects – preferably in one of their own party’s electorates – that have plaques to unveil and ribbons to cut. It’s surprising how many of these projects are announced during election campaigns.
An expert in this field, who keeps tabs on what the pollies get up to, is Marion Terrill, of the Grattan Institute. She notes that since 2016, governments have signed up to 29 projects, each worth $500 million or more. But get this: only six of the 29 had business cases completed at the time the pollies made their commitment.
So “politicians don’t know – and seemingly don’t greatly care – whether it’s in the community’s interest to build these mega-projects,” she says.
Terrill says the $11.5 billion new infrastructure spending announced in the budget includes a mix of small and large projects, such as Queensland’s $750 million Coomera Connector stage one, and $600 million each for sections of NSW’s New England and Newell highways.
The money is being given to the state governments to spend quickly, and it will be taken back if they don’t spend it quickly enough.
Which they may not, because the new projects go into an already crowded market. Federal and state governments have been pumping money into transport construction for so long that, even two years ago, work in progress totalled an all-time high of about $100 billion.
By March this year – before the coronacession – the total had risen to $125 billion, Terrill calculates.
In some states at least, the civil construction industry – as opposed to the home construction industry – is already flat chat. It’s hardly been touched by the lockdown and doesn’t need the support it will be getting. Just how long it takes to work its way through to the new projects, we’ll see.
Terrill notes that the bulging pipeline of infrastructure construction built up before the pandemic was all about responding to the high population growth we’d had for years, and imagined we’d have forever.
But the pandemic’s closure of international borders – and parents’ reluctance to bring babies into such a dangerous world - has brought our population growth to a screaming halt. The budget papers predict negligible population growth this financial year and next, with only a slow recovery in following years. That is, we’re looking at a permanently lower level of population, and maybe a continuing slower rate of population growth.
Terrill says that, rather than ploughing on, we should reassess all the road and rail projects in the pipeline when we’ve got a clearer idea of what our future needs will be. And when we have a better idea how social distancing may have had a lasting effect on workers’ future travel and work patterns.
What’s so stupid about mindlessly piling up further transport projects is that the glitz-crazed pollies are ignoring a real and long-neglected problem: inadequate maintenance of the roads and rail we’ve already got. No sex appeal, apparently.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/budget-s-infrastructure-spend-more-about-sex-appeal-than-jobs-20201022-p567oe.html
HSC maths enrolments still low
The number of students taking senior school maths has flatlined over the past 10 years, suggesting mathematics participation has "bottomed out" and universities may need to insist on the subject as a prerequisite to lift enrolments.
About one quarter of year 12 students over the decade did not take any HSC mathematics course, compared to just 6 per cent of students who opted out of maths altogether in 2000, figures provided by the NSW Education Standards Authority show. Of those HSC students who will sit their maths exams this week, more than half (30,757) are taking the standard non-calculus course.
Enrolments in advanced mathematics (16,966) and extension 1 (9060) are lower than they were 10 to 15 years ago despite today's larger overall HSC cohort.
The stagnant interest in HSC maths comes in spite of the NSW government's maths strategy which aims to increase the number of students studying mathematics in their final years of school, as well as the proportion studying higher level HSC mathematics, by 2025.
It also poses difficulties for the federal government's goal of producing more university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates.
There has been a spike this year in students taking the highest level extension 2 maths HSC exam, making it the largest cohort in eight years (3418), but it is still below the number of students who took extension 2 in 2010 (3529).
NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the government was encouraging universities to introduce more prerequisites for their courses. It also made some form of senior school maths compulsory last year, and has hired specialist maths teachers in primary schools to build students' foundations.
"I want to reverse the trend of fewer students studying maths," Ms Mitchell said. "Maths challenges our students' to think critically and creatively, preparing them for whatever career they might choose after school."
Maaike Wienk, a policy officer at the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, said enrolments in maths had not bounced back after sharply declining from 2000 and stabilising in 2010.
"We have basically bottomed out," she said. "But because it's been such a long term decline, I think people forget how it used to be."
In 2000, 94 per cent of HSC students took a maths course. That dropped to 78 per cent of students in 2005, 75 per cent in 2010 and is 76 per cent this year.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/we-ve-bottomed-out-hsc-maths-enrolments-flatline-over-the-decade-20201013-p564k5.html
Words mean nothing when those on the left use them in arguments
It’s easy to win an argument if you’re a leftist. All you need to do is change the rules of language as you go.
Plenty of allies will assist in this slippery enterprise. For example, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard famously claimed in 2012 that Liberal leader Tony Abbott hated women.
“The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office,” Gillard railed in parliament.
“Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he’s writing out his resignation.
“Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives. He needs a mirror.“
At the time, misogyny was defined as a hatred of women.
This seemed an unfair accusation to level against Abbott, whose mother, wife, daughters, sister and female colleagues have never known him to exhibit any gender-specific loathing.
So the Macquarie Dictionary stepped in to help, softening the meaning of “misogyny” to now indicate a mere implication of “prejudice” against women.
“Gillard‘s critics no longer have semantics on their side,” the Guardian’s Lizzy Davies gloated. See? It’s just that easy.
A similar politically-motivated alteration recently occurred in the US.
During her confirmation hearings earlier this month, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said that she has “never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference”.
“Like racism, I think discrimination is abhorrent,” Barrett concluded.
Readers unfamiliar with this issue are invited to detect any problem with Barrett’s words. It’s quite a challenge, because there is no problem. None at all.
But Barrett is a conservative and was nominated by US President Donald Trump, so a problem had to be invented.
Mazie Hirono, a Democrat senator from Hawaii, did just that.
“Not once, but twice, you used the term sexual preference to describe those in the LGBTQ community,” she reprimanded Barratt. “And let me make clear, sexual preference is an offensive and outdated term.“
Really? How so? And since when?
According to Hirono, the term “sexual preference” is “used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest that sexual orientation is a choice. It is not”.
But according to most people, and almost every dictionary, “sexual preference” just means “sexual preference”.
Immediately after Hirono’s outburst, however, Merriam-Webster updated its own dictionary so as to strengthen the case against Barrett – exactly as the Macquarie Dictionary had previously assisted Julia Gillard.
Their new definition reads: “The term ‘sexual preference’ as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to.”
Merriam-Webster editor-at-large Peter Sokolowski claimed the change was just a matter of routine.
But the cultural left doesn’t stop at changing definitions.
They’ll also change words and phrases, rebranding various unpopular commie concepts so those abominations may be more easily marketed.
That’s why “socialism” became “social justice”, “global warming” became “climate change”, “East Germany” became “Victoria” and “advanced confinement-grade dementia” became “Joe Biden”.
It’s also why “riots” became “peaceful protests” and “violent Marxist stormtroopers” became “Black Lives Matter”.
Words mean nothing to these people, except as shields or weapons. That’s “progressives” for you.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/tim-blair-words-mean-nothing-when-those-on-the-left-use-them-in-arguments/news-story/d4fdca22417e12bab083a4284b7a28bc
Isolation fuels ‘pandexit’ calls from Western Australia
Premier Mark McGowan has turned Western Australia into a fortress against infection. This has shielded his community from the worst of the pandemic but has increased its separation from the nation. In the words of the Premier, the state’s hard border closure has turned it into “an island within an island”. Not surprisingly, this has rekindled talk of Western Australia seceding from the federation. The movement is gaining momentum because of the success of its isolation, and friction with the commonwealth and other states.
Western Australia was a reluctant entrant to the federation in 1901. It was the last colony to join and did so late in the process. The colony was concerned that its economic position would be weakened by joining the nation, and that the federation would be dominated by the eastern states. The west feared it would not receive its fair share of taxation revenue.
Geography also played a role. Almost 3300km separates Perth from the east coast, an unimaginable distance for many people at the end of the 19th century. By contrast, London is 2500km from Moscow. New Zealand is much closer to Sydney, and yet it declined to join the federation.
After much disagreement and debate, Western Australia decided to unite with the other colonies at the 11th hour. It did so by a popular vote in July 1900, three weeks after Queen Victoria gave royal assent to the British law creating the new nation. This meant it was too late to include a reference to Western Australia as the nation’s sixth founding state.
The opening words to the British Act that introduce the Australian Constitution speak of “the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania” agreeing “to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth”. The omission of Western Australia was symbolic of its uncertainty. This has resonated over the years with the state’s politicians and leading citizens questioning whether a mistake was made and if the time had come to leave the federation.
Economic factors and political dissatisfaction have driven cycles of debate around Western Australia seceding. Mining magnate Andrew Forrest put forward the idea when the Rudd government proposed a mining tax that many saw as plundering the state’s mineral riches. A decade ago, the West Australian mines and petroleum minister Norman Moore also said that the unequal distribution of GST revenue had led to “rumblings of secession — everywhere you go these days, people are now talking about it”. He had “no doubt that Western Australia would be one of the most successful countries in the world if it was a separate country”.
These rumblings have grown again in recent times. The Western Australian Liberal Party passed a resolution at its 2017 state conference calling on the establishment of a committee to “examine the option of Western Australia becoming a financially independent state”. A poll taken this month found 28 per cent of Western Australians want to form their own country.
Others have expressed concern that calls for separation are growing louder. The federal member for Perth, Patrick Gorman, has warned against treating secession as a joke. He has acknowledged the growing support for the idea of Westralia and drawn a comparison with Brexit. In that case, unfavourable economic conditions and unresolved community dissatisfaction enabled a fringe idea to become a reality.
It is no surprise that the pandemic and Australia’s economic problems have restarted this debate. The closest that Western Australia has come to leaving the nation was 90 years ago amid the great depression. In 1930, a state government led by Sir James Mitchell was elected on a platform for secession. In 1933, he put a referendum to the people of Western Australia asking whether the state should withdraw from the commonwealth. People overwhelmingly voted to do so by a margin of two to one.
The state sent a delegation to London to petition the United Kingdom parliament to allow it to become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The British diplomatically took their time to respond. Two years later they decided not to entertain the petition because convention dictated that it come from the commonwealth and not an individual state. The commonwealth opposed secession, and so the push ended. The political movement then faltered as economic conditions improved and the commonwealth sent more money west.
The events of almost a century ago demonstrate the difficulty of any state leaving the federation. The problem for the proponents of separation is that federation is a one-way ticket. The constitution provides no mechanism for a state to leave the nation.
In the absence of a revolution, the only path to secession is to amend the constitution to permit a state to leave. The federal parliament would first need to approve the change, followed by the people voting at a referendum. A majority would need to vote yes, plus at least four out of the six states, including Western Australia. The political difficulties of achieving this make secession possible in theory, but impossible in practice. The bottom line is that Western Australians can only leave if the rest of the nation is willing to let them go.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/isolation-fuels-pandexit-calls-from-western-australia/news-story/63d8d9310d38b14b14976a0a48a99f47
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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26 October, 2020
The visa loophole that's allowing immigrants to 'permanently' stay in Australia - because it takes 50 YEARS to process the application
A special visa has a 50-year processing time, allowing immigrants to effectively stay in Australia indefinitely while they wait for it to be approved.
Craig Rookyard, 32, fled violence and crime in South Africa and moved to Perth to join his parents and sister in 2011.
Mr Rookyard paid $60,000 to complete a business degree at university but didn't qualify for a skilled visa when he graduated in 2013.
He then applied for the remaining relative visa, which allows people to become permanent residents of Australia to be with their close family members.
The visa waiting time was 12 years when Mr Rookyard applied in 2013 but it has since increased to 50 years, meaning he will be 75 years old when he finds out if he is granted residency in 2063.
While he waits, Mr Rookyard is on a bridging visa that allows him to stay in the country but without the benefits of permanent residents and citizens.
He has worked full time, paid taxes, bought a home in the Perth hills and got engaged to his Australian girlfriend while living here the last nine years.
Speaking to Nine News, Mr Rookyard said his visa situation is 'incredibly frustrating because I am Australian in every way but one'.
While Mr Rookyard is still on a bridging visa, his parents and sister have become permanent residents, bringing them one step closer to becoming citizens.
The 32-year-old has no family left in South Africa and doesn't want to return due to crime and violence.
'We were having a tough time there (South Africa) with the crime, we were getting constantly broken into, so we needed to get out quick,' he told Nine News.
'I guess my biggest worry is the uncertainty. We might elect a new government here - and they could say to all the people still waiting on that list – you are not residents here so we are going to cancel your (bridging) visa.
'That's my biggest fear because I don't want to go back to South Africa. I don't have anyone there anymore. My family is all here. Where would I go?'
Mr Rookyward was recently stood down from work during the COVID-19 pandemic but was not able to access JobKeeper like his colleagues since he is not a citizen.
The remaining relative visa is one of four visas in the Other Family category, which had only 500 places in 2019-2020.
The Department of Home Affairs website says 'there will be no further queue release for these visas during migration program year 2019-2020'.
'Current estimated processing time for Remaining Relative and Aged Dependent Relative visa applications that meet the criteria to be queued is approximately 50 years,' the website read.
Another visa with a long wait time is the non-contributory parent visa, which takes an estimated 30 years to process.
Mr Rookyard plans to marry his Australian fiancée in December and will apply for a partner visa afterwards.
The partner visa application will cost $8,000 plus thousands more for migration agent fees but comes with a shorter wait time of three years.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8866889/Remaining-relative-visa-allows-immigrants-stay-Australia-got-50-year-wait.html
National anthem non-protest decision by Australia's Rugby team
Wallabies coach Dave Rennie has confirmed the national men’s rugby side will not take a knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement before their Bledisloe Cup match against the All Blacks next weekend.
Sporting teams and organisations around the world have opted to show support for the BLM movement since the death of George Floyd by taking a knee.
On Thursday, Wallabies fullback Dane Haylett-Petty revealed the Australian squad were considering a silent protest during the national anthem before their Test match against New Zealand in Sydney on Sunday, October 31.
The Wallabies would become the first Australian national side to take a knee during a national anthem if they went ahead with the silent protest.
“I think it’s great,” Haylett-Petty said. “I think sport has an amazing opportunity to have a say and join conversations and a lot of sports have done that and it would be a great thing for us to do.”
It led ex-Wallabies captain Nick Farr-Jones to speak out against the idea.
“To take the risk of basically splitting the support the Wallabies are starting to earn through their gutsy performances in Wellington and Auckland – just don't do it guys, it's too risky,” he told 2GB radio. “You run the risk that a few (viewers) would just turn off. They don't want to see politics in national sport. That's a real risk. I think it could be divisive. I don't think here in Australia that we have a major issue in relation to discrimination of coloured people."
Which led to a response from former player Gary Ella. “That's just stupid talk. That obviously shows that Nick doesn't have a full appreciation of the history of Aboriginal people in this country,” Ella said. “If you're talking about reconciliation, we're talking about sharing and acknowledging the history that we’ve come past and are working towards a better future. Those type of comments are totally ignoring the history."
On Friday, Rennie told reporters the Australian squad came to a “unanimous decision” not to perform the silent protest.
“We met with the leaders and then the leaders met with the rest of the team and it’s a unanimous decision,’ Rennie said. “The key thing is, this is about honouring our indigenous people and we want the focus to be on that.
“Everyone’s got their own opinions around the other situation, but we want the focus to be on reflecting on our history and our past.
“All I’ve said is that our focus is around the First Nations People and the indigenous jersey. We’re not looking to make a political statement.”
https://www.couriermail.com.au/sport/rugby/peter-fitzsimons-blasts-wallabies-national-anthem-protest-decision/news-story/17d5069f4d75f50eb287d2df80e83749
Euthanasia could deliver a blow to Labor’s chances to forming a minority government with a key crossbench party,
Katter’s Australian Party leader Robbie Katter, whose party could play a decisive role in picking the next government, has hit out at the Premier – saying her voluntary assisted dying pledge is all about politics.
He said his party did not have an official position on the issue, but he was personally opposed to euthanasia, pointing to his public record and the KAP’s voting history on issues like abortion.
“I just cannot see a scenario where we could align with anyone that would push that agenda,” Mr Katter said.
“I would find it enormously hard to align with anyone that would even contemplate pushing that agenda in the next parliament. That would make it very difficult for me personally. But I couldn’t say any more than that.”
He would not say if the issue would be a deal breaker, but said he was “not in the business of compromising my values every day”.
Mr Katter accused Ms Palaszczuk of taking advantage of a “highly sensitive, emotional issue” during an election campaign.
The Premier announced at her party’s campaign launch that a re-elected Labor government would introduce voluntary assisted dying legislation to the parliament in February.
The Queensland Law Reform Commission would be asked to report back sooner than March on the proposal, with Ms Palaszczuk promising to give her MPs a conscience vote.
Mr Katter acknowledged that there were some strong arguments for euthanasia, but is concerned that once legislated, the laws could change over time – referring to the “slippery slope argument”. “Most people haven’t … put a formal (party) policy together on it because the whole issue was parked up until the law reform commission report came back,” he said.
LNP leader Deb Frecklington has previously refused to say if she personally supports euthanasia, but has said no one should have to die in pain.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/state-election-2020/the-issue-that-could-stop-labor-forming-minority-government/news-story/de3a6efc49f2f597fb5a2a09bdd27ac5
ABC news boss warns staff against focus on 'inner city left-wing elites'
ABC news boss Gaven Morris told staff they were too focused on the interests of "inner city left-wing elites" and linked his concerns about editorial coverage to the national broadcaster's ongoing funding from taxpayers.
In remarks made during staff briefings last week Mr Morris warned it would not bode well for the ABC's funding "if we're seen to be representing inner city elite interests", according to three people who were present.
The sources said Mr Morris disparaged "inner city left-wing elites" numerous times, telling staff he would be "happier if we spent less time on the concerns of the inner city elites and more time on the things that matter to central Queensland".
Mr Morris told The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age his remarks referred to the public's perception of the ABC and it was wrong for anyone to infer that he was suggesting government funding could be under threat if news coverage did not change.
"It's a value proposition back to taxpayers, back to Australians," he said. "If there is a perception in the community that we are more interested in the concerns and lives of inner city elites, then we need to work harder to make sure we are as relevant to people in central Queensland as we are to people in inner Sydney."
The broadcaster has made no secret it is focused on growing its audience in the outer suburbs and regions, which is an explicit goal of the news division's editorial strategy "More Relevant to More Australians".
But the ABC staff who spoke to The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age were concerned about how "harshly" Mr Morris articulated those priorities during the briefings, as well as the explicit link they felt he made between editorial content and the broadcaster's funding.
"The idea we would shape coverage to please our masters is very worrying," one person said.
Some of the sources agreed it was desirable to broaden the ABC's output but said this should be done when warranted by news value, not to change public perception or please the government. They complained Mr Morris' remarks were reminiscent of critiques of the ABC routinely made on Sky News "after dark" or in the editorial pages of The Australian.
According to the people on the call, Mr Morris did not directly mention climate change in his remarks, but his references to issues that were pertinent to Queensland were interpreted as a message the ABC was too focused on the dangers of climate change and not sufficiently interested in the loss of coal jobs, for example.
In response to questions, an ABC spokesperson said: "A couple of words from an hour-long briefing without the proper context is not an accurate summation."
The spokesperson said the goal of the editorial strategy "More Relevant to More Australians" was to expand the range of issues the broadcaster covers.
"ABC News already does excellent and comprehensive coverage of all aspects of climate change, and we'll keep doing that," they said.
"As well as that, we want to make sure we're doing an equally good job covering a whole lot of other issues that are also really important to people and affect their lives.
"The reference to Queensland was simply this: we need to keep working hard to ensure we're as appreciated by and relevant to people in central Queensland as we are to people in central Sydney if we're to provide value to all Australians."
Mr Morris has run the ABC's news, analysis and investigations division for five years, and oversees all the ABC's broadcast and digital news and current affairs output.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/abc-news-boss-warns-staff-against-focus-on-inner-city-left-wing-elites-20201023-p56849.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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25 October, 2020
Alan Jones: COVID causes a global crisis of freedom
Sky News host Alan Jones says COVID-19 is not, and has never been, a pandemic:
I am forever an optimist. But there is certainly a crisis in this country and, indeed, in the Western world. It’s a crisis of trust, because we also face an economic crisis, a mental crisis, an unemployment crisis, business viability crisis, an aviation crisis, a crisis in the arts industry — the list is endless, all a derivative of strategies addressing a virus which are utterly out of all proportion to the nature of the problem.
As a result, we learn this week that Millennials in democracies throughout the world are more disillusioned with their system of government than any young generation in living memory. This is a survey of nearly five million people.
Roberto Foa, the study’s lead author from the Centre for the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University, was quoted as saying: “This is the first generation in living memory to have a global majority who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works …”
David Kemp is a former federal Liberal MP, a colleague of mine in a Prime Ministerial office, and one of the most formidable defenders of liberal traditions. He wrote recently: “The corrupting effect of political power and self-interest has so clearly outed itself. The pandemic has highlighted some simple and sometimes harsh truths about ourselves, our leaders and our democracy … The most important truth is that, as individuals, we suffer, and some of us die, not from the virus, but from the lack of freedom to express and achieve our values and pursue our dreams.”
Rightly, argues David Kemp: “These disturbing occurrences underline how vital our civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional constraints are to our wellbeing as a people and a nation.”
Well may we ask if we will ever get them back. Section 92 of the Constitution guarantees that intercourse among States should be “absolutely free”. No section of our Constitution was more rigorously debated leading up to Federation in 1901 than Section 92. Our Federal government refuses to go to the High Court to defend our Constitution. If our national government won’t, who will?
The “science” is thrown back at us to justify what is nothing more than totalitarian behaviour.
John Tierney, in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute of Policy Research, which is a leading free-market think tank, wrote recently of lockdowns and of Anthony Fauci, the White House adviser, whom Donald Trump has roundly criticised: “He and politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, profess to be following the science. But no ethical scientist would conduct such a risky experiment without carefully considering the dangers and monitoring the results …”
When a politician says that this is all because of “the science”, why you can only have 10 here and 20 there and 300 there, and you can’t stand, you can only sit and you can’t sing, and you can’t shake hands — never has a single piece of paper been presented that provides an epidemiological justification for what we are being told to do.
Yet, the World Bank estimates that the coronavirus recession could push 60 million people into extreme poverty, which inevitably means more disease and death.
President Trump argued this week: “People are tired of COVID. I have the biggest rallies I have ever seen ... people are saying “whatever, just leave us alone.”
As Henry Ergas wrote, clinically this month: “Every new case leads the evening news, reinforcing its image as the Grim Reaper. One might have hoped that the experts would set the picture straight.” Well, despite my protestations, no politician in this country has ever, and I repeat ever, quoted the World Health Organisation’s daily statistics — 99 per cent of cases are mild, 1 per cent serious or critical.
Indeed, as I write, in the whole of Australia, there are 17 people in hospital. But lockdowns persist. Everywhere. Not just Victoria.
No debate, no justification. Just do as you’re told or cop the consequences. Seriously, what country are we living in? Politicians should hang their arrogant heads in shame.
Mind Medicine Australia has put together a report, documenting the consequences of the response to this virus. And, among other things, it argues that, over the next five years, the additional cost to the Australian economy from those suffering from heightened psychological distress who remain employed, but at reduced productivity, is estimated at $114 billion; that modelling from the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre suggests the COVID-19 pandemic will contribute to a major surge, 25 per cent in suicides with an increase of up to 30 per cent among young people aged 15 to 25.
The greatest metaphor of the alarmism, fear and hysteria that has overtaken our country and, indeed the world, is the use of the word “pandemic”. This is not a pandemic. It was never a pandemic.
It doesn’t matter which country you take — the US, with 328 million people, Sweden with 10 million people, or outfits like Italy, France, the UK, Spain and Australia in between — the statistics of people who are said to have died from coronavirus, (and remember, many of these people may have died with it not from it) nonetheless, the percentage of the population who have died is basically the same in all of these countries is 0.07 per cent.
Australia is an island continent with 25 million people. If we had not had Ruby Princess and international travellers, we could have easily escaped the whole show. But even so, deaths are 0.0035 per cent and look at the price we are now paying.
I have, for months, cited one international authority after another, who has argued the strategy is wrong.
Professor Joe Kettner, from Manitoba University, who said: “I have seen pandemics, one every year. It’s called influenza and other respiratory illness viruses. I have never seen this reaction and I’m trying to understand why.”
Professor John Ioannidis, the Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University (and think of those mortality figures I have cited) has said: “If we had not known about a new virus out there and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year.
“At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.”
We are in a social, economic and moral sewer, because we have failed to listen to world authorities.
A fed-up and disillusioned Australia is cheering when Professor Kemp argues: “The authoritarianism of those whose philosophies are based on centralised power and imposed conformity has been unmistakeable … it’s time for the Prime Minister to recognise … that giving priority to his relations with those who abuse their power and disrespect their citizens is not consistent with the strong lead that the nation needs.”
Our collective plea is, get out of our way, leave us alone and give our country and our freedoms back to us.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/alan-jones-covid-causes-a-global-crisis-of-freedom/news-story/93281a5a30a853074d8c8b50a1ebac76
The West’s booming new religion
This week, Britain’s Equalities Minister delivered a speech we probably wouldn’t hear in our federal parliament. That’s a shame because we could do with some home truths about a booming wokeness movement that is deeply flawed.
During a House of Commons debate on Black History Month, Tory minister Kemi Badenoch, an immigrant of Nigerian heritage, exposed the blind adherence of schools to simplistic slogans of the Black Lives Matters movement.
“I want to speak about a dangerous trend in race relations that has come far too close to home in my life and it is the promotion of critical race theory — an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression,” she said. “What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted facts. We don’t do this with communism. We don’t do this with socialism. We don’t do it with capitalism.”
Badenoch said that some schools have decided to openly support the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group “often fully aware that they have the statutory duty to be politically impartial”.
“Black lives do matter. Of course they do,” said Badenoch. “But we know that the Black Lives Matter movement — capital B, L, M — is political. I know this, because at the height of the protest, I’ve been told of white Black Lives Matter protesters calling — and I apologise for saying this word — calling a black armed police officer guarding Downing Street a ‘pet n …’.”
When Badenoch entered the British parliament in mid-2017, she was hailed by sections of the media as the smartest of the crop of new MPs. And maybe only a woman of colour could rise in parliament and say we should stop pretending BLM “is a completely wholesome anti-racist organisation”. ‘There is a lot of pernicious stuff that is being pushed and we stand against that,” she said.
“We do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and their inherited racial guilt. And let me be clear, any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”
Let’s not kid ourselves. There is a similar propensity in Australian schools to present BLM in simplistic, and misleading, terms as a wholesome anti-racist movement.
For example, at Ballarat Grammar, a weekly chapel service in week eight of term three, delivered as a video package to students, was devoted to the BLM movement. After an introduction where the school chaplain describes social movements as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, a number of students read scripted statements extolling the virtues of the BLM movement. Students call for reparations for invasion. They talk about white privilege. They detail the terrible treatment of some Indigenous Australians within the justice system.
Students should bring complex and difficult issues to the attention of other students. Genuine learning will, at times, cause discomfort. But the video package for Ballarat Grammar students, and posted on the intra-school website, is a mickey mouse version of the BLM movement. It makes no attempt to recognise BLM as a political movement, which, like every political movement is complicated, sometimes inconsistent, and not figured out from a handful of scripted platitudes. Students are not stupid. Teachers, and preachers, respect them far more by allowing them to explore how political movements can be both significant and far from perfect.
Students have come of age in an online world. So there has never been a greater need to help them be discerning, curious, even sceptical of what they come across in their digital world. So why package up the BLM movement as a Hallmark card?
Defunding police, for example, has become a crude mantra of the BLM movement. It ought to be contested, even at schools, lest students imagine that mantras are a substitute for thinking about complex issues.
As Ballarat Grammar was compiling its BLM chapel video, the BLM website stated its aim to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family”. Though deleted from the website in mid-September, how does this anti-family view fit with the chaplain’s claim that the BLM movement is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit?
Parts of the BLM movement are radically political, vehemently anti-capitalist and aimed at dismantling the liberal order. It’s not hard to find video footage of black-clad BLM protesters standing over diners at restaurants, chanting “white silence is violence”, demanding that all people raise their fists to show solidarity with their chosen agenda.
If this was just a case of dumbing down education, that would be bad enough given the woeful results of Australian students in international educational rankings. But if educators are not giving students the warts-and-all truth about the BLM movement, how will kids learn to separate some very sound aims from some deeply authoritarian traits? Ballarat Grammar’s chapel service could have offered students the chance to consider a deeply ethical question: when, if ever, do the ends justify the means?
Imagine a school classroom where high school students are asked to consider whether Western lives matter? Where they are challenged to think whether we should kneel for French teacher Samuel Paty? Where they are asked to consider what Italian journalist Guilio Meotti said during the week after the civics teacher was beheaded for discussing the Mohammed cartoons in his classroom: “This French teacher was the victim of the most ferocious racism that circulates today in Western democracies, that of fundamentalist beliefs against ‘infidels’.”
Alas, not just schools offer unthinking support for the BLM movement. Corporations and all kinds of other groups salute it too as part of their commitment to “diversity and inclusivity”. This commitment, part and parcel of a wider wokeness agenda, is another quasi-political movement that, like the BLM movement, could do with a splash of scepticism and analysis.
Parading virtue is not the same as doing good. No organisation should need a highly paid team of D&I “experts” to prove it supports inclusivity and diversity. Nor should it need pages of turgid D&I policies to understand that no person should be discriminated against on the basis of sex, sexuality, creed, culture or race.
But the D&I industry has become the perfect Trojan horse for more opportunistic activists to demand special status and privileges for groups they deem special. And timid CEOs and boards are swallowing it, lock, stock and barrel. Most companies have D&I statements drafted by D&I “officers”, D&I KPIs drawn up and monitored by more D&I “professionals”, D&I workshops run by D&I “experts”. It is, as Time magazine reported late last year, a booming industry: a 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63 per cent of diversity “experts” were appointed during the past three years.
What a terrific lurk. No skills or formal qualifications required. Learn the D&I lingo, master the art of bullshit, and you’re on your way to a lucrative career with guaranteed work from company executives and board members looking to mimic each other with expensively drafted drivel about diversity and inclusion.
Woke D&I flunkies are paid handsomely, for example, to advise companies to establish their diversity and inclusion credentials by encouraging employees to “bring their whole self to work”. Most of it is for show. And much of it is as deeply flawed as the BLM movement.
What if your whole self includes a Christian or Muslim view of traditional marriage or homosexuality? Rugby Australia famously told Israel Folau not to bring those bits of his whole self to work, nor to express them on his personal social media accounts. Then he was told not to come to work at all.
James Cook University is another organisation that, according to its website “encourages diversity.” “JCU has an extensive program in place to encourage diversity,” it says. JCU places “diversity messages” in its recruitment advertising — such as this: “We are enriched by and celebrate our workplace diversity and welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and abilities.”
But when it comes to the university’s core business, diversity and inclusion is a crock. Rather than defend the diversity of academic opinions, JCU sacked physic professor Peter Ridd, claiming he acted in an uncollegial manner when he challenged the quality of climate research by a JCU academic.
More and more, the D&I industry resembles a new religion for our secular age. Corporate executives throw shareholder money in the D&I collection plate to signal their virtue.
Even worse, whereas older, traditional religions are learning to become more tolerant of difference, the D&I industry is not there yet.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/diversity-and-inclusion-the-wests-booming-new-religion/news-story/700b9126217c89e78daa81560ebf8600
Restrictions hinder housing affordability
Restrictions on new building are one of the main reasons housing is so expensive, especially in Sydney. Local councils want to make this worse.
Ku-ring-gai Council, in Sydney’s affluent North Shore, recently voted for “no increase in housing numbers or building heights” in defiance of state government targets.
Several other Sydney councils, including Ryde, Canterbury Bankstown and Randwick have called for reductions in the housing targets.
These calls are ostensibly in response to a reduction in population growth following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alister Henskens, the local state member, argues that, because of the pandemic, “no new housing may be required in the next 5 years in Ku-ring-gai as there is likely to be an excess of housing supply over demand in Sydney in the medium term.” Many other politicians have made similar claims.
There are three problems with this argument.
First, it ignores Sydney’s long history of under-building. This has accumulated to a large shortage. The NSW Productivity Commission’s recent Green Paper estimates that since 2006 housing supply has fallen short of underlying household formation by 70,000 dwellings.
This shortage is expected to grow to 170,000 dwellings by 2040. These projections take into account the pandemic and current building targets.
Second, a more relevant way to gauge the need for housing is to compare sale prices with supply costs. Homebuyers in Sydney are paying $350,000 more for the average new apartment than it costs to supply.
The unaffordability of housing is further evidence of a housing shortage. High housing costs are an unavoidable consequence of supply restrictions like those of Ku-ring-gai council.
Third, the construction industry is already undergoing a sharp contraction. However, unlike hospitality, entertainment and many other industries that have been hit by the pandemic, construction is a “COVID-safe” activity. It is an area of the economy that can be readily and safely expanded to reduce unemployment.
Unlike industries being supported by fiscal stimulus, market-rate housing provides goods of lasting value that households really want.
With high prices and negative real interest rates, now is a great time to be building houses. The construction industry can rapidly create jobs at no cost to the taxpayer.
All that is needed is for planners to get out of the way.
The alternative of letting the local councils reduce their targets will make housing even more unaffordable.
https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/articles/restrictions-hinder-housing-affordability/
University to shift teacher training to postgrad diplomas
Back to the future. No more dummy teachers: Students with poor High School marks no longer admitted
The University of Technology Sydney has abruptly shelved its primary teaching degree, saying it was losing money and struggling to attract students because of government-imposed academic standards for trainee teachers.
The decision – which the university describes as a "pause" – comes as a new federal university funding scheme, beginning next year, reduces fees for education degrees to address a looming teacher shortage.
UTS' BEd (Primary) degree has been removed from the 2021 University Admissions Centre guide. Hundreds of students who listed it as a preference have been individually contacted to be told it is not available, multiple sources told the Herald.
The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Alan Davison, wrote to the school of education late last month listing the reasons behind the decision.
There was not enough interest in the degree, its ATAR was low compared with competitors, and the school of education was not generating enough high-visibility research, he wrote in an email seen by the Herald.
"There is continued impact on load [student numbers] from increasing federal and state standards requirements, [such as] those wishing to enter a teaching degree require a minimum standard of three Band 5 HSC results," the email said.
Professor Davidson’s email said UTS’s vice-chancellor and provost had asked him to take "prompt action" to pause the degree, and explore the possibility of offering a postgraduate primary education course instead.
"As you are aware, undergraduate teacher education at UTS has been a major loss maker, and that must be addressed with some urgency," he wrote.
Students studying the degree will finish it, and there will be a small first-year cohort next year of deferred and repeating students. The secondary education degree has also been cancelled with UAC, and will be offered as a masters degree.
A spokeswoman for UTS said the pause would allow a review of the course in the first half of next year, "leading to a decision on its ongoing viability," she said.
One in 10 trainee teachers fails required literacy and numeracy tests
The decision was made before the federal government’s changes to student fees passed the Senate on October 8. "The challenges facing the area predate, and are unrelated to, the recent government funding changes," the spokeswoman said.
Under those changes, student fees for education degrees will drop by almost $3000 to encourage more students to study teaching. However, the government will not match the amount of money universities will lose due to the lower fees, so teaching – like nursing and engineering – will attract less total funding per student.
Michael Thomson, the state secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, said UTS was due to replace its existing primary teaching course with a new one in 2021. Staff had been working on that course for at least a year.
"They were quite shocked when the announcement came that they were putting it on pause," he said. "What does a pause mean? People are concerned that this decision was made a bit ad hoc."
Mr Thomson said staff found out about the change two days before voluntary separation applications closed. "If they’d had this information beforehand, it might have influenced what they did," he said.
Like many universities, UTS’s revenue from international students has been hit hard by border closures related to COVID-19.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-major-loss-maker-uts-shelves-its-primary-teaching-degree-20201022-p567mr.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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23 October, 2020
How Victoria's lockdown killed four newborn babies: Distraught families told that their children were not permitted to enter Victoria for emergency heart surgery before they died
Four babies have died in Adelaide in the past four weeks after they could not be airlifted to Melbourne due to the city's coronavirus lockdown.
South Australia does not have a cardiac unit for children meaning seriously ill newborns with heart issues are normally taken to Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital - but this option has been ruled out due to the pandemic, an inquiry heard on Tuesday.
Victoria does not currently have any restrictions in place for travellers entering from another Australian state.
But Slaried Medical Officers Association chief industrial officer Bernadette Mulholland told The Australian that doctors told her 'in these four cases, the issue was Victoria not being able to retrieve the babies'.
Associate Professor John Svigos told the South Australian parliament's public health services committee that Melbourne's lockdown meant transfer was not available.
'In our current COVID situation... the usual process of referral to the Melbourne cardiac unit is no longer tenable, and referral to Sydney is on a case-by-case basis,' he said.
The babies died over the course of the past four weeks, with the most recent death coming on Friday.
The inquiry heard the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital being described as 'second class'.
'The Women's and Children's Hospital has sadly seen the deaths of three babies in the past four weeks who were unable to be transferred, who almost certainly would have benefited from on-site cardiac services,' Professor Svigos said, according to the Adelaide Advertiser.
'I shall leave it to you to imagine the profound effect of these deaths on the parents, their families and the dedicated medical and nursing staff dealing with these tragedies... they feel that they have let their patients down.'
The respected obstetrician, who now heads up the WCH Alliance lobby, bluntly asked how many more deaths of babies and young children will the community and staff be forced to endure before the situation is improved at the hospital?
Shortly after the explosive testimony, Ms Mulholland informed the committee a fourth child had also tragically died on Friday.
She told the committee a chronic lack of resources is leaving medical staff on the brink of 'burnout'. Ms Mulholland explained it was common for junior doctors to be found 'sleeping on the floor because of a lack of resources', the INDAILY reported.
'Essentially there is not enough staff, not enough resourcing, not enough allied health to run many of the services of paediatric medicine in this state,' she said.
'If something is not done about it then the legacy this will create for the women and children of this state will unfortunately be very grim.'
One year earlier hospital staff called for a an upgrade to the chronic lack of paediatric cardiac services available at the hospital but the business case was rejected because it was not seen to be economically viable.
An independent report concluded the number of likely cases would not be enough justify $6million set-up cost, or keep the skill levels of surgeons up to standard.
But Professor Svigos warned the hospital must become self sufficient and not rely on patient transfers.
'If we are not self sufficient we are going to run into this problem again – it would be crazy to think we are not going to have another pandemic at some stage,' he said.
After sitting through the alarming testimony, committee chairwoman Connie Bonaros said the situation is 'utterly unacceptable' and 'national disgrace'.
She said babies were dying entirely due to penny-pinching.
In response to the damning allegations, the Women's and Children's Hospital told Daily Mail in a statement paediatric cardiac surgery services are currently under review with the Network's Board.
'We are working closely with our clinicians to develop a service proposal for the use of ECMO for children in South Australia,' the statement read.
'The hospital added that South Australian children will always have access to the health services they need.
'The quality of the services we provide is always our number one priority and South Australian families should rest assured that our hospital continues to provide the safest care for our patients.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8861271/Why-Victorias-lockdown-killed-four-newborn-babies.html
Financial case for Snowy Hydro 2.0 just doesn't hold water
A boondoggle initiated by former PM Turnbull to placate the Greenies
To begin, the true cost has not been admitted but is creeping up. This cost is in two parts – money paid by the government to take full ownership of Snowy Hydro and the cost of the project itself. The federal government, which only had shares in 13 per cent of Snowy Hydro at the start of this process, paid NSW and Victoria $6.3 billion to buy them out, based on a “fair market value” for Snowy Hydro of $7.8 billion. Allowing for inflation, this was more than double the value estimated as part of a failed privatisation attempt in 2006. The government’s total investment was increased to $9.18 billion with an equity injection/subsidy of a further $1.38 billion.
Sure, the government will now stand to get the full dividends but these are shrinking, as revealed in the latest annual report published this week ($218 million last financial year?), and indicate a poor investment return, even pre-Snowy 2.0.
In March 2017, the project was estimated to cost $2 billion. In April last year, a contract for part construction was let at $5.1 billion, to a syndicate made up of Italy’s Salini Impregilo, South Africa's Clough and US company Lane Construction. The latest cost estimate, declared in the recent Standard and Poor credit assessment, was $5.7-$6.2 billion, which excludes many significant costs, especially transmission, bringing the government’s total exposure to date to more than $15 billion.
It is significant that S&P downgraded the credit standing of Snowy Hydro to near junk status in September, even though the capital injection was ostensibly to prop up the credit rating so a final investment decision could be made.
S&P also noted that: "We could lower our ratings if we were to believe that ... timely and adequate support from the government is not forthcoming." They also said: "We expect that Snowy will not undertake any other major projects (such as additional gas-fired generation) in a manner that would place pressure on the balance sheet of the company, or without appropriate support from the shareholders."
This provides important context to Morrison’s threat to use Snowy to build gas-fired generation in the Hunter if the private sector fails to commit by April next year to provide an adequate replacement for the Liddell coal-fired power station.
Snowy Hydro has claimed exaggerated net benefits of $4.4 billion to $6.8 billion, way short of the likely cost. The business case just doesn’t stack up, with costs seriously understated and revenues overstated. The government has made extraordinary, open-ended commitments to Snowy – and taxpayers are carrying the risk.
The Australian Energy Market Operator's Integrated System Plan has indicated that Snowy 2.0 will not be needed for another 10 years, not today, as Snowy management has claimed. This is evidenced by the historically low use of the pumped storage component of Tumut 3 station. AEMO forecasts less than half the output that Snowy has assumed. Far more efficient and cheaper storage alternatives are available.
The government also claims that Snowy 2.0 will put downward pressure on electricity prices and create jobs. Yet its own modelling shows higher prices from 2032 to 2047, and these price forecasts exclude the significant costs of transmission. Generation may push prices lower, but pumping will push them higher. At 2000MW, Snowy 2.0 will be the largest demand in the market, and pumping is required for 133 per cent of the time of generation due to losses. Moreover, how much of pumping power will be coal-fired?
As to jobs, the partial EIS suggests just eight to 16 operational jobs after construction.
As a pumped hydro project Snowy 2.0 also has its weaknesses - the 27-kilometre gap between the two reservoirs is about double the longest anywhere else in the world, resulting in high water friction losses, and the storage capacity of the lower reservoir is smaller.
The significance of the environmental impact on Kosciuszko National Park should also not be dismissed. This includes the project's size, which covers thousands of hectares, including hundreds of hectares of crucial habitats; the dumping of millions of cubic metres of spoil (some contaminated); more than 100 kilometres of access roads and tracks; clearways measuring 120 to 200 metres wide for the 10 kilometres of two double-circuit 330kV transmission lines; depressed water tables above the tunnel; the compounding of bushfire damage; and the visible scars on the landscape. It is certainly the largest, and perhaps the only, significant commercial/industrial project allowed in our national parks.
It should also be recognised that this project is not vital to the transition to renewables and it creates about 50 million tonnes of greenhouse gases during construction and operation.
Even though government spending is essential to our COVID-19 recovery, taxpayers want assurances of value for their money. Energy experts have been sceptical about Snowy 2.0 from the outset. It is essential that there be a full and genuinely independent assessment of the project before another dollar is committed or spent.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/financial-case-for-snowy-hydro-2-0-just-doesn-t-hold-water-20201021-p5677c.html
Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has demanded Australia Post's CEO stand aside pending an investigation into the purchase of luxury watches for executives.
The Communications Minister has ordered an investigation into Australia Post after four senior employees were given $3,000 Cartier watches as a "thank you" for working to secure a lucrative deal with three of the major banks in 2018.
Minister Paul Fletcher said he had asked Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate to step aside during the investigation. "I was as shocked and concerned as everybody else to discover this when it was revealed in Estimates this morning," he said.
"I have asked the chair [of Australia Post] to provide the full support of the company for this investigation, and I have also asked the chair to inform the chief executive that she will be asked to stand aside during the course of this investigation."
The Estimates hearing was told the watches went to a team who worked on a multi-million-dollar deal that meant customers of Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and NAB could do their banking at post offices.
Ms Holgate said the employees were given the watches on behalf of the chair of the board and herself as a thank you gift.
"There were a small number of senior people who put in an inordinate amount of work in, and they did receive a reward," she said.
Ms Holgate said she was not one of the four people who received a watch, and could not specify what type of watches were bought.
When asked how and on what card they were purchased, neither Ms Holgate or the company's chief financial officer could say, but they rejected a suggestion they were paid for with taxpayer funds. "We are a commercial organisation, it was a recommendation from our chair that these people get rewarded," she said.
The Federal Government owns Australia Post but it operates as an independent business and does not receive funding from the Government.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he was "appalled" and that the gifts were "disgraceful and not on".
"We are the shareholders of Australia Post on behalf of the Australian people," he said. "The chief executive ... has been instructed to stand aside, if she doesn't wish to do that, she can go."
Australia Post has recently reduced letter delivery services to every second day in a bid to meet the increased demand of delivering parcels, which now make up 61 per cent of its business because of the increase in online shopping.
Earlier today, Ms Holgate flagged that the company planned to employ up to 5,000 extra people to help with increased demand over Christmas.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-22/australia-post-gifted-cartier-watches-executives-investigation/12802152
Canberra magistrate Bernadette Boss complained Supreme Court made it impossible to protect children
A Canberra magistrate's exasperated warning she is "no longer in a position to protect children" from parents who beat them has been revealed after an appeal against one of her decisions.
Magistrate Bernadette Boss made the remarks — aimed at the ACT Supreme Court — in June, while hearing the case of a mother who slapped, pinched and punched her 11-year-old son.
During the hearing, lawyers for the woman presented an appeal against an earlier decision by Dr Boss, in which the Supreme Court set aside the sentence she imposed and replaced it with a non-conviction order with 12-months' good behaviour.
In that case, a mother had hit her seven-year-old son with a shoe after he lost some of his toys, leaving him with "significant" bruising.
The outcome of the appeal had been published just two days before the sentencing hearing.
After being presented with the documents in court, Dr Boss believed the Supreme Court's overturning of her sentence meant she had to sentence the 11-year-old's mother in a similar fashion, despite her concern it was too lenient.
"OK, children are clearly not to be protected in this jurisdiction. I know I'll probably get into trouble for making that remark, but I find that absolutely remarkable in the extreme," she told the June sentencing hearing. "I don't know what I'm to do frankly. I can't protect children in light of that decision. How can I protect a child in this jurisdiction?
"A child in this jurisdiction can be assaulted and actual bodily harm can be occasioned to them, and that is still not serious enough to be beyond a section 17 [non-conviction order]. "My hands are tied. I'm virtually forced into a section 17 in this case."
Dr Boss said she wished the Supreme Court judge who overturned her original sentence, Chrissa Loukas-Karlsson, would join her to hear family violence cases in the lower court. "With all due respect to her Honour, I wish she would come and sit in the family violence list," she said. "I'm amazed. I can't go further than that without being disrespectful."
Dr Boss is set to leave the ACT Magistrates Court, having recently been appointed as the National Commissioner for Defence and Veteran Suicide Prevention.
Justice Loukas-Karlsson's decision in the appeal took into account the fact the seven-year-old's mother was facing other stresses in her life.
"The appellant's serious personal stress and emotional strain had caused an uncharacteristic lapse of judgement, as a result of which the appellant committed the offence," she said.
After seeing that judgement, Dr Boss sentenced the 11-year-old's mother to a 12-month good behaviour order with no conviction recorded.
She interpreted the Supreme Court decision to mean first-time assaults on children, even if they resulted in bruising, should not result in convictions.
But prosecutors then appealed that decision to the Supreme Court as well, arguing it was too lenient.
In a decision published this week, Justice David Mossop found Dr Boss had been wrong to believe the first appeal left her with no option but to issue a non-conviction order.
"In my view, her Honour erred in approaching the matter on the basis that the sentence [in the first appeal] was a binding precedent," he said.
But he ultimately found that while Dr Boss could have used her discretion, the final sentence was right for the woman's case.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/canberra-magistrate-bernadette-boss-complained-supreme-court-made-it-impossible-to-protect-children/ar-BB1agDaN?ocid=msedgdhp
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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22 October, 2020
Warning Perth in 'rental crisis' as residential vacancy rate slumps to lowest level in 13 years
Covid inspired laws that protect tenants but burden landlords have driven many landlords out of the business. Being inconsiderate of landlords always has that effect
Western Australia's peak real estate body has warned Perth is in a "rental crisis" after the city's residential vacancy rate fell below 1 per cent for only the third time in 40 years.
The "rental crisis" is being stoked by a lack of investors
Real Estate Institute of WA (REIWA) figures show the home vacancy rate has dropped to 0.96 per cent, the lowest level in 13 years.
REIWA President Damian Collins said the rate was declining rapidly and was on track to reach the 0.8 per cent all-time low, recorded in March 2007.
"With rental listings in Perth falling eight per cent to 2,926 over the month, we have certainly hit a rental crisis," he said. "Tenants looking for a rental will potentially find themselves unable to find a home.
"We're seeing sometimes dozens and dozens of people looking at properties and that many tenants are finding out they can't get into a home."
Mr Collins said the COVID-19 pandemic had seen many people abroad return to WA at once, all looking for homes to either rent or buy.
"I suspect that coming into early 2021, it's likely we're going to run out of all properties available in totality," he said.
Low property investment fuelling shortage
Mr Collins suggested the problems being experienced in the rental market were largely due to low levels of investor activity.
"Typically during this time we would see investors enter the market and increase stock levels, however we are seeing investors are not as confident," he said.
"Western Australia has approximately 17 per cent of properties purchased by investors, whereas we would normally expect to see investors buying 30 per cent or more of the available properties."
An aerial view of the inner city Perth suburb of Inglewood.
REIWA says the rental crisis will only get worse if investors are not lured back into the market.(ABC News: Gian De Poloni)
Mr Collins said one factor spooking investors was the extension of the COVID-19 emergency residential tenancy laws until the end of March next year.
The State Government introduced the legislation earlier this year in response to the global pandemic, protecting tenants from being evicted from their rental properties and banning rent increases on existing tenancies.
Mr Collins said it disregarded the needs of landlords and would ultimately lead to higher rental prices and fewer rental properties being available when the emergency period came to an end.
He said the rental crisis would only get worse if investors were not encouraged back into the market.
"The Government needs to send a clear signal to the market that they have no intention of extending the legislation further if we remain relatively COVID-19 free," he said.
"That might give some confidence back to investors to come back into the market when they have some clarity about the outlook of their investment property, otherwise investors will continue to sit on their hands and make a bad situation even worse."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-21/perth-rental-crisis-warning-as-residential-vacancy-rate-slumps/12798076
Wollongong Coal says Russell Vale mine expansion 'no risk' to Sydney's drinking water, but locals are wary
There's no such thing as a happy Greenie. They make themselves feel significant by opposing things
A New South Wales coal mining company that wants to expand a mothballed operation beneath Sydney's drinking water catchment says it has "engineered out" any risk to the environment.
Wollongong Coal is seeking approval from the State Government to extract 3.7 million tonnes of coal over five years from its Russell Vale mine.
During a two-day public hearing of the Independent Planning Commission (IPC), chief executive Warwick Lidbury said the company would use a bord-and-pillar mining method to mitigate subsidence.
"The board of Wollongong Coal has committed to complete this project and future projects utilising an environmentally friendly process," he said.
"It excludes longwall mining and has engineered out the risk associated with mining under the water catchment, as well as the noise generated, air quality, and the visual impacts on the pit top area.
"The extraction plan will ensure no cracking of the strata, no additional loss of water from the catchment, no adverse effects of the water quality on the surface, no adverse effects on the upland swamps, no effects that will increase bushfire risk and no effects on any Aboriginal sites."
The colliery has been in care and maintenance since 2015 and its owners are $1 billion in debt.
It is the third time Wollongong Coal, which is owned by Indian business Jindal Steel and Power Limited (JSPL), has significantly amended its expansion proposal since 2009.
The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) has now recommended the IPC approve the project after what it described as an "exhaustive process".
"The revised bord-and-pillar mining method addressed the key concerns raised in previous reports, in relation to the uncertainty around subsidence and groundwater impacts," director of resource assessments, Steven O'Donoghue, said.
"There'll be economic benefits to the Illawarra and overall, considering that the benefits outweigh the residual costs."
More than 80 parties, including residents, community organisations and businesses, made presentations to the commission on Monday and Tuesday, with fewer than a quarter in favour of the proposal.
Opposition to the project included concerns for water loss from Sydney's drinking supply and climate change, as well as truck movements, noise pollution, and the impact on air quality.
"We're constantly having coal dust descending on our homes," said Illawarra Residents for Responsible Mining spokesperson Alison Edwards.
"As soon as the mine starts up again, with its dropping coal from a high conveyer onto stockpiles, on unsealed roads, we will again be beset by heavy loads of coal dust falling in the vicinity."
Lock the Gate spokesperson Nic Clyde used his presentation to refute claims the bord-and-pillar technique would remove the risk to the water catchment.
"[The project] will cause the loss of about 10 million litres a year to surface waters, which adds up to 50 million litres of water over the five years," he said.
Members of the Seacliff Coasters running group also questioned the mine's impact on public amenity and recreational use of the Illawarra escarpment.
"We've been running for a very long time, but a virtual wall has now been imposed by Wollongong Coal on the Lower Escarpment Trail," said runner Tim Siegenbeek van Heukelom.
"A gate and a newly erected sign indicate no access and threaten prosecution for those who do.
"I call for you to reject the coal mine expansion proposal to enable us to keep enjoying and caring for this magical natural environment."
A boost to employment
Several speakers argued in favour of the proposal on the basis that it would create 205 direct jobs, 800 indirect jobs and 22 jobs during construction.
"If the Russell Vale mine does go back into full production, it will lead to more jobs and revenue for our office and supporting businesses," said Becker Mining spokesperson Geoff Pollard.
"The project will be required to use many different trades and contractors from many different fields and will continue to need these people for the life of the mine.
"This is a great opportunity for the Illawarra."
Danae Horsey, director of the Little School Preschool at Kembla Grange, said Wollongong Coal also made a significant financial contribution to the local community.
"We've had a very positive relationship with Wollongong Coal over the years," she said.
"They've been very generous in support of our community projects and keeping small services like ours viable.
"They make donations to our programs, they funded our early-learning languages program, they've funded our sustainability projects [by] donating money for water tanks and having those installed.
"I think it's under-reported, the good work that they do, and how they support small businesses like us."
In June 2018, the NSW Resources Regulator accepted an enforceable undertaking from Wollongong Coal to pay donations of $5,000 to a local charity or community group and to lease a portion of its property to the Little School Preschool for $1 per year until 2023.
The decision was made after an investigation into an alleged failure of the company to pay annual rental fees and administrative levies.
The IPC will make a determination on the Russell Vale Expansion Project in the coming months.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-21/russell-vale-coal-mine-expansion-no-risk-to-sydney-water/12785696
New Zealand has elected its most diverse Parliament ever. How does Australia compare?
Why is this Left-wing bigotry condoned? People should be judged on their personal merits, not on what group they belong to
New Zealand has just elected its most diverse Parliament ever — almost half their MPs will be women, and around 10 per cent are from the LGBTQ+ community.
Ms Kerekere said it was vital that "people have the opportunity to take part in the decisions that affect their lives", and she wanted to make sure decisions are viewed through a M?ori and rainbow lens.
"In Parliament, that is the highest level, and everybody must be at the table to have those conversations," she said.
"I'm really proud that I can be here to represent."
As votes are still being counted, some seats have not yet been finalised. But it looks like New Zealand's Parliament will have 48 per cent women.
There are also 16 M?ori MPs, and the country is also celebrating the election of the country's first MP of African origin, Ibrahim Omer, its first Latin American MP, Ricardo Menéndez March, and its first MP of Sri Lankan heritage, Vanushi Walters.
It also appears as though 12 of the 120 seats have been won by people from the LGBTQ+ community.
How does it compare to Australia?
In Australia, there are 86 women elected at the federal level across the 227 seats in the upper and lower houses, or just under 38 per cent.
In the House of Representatives, there are 47 women MPs, making up just under a third, at 31 per cent.
As of last month, Australia has — for the first time — a majority of women in its Senate, with 39 women and 37 men.
There are six Indigenous people elected at the Federal level, and nine people who identify as LGBTQ+.
After the 2019 election, about 4 per cent of Federal MPs had non-European heritage — far below Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-21/new-zealand-jacinda-ardern-election-parliament-diversity-lgbt/12782724
Two Australian High Court judges will be named today – unlike Amy Coney Barrett, we know nothing about them
Most Australians would be unaware the High Court is about to get two new judges, with replacements for the retiring Geoffrey Nettle and Virginia Bell expected to be named today.
Fewer still could explain how those judges will be appointed, and what is involved in the process.
The US Supreme Court and the High Court of Australia perform similar constitutional roles: both courts resolve technical legal cases, as well as those of enormous political significance. Both also have the power to strike down legislation.
But whereas appointments to the US Supreme Court are a highly visible festival of political intrigue and showmanship, the process in Australia is a secretive affair occurring strictly behind closed doors.
Even avid court watchers are left to speculate who will be appointed to replace retiring judges, as well as when such appointments will even be announced.
While our judges may prefer their relative anonymity, the process for choosing who sits on the highest court must be more transparent. Our system is beginning to look outdated.
Huge discretion to appoint any lawyer to the court
When the High Court was created in 1903, it comprised three judges. Over the past 120 years, the size of the bench has expanded to seven. Following a referendum in 1977, a mandatory retirement age of 70 was introduced.
However, the Constitution and subsequent legislation are conspicuously silent on the process to be followed in appointing judges. Section 72 of the Constitution says only
"The justices of the High Court […] shall be appointed by the governor-general in council."
In practice, this means judges are nominated by the prime minister following advice of the cabinet, with significant weight given to the recommendation of the attorney-general.
The Constitution does not mention qualifications for High Court judges. The High Court of Australia Act 1979 does require appointees to have been either a judge of an Australian court or enrolled as a legal practitioner for at least five years. This minimal threshold provides a very low bar for eligibility.
Similarly, the requirements for vetting judges are scarce. The High Court of Australia Act provides a minimum role for consultation with the states:
"Where there is a vacancy in an office of justice, the attorney-general shall, before an appointment is made to the vacant office, consult with the attorneys-general of the states in relation to the appointment."
Such consultations occur in private. There is no requirement for how extensive they must be, nor do they need to factor into the final decision at all. A five-minute session at the end of a National Cabinet video conference would suffice.
In practice, these provisions grant huge discretion to the cabinet to appoint almost any lawyer they wish.
Fortunately, the country has organically developed some strong political conventions to guide the process, including commitments to make appointments based on merit, as well as geographic and (more recently) gender diversity. Unlike in the US, a judge's political leanings are not overtly taken into account.
While a handful of judges have been former politicians, by and large we have been blessed with an apolitical bench populated by the most eminent judges and lawyers in Australia.
However, both the Trump administration in the US and the Johnson government in the UK have shown just how brittle political conventions can be. Once those conventions shatter, the social legitimacy of public institutions — including courts — can quickly evaporate.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-21/two-high-court-of-australia-judges-will-be-named-soon-e28093/12789198
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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October 21, 2020
Walking to school was common in the 1980s but now we drive our kids in record numbers
In the 40s I walked to school by myself -- crossing a main road on the way -- aged about 6. That was normal then -- JR
In the 1970s and '80s most of us walked or rode a bike to primary school without thinking too much about it.
Cars were expensive and few families had more than one, so if your school was close and the rain or heat wasn't terrible, walking or cycling was the most obvious way to get there.
My family has been very lucky to live close to a local school situated near good public transport, and walking to school has always been part of our routine.
When my two boys were too young to walk or cycle on their own, it was easy to walk with them as part of my journey to work.
Leaving the house for school in those days felt like escaping through a magical sliding door — from the rush and stress of the school morning routine to a slower, calmer world.
Once outside the door, irritation about lost lunchboxes and last-minute permission slips would dissipate. Our paces matched. I got to hear a bit more about what was going on in their young lives and minds.
Then there is the quiet pleasure of the walk itself: the unscheduled but happy meeting of a favourite friend or animal along the way, the seasonal scoffing of mulberries overhanging a laneway en route, the complicit exchanges of harried parents, a sudden waft of jasmine announcing spring.
Walking to school helps us to feel as though we're living in a real neighbourhood and community that only footfall on pathways can create.
The benefits of living as much as possible outside of the urgent, car-driven world seem obvious.
Today we drive our kids to school in record numbers. The national rate of "active travel to school", as the experts call it, has declined over the past 40 years from 75 to 25 per cent of trips.
Much of this can be explained by growing car ownership, changing family dynamics and increasing distances between some homes and schools.
But there have also been changes in how far kids are allowed or are willing to go. Nearly 60 per cent of Australian parents report that the distance from home to school is three kilometres or less.
It's a trend that's reflected in many other OECD countries and worries policymakers in the fields of both health and transport.
Health professionals estimate that more than 70 per cent of children and 91 per cent of young people do not meet minimum physical activity recommendations.
But it's also a transport issue.
In recent years I have worked with other transport policymakers and planners on how future transport systems can keep up with growing populations. The research clearly shows small changes in people's travel behaviour to make fewer car trips can make a big difference in how the transport system copes.
"Active travel to school" is one of 10 priority areas proposed by the Australian Health Policy Collaboration and more than 70 leading chronic disease experts to fix the growing obesity and chronic health crisis.
And you don't have to be a transport professional to see that school trips in cars are also bad for traffic congestion and road safety. Queues of cars around schools and local roundabouts make crossings dangerous for walkers and cyclists.
While these trips may seem short and innocuous, the sheer volume of them also clogs up the wider network, diminishing air quality and the way our cities function.
Experts estimate that the additional congestion costs generated by school trips in cars is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
So what can we do to get more kids walking or riding a bike to school? Good pedestrian infrastructure, pleasant walking and cycling environments and safe crossings are critical, of course.
The good news is that transport planners are increasingly seeing streets as places for walking or riding bikes, and pedestrians and cyclists as more than just safety risks to be mitigated.
But parents' perceptions are also a key obstacle to more kids cycling and walking to school, particularly when the decision is to let them do this independently.
Could you be breaking the law?
It's not helpful that in some places letting a child go to school on their own could be classed as breaking the law.
In 2017 the ABC reported on a notice published in a school newsletter bearing the Queensland Police Service insignia telling parents that children under the age of 12 cannot walk or ride to school alone.
For the past 10 years, Queensland's criminal codes have made it an offence to leave a child under 12 unsupervised for an "unreasonable" time (although legally speaking the report argued that this was unlikely to mean a blanket ban on kids under 12 making their way to school alone).
But parents' thoughts and perceptions on official guidance and social norms are important. A 2016 study in Victoria found parents were more likely to restrict their child's independent mobility if they were worried about being judged by others.
However, the biggest barrier to more parents letting their children walk or ride to school alone is parental concern about speeding cars and other traffic dangers.
This is followed by fears around "stranger danger" and abduction (although statistically speaking, kids are much safer on the street than online).
It's understandable — the urge to keep kids safe is hardwired in parents. But when we choose to drive to school, we only add to the real traffic dangers and risks even as we continue to frame it as a problem created by others.
Or as a legendary outdoor poster by Dutch satnav maker TomTom proclaimed in 2010: "You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic."
But it's also possible that continued anxiety around exposure to others (particularly on public transport) may persuade us that we're better off staying inside our bubbles on wheels.
These days, my kids are older and get to school by themselves.
My youngest son still walks to school via the same route I take to the train station and prefers neither of his parents accompany him. It's a change that seemed to happen almost overnight. One morning the boys simply walked out the door on their own, leaving a house that felt suddenly very quiet.
I do miss walking and talking with them sometimes; that everyday invitation to spend more time in the present.
But it would be hard not to celebrate their independence, confidence and ability to successfully navigate the outside world for themselves.
I also hope that walking to school with the kids will mean remembering less about the fretful assembly of school lunches and missing library bags and more about chance encounters with puddles, plants and people.
And sometimes, on a lucky day, the feeling of a small hand slipped quietly, without too much thought, into mine.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-20/walk-to-school-children-transport-traffic-health-safety/12660300
"Social housing" in action
There are many stories like the one below
An Adelaide family whose social housing apartment was riddled with mould and left without repairs for seven months has been given a new home just days after a visit from federal Opposition leader Anthony Albanese.
Nathan Andersen had reported severe mould in his bathroom ceiling from a leaking pipe in the flat above back in March, and was concerned it was a health hazard for his son.
It took until last week, after the dire need for repairs gained media attention during Mr Albanese’s visit to SA, for there to be progress. “It was all stuck in the woodwork for months and months and months and nothing,” Mr Andersen said.
“When (they) came out to do an inspection again, when they had a look at the roof, they deemed it unliveable because it’s a health hazard,” he said.
“They got back to me within two hours and said they had a house for me.” Mr Andersen welcomed the result, saying: “I’ve got upgraded to a three-bedroom house with a yard – it’s really great.”
He was told the delay was due to miscommunication.
Federal Labor’s housing spokesman Jason Clare said: “It shouldn’t have to take a visit from the Leader of the Opposition to get this fixed.”
He said there were “100,000 stories just like Nathan’s across the country” where tenants were living in social housing that desperately need to be repaired.
Labor has called on the Federal Government to fund social maintenance as part of its COVID-19 recovery package to create jobs for the construction sector and to improve conditions for tenants.
https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/sa-family-gets-new-home-after-unliveable-social-housing-gained-media-attention-in-anthony-albanese-visit/news-story/6c80f6b257b143bd7c1a67554253696d
University of Tasmania aims to divest entirely from fossil fuels by the end of 2021
All this will do is hand a bargain to less loony investors
UTAS vice chancellor Rufus Black said the university had decided to begin moving away from fossil fuel investments.
He said UTAS already had no direct shareholdings in fossil fuel companies and said to date fossil fuel-exposed investments represented 0.6 per cent of the university’s portfolio.
“We are working to be out of fossil fuel investments by the end of next year, but we have also taken the view that divestment is not enough,” Prof Black said.
“We need to invest to change the world. An economy consistent with a stable future for our climate is very different to the one we have today.
“New ways of doing business, new technologies, new ways of organising our society are all urgently needed.
“Therefore the university has changed its investment strategy to target those investments that support the delivery of a zero carbon economy.”
Prof Black said “our grandchildren will live into an era where our planet will be transformed into the dramatically negative unless we do something bold”.
In 2018 UTAS students protested for the university to adopt a fossil fuel-free policy by brandishing a sign of the word “divest” on kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
The UTAS announcement comes on the launch day of Global Climate Change Week which Tasmania, and more specifically, UTAS, is hosting this year.
The university will hold stewardship of the stewardship of the fast-growing Global Climate Change Week initiative until 2025.
Started five years ago by two academics at the University of Wollongong, the week will feature nearly 200 public lectures, panel discussions and arts activities on almost every continent.
“We have universities from all over the world registered and a whole range of diverse and interesting activities that are limited only by the imaginations of the people involved,” co-chair Professor Fred Gale said.
“We want to make sure there is action on climate change around the world at university level. It’s a critical issue. We’ve got a decade to turn this around.”
The university ranked third worldwide when the Times Higher Education University Impact Rankings assessed 376 institutions against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals earlier this year.
https://www.themercury.com.au/education/university-of-tasmania-aims-to-divest-entirely-from-fossil-fuels-by-the-end-of-2021/news-story/354fa5e415b3b5afaeff0da6a750d34e
Greenies versus fishermen
The global conservation status of a NSW marine park is at risk after the Berejiklian government weakened its sanctuary status without consultation to allow recreational fishing, documents show.
Montague Island, located off the south coast, was among the first 25 sites to be granted so-called Green Listing by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Documents obtained under freedom of information show both National Parks and IUCN raised concerns about the impact of easing protection.
Fisheries minister Adam Marshall announced last December six marine park sanctuaries would be open to recreational fishing without consulting either the public or the Batemans Marine Park Advisory Committee, according to an email sent that month by Joanne Wilson, a senior parks policy officer.
"Opening up the sanctuary zones in the marine park to line fishing, netting, and taking bait will remove all areas of refuge and breeding for fish that then spill over to other areas, and cause a reduction in the health and resilience of the marine ecosystems around Montague Island," Dr Wilson wrote.
It was "a worrying sign" the decision Fisheries hadn't bothered to consult with the parks service before the decision and "there is a risk" it won't be asked about other key issues, she said.
The move had also come just days before the renomination of Montague Island's Green List status, and it placed "future renominations at risk", Dr Wilson's email, obtained by the Herald, said.
A separate document, dated Christmas Eve, from the IUCN's Green List Committee, congratulated Montague Island Nature Reserve for achieving its status but "expressed its concern about any relaxation" of protections.
It said the extraction of fish from the two reserves – covering roughly a third of the waters around the 81-hectare island – would affect availability of food for seabirds. The committee "reserves the right to review [the Green List status] should there be adverse implications for seabird viability", the letter said.
Minister Marshall defended the proposed changes to fishing access – that are still to formally gazetted – as an election promise taken by the Coalition to the 2019 election.
"Community members will be given another opportunity to provide feedback on the proposed changes over a minimum of two months through the established public consultation process," he said, adding both he and Environment Minister Matt Kean have to sign off on any temporary or longer change.
Mr Kean said the marine parks were popular tourist destinations, "home to important marine biodiversity and a treasured part of the local community”.
“I am aware of the strong views of stakeholders, including the IUCN, regarding the future of the sanctuary zones in the Bateman’s Bay Marine Park," he said. "For this reason I intend to visit the Marine Park and see for myself this unique and precious part of our state.”
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/worrying-sign-rollback-of-protection-puts-marine-park-status-at-risk-20201019-p566h8.html
Australian farmers want illegal workers too
Farmers have pilloried the Federal Government for ruling out an illegal worker amnesty that would allow undocumented workers to come forward without fear of being deported.
Victorian Farmers' Federation spokeswoman Emma Germano has suggested the Government was "the ultimate dodgy labour hire company that financially underpins a model that is not fair, not ethical, and not sustainable", having ruled out the proposal.
On Monday night, before a hearing of Senate Estimates, Employment Minister Michaelia Cash confirmed the Government would not allow such an amnesty. "The Government's position is there will not be an amnesty," Senator Cash said.
"An amnesty would send a dangerous message that it is okay to flout our strong visa and migration rules, principles that this Government has worked incredibly hard over a period of time to secure," she said.
The hearing heard from Government officials that there are an estimated 70,000 unlawful, non-citizens in Australia.
Some farm groups, including the VFF, had been calling for an amnesty to help the industry address its issues with undocumented workers and clean up the industry.
Ms Germano, one of the first to advocate for illegal workers to come forward, with protections, in 2017, said farmers were frustrated the Government was not prepared to pursue the idea.
"Farmers are p***ed off that they [Government] pretended to look at it when they never had genuine intention of making this thing go through," she said.
"Instead they support a black market for horticulture wages that undermines the farmers that are compliant and pay the right wages. "It also puts the undocumented workers in constant danger."
A three-year investigation into worker exploitation has found some foreign workers on Australian farms are "bonded like slaves" to dodgy labour hire contractors.
Earlier this month, Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said the Federal Government had discussed an amnesty as a potential initiative to help address a farm worker shortage.
The proposal was raised by Victorian Agriculture Minister Jaclyn Symes at a meeting of agriculture ministers earlier this year in light of the COVID-19 restrictions which have prevented workers from entering Australia.
An amnesty is supported by the West Australian Agriculture Minister Alannah MacTiernan.
Last year, a report by the University of Adelaide found Australian farmers often relied on illegal labour or risked leaving their crops to fail.
It said worker exploitation had become the "established norm".
Typically, about 70 per cent of the horticulture industries workforce is foreign, and there have been concerns raised about how farmers will harvest their crops this summer due to Australia's decision to close its borders in March.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-20/government-rules-out-worker-amnesty/12784968
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 October, 2020
Newly elected Perth mayor and Channel Seven star Basil Zempilas doubles down on his radical plan to 'forcibly remove' homeless people from the CBD
Newly-elected Perth mayor Basil Zempilas has spoken out about his radical plan for a 'safer, cleaner, friendlier city' ahead of his swearing-in on Monday.
The high-profile Weekend Sunrise sports presenter and former Channel Seven host was voted in as Lord Mayor of the city on Saturday night.
The father-of-three sparked outrage early in his campaign when he said he'd 'forcibly remove' homeless people from the CBD, calling them a 'blight' on the city.
Despite backtracking during the campaign, Mr Zempilas on Sunday doubled-down, saying dealing with the homeless was a 'huge issue' for ratepayers and visitors to Perth, and vowing to bring up the topic with the State Government.
'My view is, the situation at the moment, it's not fair on the individuals themselves and it's not fair on the City of Perth and we need to find better interim solutions for those people who are homeless,' Mr Zempilas told The West Australian.
He also revealed he will work with Queensland based organisation Beddown, who turn carparks into temporary shelters for the homeless.
'They take empty or unused spaces ... They roll out bedding ... and instead of people sleeping on the streets, they sleep in a safer environment where they can get a good night's sleep and get some extra support,' he said.
On what he wants to achieve in his three years as Perth's leader, Mr Zempilas said he wanted to fix the issues which were keeping people away from the city.
'I just want people to feel like it's a more welcoming environment. And right now, there are a number of reasons why people don't necessarily come into the city to either work, to shop, or to live.'
Other priorities mentioned on Sunday where Premier Mark McGowan's hard border policy in response to the coronavirus pandemic, in which Western Australia remains closed to eastern states.
He said he wants to see the borders open as soon as possible, adding that a wider number of compassionate cases could be looked at first.
A tactic of softening of the hard border stance on a number of smaller cases and seeing how that goes is the position he said he would like McGowan to take.
Industry experts have previously said Perth CBD businesses and hotels have collectively lost hundreds of millions in revenue courtesy of the border closure.
He also said factionalism in the local government, an issue which contributed to the previous council being dissolved in 2018, would be addressed.
Mr Zempilas said he expected each newly voted in councillor to abide by their own decision-making and ideas rather than voting for political reasons.
He is expected to continue to juggle his media roles along with his duties as Mayor.
He presents the sports segment on Seven News Perth, writes as a columnist for the 'West Australian' and leads Channel Seven's AFL and Olympics commentary.
He also co-hosts the 6PR Breakfast Show with Steve Mills, but will step down from his role at the end of this year.
On Saturday, he narrowly beat former ABC journalist Di Bain by securing 29.4 per cent of the vote.
Mr Zempilas was behind for most of the count but enjoyed a last-minute surge in support, edging ahead of Ms Bain who finished with 24.94 per cent of the vote.
It marks the first time in two years that voters have elected members of the council after it was suspended in March 2018.
A government inquiry was launched at the time and found 'greed, incompetence and mismanagement' was practiced by a number of councillors.
Mr Zempilas called the latest election a brand new beginning for the City of Perth.
'This is a great opportunity for everyone, and it's a great opportunity for the City of Perth to have the fresh start that it has so desperately been looking for,' he said.
'Everything we do from this point on is for the ratepayers and for the residents of the City of Perth. That's who we are here for and that's who we are here to serve.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8853365/Basil-Zempilas-forcibly-remove-homeless-people-Perths-city-elected-Lord-Mayor.html
Covid rewrites Australia’s future, with huge drop in population signalling challenges ahead
Population growth of 600,000 fewer people in 2022 a sign of major changes for all aspects of life, Deloitte reports
The pandemic has created Australia’s “sliding doors” moment, with the nation now facing a smaller and older population shift, forever altering the future that may have been.
The decision to shut Australia’s borders, made out of necessity to prevent Covid-19 spreading, has pulled the country into a new reality where lower rates of population growth will affect everything from the number of schools that states build to the rate of infrastructure investment, economic consultancy Deloitte Access Economics has found.
“The arc of our nation’s history is bending before our very eyes – a smaller and older Australia awaits us,” Deloitte’s latest quarterly business outlook has reported.
“That isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s definitely big. It will reshape the nation’s future in a bunch of ways.”
The international border closure has meant Australia’s population growth statistics, which are used to plan future infrastructure, communities and spending, have been thrown completely off course, with Deloitte forecasting the nation’s population will grow by at least 600,000 fewer people than had previously been estimated for 2022.
Australia has relied on population growth – mostly through migration – to shore up economic growth for the past three decades. Deloitte is not alone in its predictions – the Treasury, based on an assumption the international border would reopen by late 2021, predicted Australia would have 1 million fewer people than anticipated in two years time.
That not only means changes to infrastructure and growth plans – it also cuts down on the amount of revenue governments across the country had anticipated on receiving, putting increased pressure on already stressed red-line budgets.
“If demographics is destiny, then our destiny just got a lot more challenging,” Deloitte said.
“That loss of migrants will have impacts for many years; it weighs on the pace of recovery, slowing everything from housing construction to the utilities. And, combined with a slumping birthrate, it will change the outlook for school numbers.”
And it’s not just spending. Australia’s existing population includes about five million baby boomers. Younger migrants of working age have traditionally been used to boost the workforce as the older generation retires. Deloitte forecasts the absence of migrants from the labour force will “cut into longer-term growth relatively more than just the overall slowing in growth might suggest”. Deloitte predicts Australia’s net migration arrivals will shrink by 20,000 in the 2020-21 financial year and only increase by 20,000 the next.
And that, the analysts say, is the best-case scenario, based on predictions the rest of the world, not just Australia, will have a handle on the coronavirus sometime in the next year.
“While the risk that countries around the world will shut their borders for an extended period of time seems to have eased somewhat, we can’t ignore the risk that further waves of the pandemic here or overseas will slow that process, and that net migration rates could remain suppressed for more than the two or three years that we currently expect,” Deloitte said.
Combined with a slump in the domestic fertility rate (a downward trend Treasury predicts will continue for the next decade), Australia is looking at a substantially older population than was forecast just a year ago. The substantial drop in migration will further compound Australia’s birthrate – fewer migrants also means fewer mothers giving birth.
“That’s two-thirds of a million missing Australians,” the analysts said.
“The coronavirus will leave behind a huge hangover – we see an Australian economy permanently be more than 3% smaller than our pre-Covid forecasts, mostly as closed borders mean our population will be similarly smaller.”
The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported Australia’s population was 25,649,985 at the end of March, with 61.8% of the annual growth rate (357,000 people) due to net overseas migration.
Australia had previously been forecast to hit 30 million people by 2029.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/19/covid-rewrites-australias-future-with-huge-drop-in-population-signalling-challenges-ahead
BoQ to expand branch network bucking trend of larger rivals
BANK of Queensland plans to expand its branch network by almost 20 per cent as the same time as its cross-town rival Suncorp shutters scores of outlets.
BoQ, which on Wednesday announced a better-than-expected annual profit, said it had ambitions to open about 30 branches across the country as it built on its successful owner-manager model.
Brisbane-based BoQ currently has about 165 branches, including 98 in Queensland, making its network considerably bigger than larger competitor Suncorp. Suncorp last month announced it would close 20 branches, leaving it with 93 stores.
BoQ chief executive George Frazis said that while the bank’s digital initiatives were proceeding, physical branches remained vital. Many of BoQ’s branches are owned and operated by its managers.
“Our branch network is a key point of difference for us and that is why we are looking at growing,” said Mr Frazis. “Our owner managers are small business people who are well connected with the community and passionate about what they do.”
BoQ will resume paying dividends after a COVID-19 deferral, shrugging off a sharp decline in annual profit as it prepares for higher loan losses.
The bank declared a full-year dividend of 12c per share, reflecting 6c for each half. Against the backdrop of the pandemic and strict regulatory guidance, the payment reflects a 81.5 per cent cut on 2019 dividends, which totalled 65 cents per share.
Cash net profit tumbled 30 per cent to $225m for the 12 months ended August 31, compared to the prior corresponding year.
About 21,000 of the bank’s customers have claimed loan repayment deferrals during COVID-19 but that number was declining.
Mr Frazis said the Queensland economy was well placed to recover from the pandemic shutdown with positve signs already seen in some sectors such as health care.
“We have a large exposure in the medical profession and a lot our Queensland customers are back to pre COVID levels,” he said.
BoQ’s result beat analysts’ expectations, which were for BoQ’s annual profit to print at $213.5m.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/business/boq-to-expand-branch-network-bucking-trend-of-larger-rivals/news-story/1847efefabbe4fa509cecb1eaa8c784d
Sausage sizzles back at Bunnings stores around NSW today
Good news. I like Bunnings' sausages myself
Not everything is back to normal yet — but the prospect of a snag in the sun is a step in the right direction, with Bunnings’ iconic sausage sizzles returning.
The hardware chain suspended most barbecues outside stores in March as the coronavirus pandemic hit Australia. Over the past few weeks, the barbecues have been cautiously rolled out across stores in the ACT.
Saturday’s snag comeback means customers at about 40 stores across NSW will be able to enjoy a sausage and support a community group or charity.
Bunnings chief operating officer Deb Poole said stores hosting barbecues this weekend included Padstow, Alexandria and Blacktown in Sydney, as well as Wollongong, Albury and Orange.
Ms Poole has previously said 130 community groups were lined up for the first weekend in NSW, including community fundraisers for the Lions Club, the Rotary and various sports clubs
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/sausage-sizzles-back-at-bunnings-stores-around-nsw-today/news-story/c15255663ae332e0ed336ce0db1869fb
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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19 October, 2020
NSW Liberals back down on koalas
After a bruising political battle that saw Gladys Berejiklian impose her authority over state Nationals, NSW Liberals have quietly backed down, supporting a bill to weaken planned reforms designed to protect koalas on privately-owned farmland.
Simmering tensions between the coalition partners exploded in September when Nationals MPs complained new laws to protect koalas after the bushfires introduced by Liberal MP and Planning Minister Rob Stokes would cut the value of farm land.
Mr Stokes had argued the new Koala State Environment Planning Policy (SEPP) and its expanded definition of habitat was needed to prevent koalas becoming extinct. He said it responded to warnings from the NSW Audit Office, Natural Resources Commission and an Upper House Inquiry - which said NSW's koala would be wiped out by 2030 without urgent action to increase protections.
But by September NSW Nationals Leader John Barilaro had threatened to withdraw his party from the Coalition unless the laws were changed. He said the koala SEPP was a "noose around the neck of farmers that will cause a slow and painful death".
At that time, Mr Stokes dismissed Mr Barilaro's claims as "mistruths" and argued farmers could still "engage in any routine agricultural practice".
Premier Gladys Berejiklian stood firm and threatened to sack Nationals Cabinet Ministers unless they supported the policy. Mr Barilaro backed down and Liberals hailed it as a victory over the bombastic Mr Barilaro.
But this week the Nationals introduced the Local Land Services Amendment Bill to Parliament, supported by the Liberals, which will exempt private rural landholders from having to recognise the new, expanded definition of koala habitat.
Environmental Defenders Office head of law reform Rachel Walmsley said the changes would prevent expansion of koala habitat protection on private farmland into the future.
"This bill is trying to freeze in time the small areas that are currently mapped, whereas it's clear from the science we need to protect more habitat," Ms Walmsley said.
Nationals MP and Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall spruiked the proposed changes on Thursday this week.
"There is already a strong framework in place to regulate agricultural land in NSW and what this legislation does is ensure farmers continue to be regulated under that framework – rather than the planning system," Mr Marshall said.
Mr Stokes said on Friday he was "pleased to say we have hit the mark" and the Nationals' bill showed there are "often important robust and passionate discussions as part of the decision-making process".
The current Koala SEPP is limited in its impact on farmers and mostly only affects significant property developments that require local council approval. Land clearing and routine agricultural activities are still permitted on farmland.
Significantly, protections only kick in if a local government has developed a Koala Plan of Management. But removing koala habitat isn't barred, rather the developer is required to get an expert ecological assessment.
The Nationals' amendment bill kicks in where local governments develop a koala plan of management.
There are only five local governments with plans of management mapping koala habitat in place - on the NSW North Coast - and they would be unaffected by the proposed changes.
But if any local government develops one in the future, the bill guarantees private rural landholders are exempt and the protections could only apply to public or peri-urban land.
Independent MLC Justin Field said he was "disappointed that the Liberal Party has given in to yet more anti-environment brinkmanship from the Nationals".
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/liberals-back-down-on-koalas-after-barilaro-bluster-20201016-p565uf.html
Free COVID-19 mental health clinics seeing 'amazing results'
No surprise that the greatest need is in Victoria
Clare Groves, who runs a COVID-19 mental health clinic in Brunswick East - one of the 15 rapidly set up with $26.9 million in Commonwealth funding last month - said she was already seeing "amazing results" in patients who would otherwise end up being admitted to psychiatric wards.
"Previously, the only gap-free care available was as a hospital inpatient, and that's not what's best for people to recover," she said.
The Head to Help COVID-19 mental health clinics opened their doors on September 14, a month after Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced they would be set up under one-year contracts in response to a spike in calls to crisis telephone lines and hospital presentations for self harm.
The speed of the roll-out contrasts with the eight adult mental health centres announced in the 2019-20 federal budget, which are not due to open their doors until next year. Under the $114.5 million plan, one of the centres will be located in each state or territory, including Corio in Victoria and Penrith in NSW.
A spokesman for federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the data indicates "prolonged restrictions are having a disproportionate effect on people in Victoria" compared to elsewhere and the 15 clinics "were rolled out to ensure that additional community-based support is available to assist Victorians during this challenging time".
The spokesman credited the work of Professor Pat McGorry and other experts for developing the service model for the adult mental health centres, which allowed for the rapid establishment of the Victorian clinics.
Ms Groves said she was given the contract to deliver the Brunswick East service after pioneering the "holistic" model over the past seven years with patients who received treatment under no-gap schemes funded by health insurers and WorkSafe.
"Our data shows we decrease hospital admissions by over 90 per cent," she said.
Patients are given a comprehensive treatment plan to be delivered by a team of experts - psychiatrists and psychologists along with social workers, nurses and occupational therapists trained in mental health - to help address the complex circumstances that may be implicated in their mental illness.
The clinic accepts patients who are triaged through the Head to Help telephone referral service, staffed by intake clinicians who establish whether a person needs to be referred to an acute service in a hospital or could simply be referred for counselling.
Head to Help picks up those who do not fall into either category, often described as the "missing middle" of mental healthcare.
Head to Help intake clinician Belinda Lazarides said she had taken calls from many Victorians who lacked an ability to "navigate the mental health system" and would otherwise "fall through the gaps".
In one case, a man who called for a referral to a financial counselling service was given more significant help after she established that he had overdosed the night before and had family and relationship difficulties.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/call-to-expand-free-covid-19-mental-health-clinics-seeing-amazing-results-20201015-p565kj.html
Anti-vaxxers don’t deserve to be on ballot: Frecklington
LNP leader Deb Frecklington has lashed anti-vaxxer candidates, saying they do not deserve to be on the ballot paper.
The criticism follows the LNP’s move to preference a renowned anti-vaxxer party below Labor after originally saying it would put the ALP at the bottom of the ballot in all electorates.
Ms Frecklington said she was unashamed about putting anyone who risks the safety and health of children last. “They don’t deserve to be on the ballot paper,” she said.
Ms Frecklington had committed to preferencing Labor last due to the Palaszczuk Government’s uncertainty around approvals for an expansion of the New Acland coalmine on the Darling Downs, but left wriggle room, saying a final decision would be made after candidates had been finalised.
An LNP spokesman told The Courier-Mail the party had made an exception to put the IMOP party below Labor because it fundamentally disagreed with its position on vaccines
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/state-election-2020/antivaxxers-dont-deserve-to-be-on-ballot-frecklington/news-story/1d12ecc6416e9521ae08ead7248857d6
New NSW schools policy will make it harder for difficult children to be suspended
Parents, teachers and principals have joined forces to fight a proposal that would reduce the length of school suspensions, arguing it would weaken schools’ ability to deal with violent students and blur standards of acceptable behaviour.
Frank Potter, an executive director at the NSW Department of Education, was questioned about the department's draft suspension policy at the Disability Royal Commission's public hearing into inclusive education, which began on Monday.
He said an increased number of students with various degrees of disability were attending the state's schools and more funding was being allocated to them. "It's appropriate that decisions, [and] policies that might have been in place before, are reviewed to the context of the day," he said.
The commission heard the case of five-year-old Sam, who had been suspended seven times in his first 13 months of school. "I can't comment on how appropriate that would be within that context," Mr Potter said. He said Sam would not have been suspended under the new draft policy.
"There is discretion [in the draft policy] and there are opportunities for schools to put in place other strategies rather than resorting to suspension," he said.
Under the present policy, schools must suspend students who are physically violent, regardless of the student's intent.
Junior counsel assisting the commission Elizabeth Bennett asked whether accidental conduct that resulted in serious physical harm would mean a student must be suspended.
"If there was serious harm or impact, yes, I think that's what it would be. That would be my view rightly or wrongly," Mr Potter said.
"Do you see any potential for the policy to operate in a way that disproportionately impacts on students with a disability when understood that way?" Ms Bennett asked. Mr Potter replied "yes".
"Do you think it's right that a policy of the NSW department disproportionately affects children with a disability?" Ms Bennett then asked.
"No policy should have an unintended consequence and therefore it needs to be reviewed," Mr Potter said.
The proposed new strategy would cut the maximum school suspension from 20 to 10 days, and students from kindergarten to year 2 could only be sent home for serious physical violence, and for no longer than five days.
Disability advocates support plans that make it harder for schools to order young children home for bad behaviour or repeated disobedience, but principals have called the rules impractical.
At present, principals must make reasonable adjustments for a student before they are suspended.
Under questioning, Mr Potter said there was no documentation outlining what reasonable adjustments entailed. "My expectation [is] that professional people in schools would clearly understand what was required in order to be in place to support students with disabilities," he said.
"The principal has ultimate responsibility to make a decision."
Ms Bennett asked whether one school principal could take a particularly broad approach of what constitutes a reasonable adjustment, while another might take a narrow approach. "Wouldn't a student with a disability face a radically different experience at those two schools?" she asked.
"That would be possible," Mr Potter said. "I think we do our best with challenges that are before us and the ways in which schools respond to those challenges may well be different, depending on experience and understanding."
Consultation on the draft policy closed on Sunday. The NSW Teachers Federation, the P&C Federation, and primary and secondary principals groups have said schools needed more specialist staff and early intervention to stop unaddressed student needs turning into poor behaviour.
Mr Potter said recommendations from the Ombudsman and royal commission would "also help inform taking that strategy forward, in terms of its development".
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/new-nsw-schools-policy-will-make-it-harder-for-children-like-sam-to-be-suspended-20201013-p564py.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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18 October, 2020
Peter Gleeson: It’s like we’re in a hostage situation
This column is deadly serious. It is not a parody.
Much has been said and written about the enormous emotional and psychological toll being exacted upon communities around Australia in the grip of this terrible pandemic.
People’s lives have been turned upside down and the mental health impact is just starting to hit home as people reel from months of being cooped up and losing their jobs.
But a strange and mystifying phenomenon is playing out before our very eyes, particularly in Victoria. but every state and territory, to varying degrees, has fallen under this spell.
The kindest psychological analysis is that Australia is in the grip of a real life Stockholm Syndrome scenario. The unkind analysis is that many people have fallen for the Svengali ways of governments that rule best through fear.
How can it otherwise be that in, for example, Victoria, you have a State Government that continues to enjoy strong public approval ratings, yet it has botched a global pandemic so badly that hundreds of deaths can be sheeted home to poor public policy?
In Victoria, you’ve got a government that has seen the demise of its Health Minister Jenny Mikakos and its most senior public servant, Chris Eccles, because of its poor handling of coronavirus, yet the person who is accountable above everyone else, Premier, Daniel Andrews, remains?
Is it brutal to suggest that anybody who still supports Daniel Andrews as premier of Victoria needs to take a look in the mirror?
Of all the KPIs we ask of our politicians, keeping us safe has got to be right up there. The hardened Trotyskites can’t be saved, but surely the average, well educated, free-thinking Victorians must have a slight question mark over this mob?
Stockholm Syndrome is defined as a psychological response. It occurs when hostages or abuse victims bond with their captors or abusers. This psychological connection develops over the course of the days, weeks, months or even years of captivity or abuse.
Psychologists say the victims start to develop positive feelings towards their captors, as they share common goals and causes.
In these most challenging of times, we as a nation have looked to our leaders for support, comfort, reassurance.
The real day of reckoning for our leaders will not come this week, or next month, or even in the first half of 2021.
It will come when the health narrative is replaced by the economic fallout, when JobKeeper ends and the insolvency rates skyrocket among small business. Only then will people start to realise that this was more than keeping us safe from the virus.
Sky News host Paul Murray says rising support for the Victorian government’s handling of the virus from Victorians shows Stockholm’s syndrome is clearly very powerful and is deeply felt “in the communist republic at the moment.”
Real leadership – and Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian are the standouts – is about protecting people’s health, keeping them employed and making sure they have the mental resilience to get on with life.
It’s about making the right call on borders and exemptions, showing compassion and empathy at a time when people are at their most vulnerable.
It’s not about favouring the rich and famous over the average Joe. It’s about releasing the medical advice, so that people can understand decisions.
It’s about showing dignity and compassion to those who have lost loved ones. It’s about doing the right thing by its people, not knee-jerk reactions based on polling.
My theory is that our daily diet of sombre statistics and mealy-mouthed spin has anaesthetised Australians to the real issue right now – how we recover and try to get life back to a semblance of normality. While people remain in their own homes, subjected to strict lockdowns and travel restrictions, their only true north is hope.
People desperately want a lifeline and light at the end of the tunnel. The jingoism and state parochialism must end.
Scott Morrison tried to unite us in the fight against this pandemic but the state and territory leaders gave him the middle finger.
People want to believe this thing will be over soon. Even if it means falling in love with the very people that put them there.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/peter-gleeson-its-like-were-in-a-hostage-situation/news-story/5523fd05fe274cbbc97aa80307058a94
Aussie gamblers are betting millions on US President Donald Trump being re-elected
Aussie punters are staking millions in Hail-Mary bets on Donald Trump’s re-election, ignoring polling numbers in the hopes that election history “will repeat itself”.
Trump – the presidential dark horse – yesterday sat as a $2.80 underdog in Ladbrokes Australia’s election stakes after being outperformed by Joe Biden in all key swing seats in the latest polls.
Still, the betting agency is holding around $3.5 million in bets for the incumbent president and “can barely write a bet for Biden”, the $1.40 favourite.
“It has been one-way traffic since Biden was declared as the Democratic Party nominee, and in the past few weeks it has really intensified,” Ladbrokes Australia CEO Dean Shannon said.
“As it stands Trump is a far worse result for us than anything that will run in the Melbourne Cup the day before.
Figures show that in the head-to-head market alone, Ladbrokes is holding eight times more bets on Trump than Biden.
That includes a $100,000 bet from one ambitious punter for Trump’s re-election as well as a series of other bets between $2,000 and $20,000.
Mr Shannon said the Australia betting interest in the presidential election was “baffling”, with Ladbrokes recording 20 times the number of bets on the US election compared to what was held for the entire Queensland election.
It follows a similar trend four years ago from punters who collected huge payouts when Trump, the underdog, usurped rival Hillary Clinton.
“The money was right then and there are plenty of Ladbrokes punters who believe history is about to repeat.”
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/aussie-gamblers-are-betting-millions-on-us-president-donald-trump-being-reelected/news-story/7ab1382e9681ea28834647be559fe3ea
Minor Australian bank BANS customers from using credit cards on any gambling services including Sportsbet and pokies - sparking backlash as critics ask whether McDonald's will be next
A bank has banned its customers from using credit cards on any gaming or gambling services, sparking backlash from customers who claim McDonald's will be next for selling unhealthy food.
Bank Australia has informed its customers they will not be allowed to make any gaming transactions on their credit cards from December 1.
'Effective from 1 December 2020 we are blocking all gambling and gaming transactions on credit cards,' the 'responsible' bank wrote to customers.
Chief executive of the Australasian Association of Convenience Stores, Jeff Rogut, told the Courier Mail the bank should not be controlling how customer's behave.
'I don't think the companies that are offering the service should decide where consumers are spending their money,' Mr Rogut said.
He said the bank could 'take it to another extreme' by not processing payments for alcohol, tobacco or lottery tickets.
Director at The Centre for Independent Studies, Peter Kurti, said it was 'odd' that a bank would dictate these 'moral decisions'.
'What's next? If you go to Dan Murphys or McDonalds and make four trips in a week is the bank going to say "no it's bad for you"?' Mr Kurti said.
Mr Kurti said if his bank 'did this to him' he would be frustrated and immediately cancel his credit card.
Bank Australia is customer-owned, meaning there are no external shareholders.
'We return our profits to our customers through pursuing our purpose of doing good for people and the planet as well as offering competitive and fair rates, fees and services,' the website reads.
A Bank Australia spokesperson said any money loaned from savings and deposits by customers needs to be used responsibly.
'As part of our commitment to responsible banking we want to make sure that the money we lend is used in ways that minimise potential harm to our customers and others,' he said.
The spokesperson said the bank does not think gambling with funds that are borrowed from other customers is responsible.
He said a 'majority' of the bank's' 165,000 customers supported the new changes.
Customers are still allowed to make gaming and gambling payments on their debit cards.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8828991/Aussie-banks-BAN-customers-using-credit-cards-gambling-including-Sportsbet-pokies.html
Australia claims some victories against fire ants
It's the fire ant's ability to move that makes it so hard to get rid of. Fire ants can fly up to 5 kilometres, hitchhike on human transport and float or 'raft' on water.
The dreaded fire ant has been in Australia since 2001, entering the country via a cargo ship at the Port of Brisbane in Queensland.
Since then, the National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program, funded by all state and territory governments and the Federal Government, has been working on a strategy to eradicate the pest from the country.
Graeme Dudgeon, the program's general manager, said they had made inroads in getting rid of the ants from Australia.
"We have eradicated fire ants six times and we've eradicated fire ants in what is the largest eradication of any invasive ant species in the world," he said.
Ross Wylie, the eradication program's science leader, said the "super pest" ants could do large amounts of damage to the environment, crops and wildlife.
It is their propensity to ruin everything they come into contact with that makes fire ants such a threat to agriculture and Australia's way of life.
"Generally when you get pests, they affect one crop or another crop or they affect health or the environment," Dr Wylie said.
"This thing affects everything, so it attacks more than 52 different agricultural crops. It affects the environment, it affects human health, it affects lifestyle, so it's a super pest.
"The biggest problem they give us is that they've got three different ways of moving."
Mr Dudgeon said eradication was the only option for Australia.
"So the countries where they haven't eradicated, it's costing them many billions of dollars — it impacts people's lifestyles," he said.
"They can't have picnics; I've seen photos of people walking around their backyards with buckets on their feet.
"They cause problems with agriculture and they kill people."
Although there have been no reported deaths in Australia, the bites are severe and can cause hives, swelling of the face, eyes or throat, and nausea.
National program has six years to go
The National Red Imported Fire Ant Eradication Program was reviewed in 2016, and embarked on a new strategy the following year.
Four years into the 10-year program, Mr Dudgeon said it was unclear how successful it had been.
"We've put eradication treatments on over 30 per cent of the area and we're currently doing surveillance to work out how effective that has been," he said.
The $400 million program includes helicopters that aerial spray and capture thermal wavelength images, dog detection, and genetic tracing.
"Every single fire ant specimen we've got since 2001 we do genetics on," Dr Wylie said. "We use that to tell us relationships, so we can tell which is the mother nest, which is the daughter nest."
Dr Wylie said the genetic testing could help them understand how far the ants had flown or travelled in a different manner. "If we think it's a movement of product, our compliance officers would use that sort of information, so it's very, very valuable," he said.
Regulations tough on industry
And while industry groups agree that eradication is the best policy, some question the regulations that have followed.
Ian Atkinson, chief executive of Nursery and Garden Industry Queensland, thinks the regulations need to be reassessed.
"We believe that the risks that we pose in terms of moving particularly pregnant queen ants is virtually non-existent," he said. "We have no evidence in Australia of the movement of pregnant queens by containerised nursery stock."
Queensland rural organisation AgForce also wants the program to succeed but is doubtful if an eradication strategy can work.
"A lot of our producers are concerned that this pest, which has never been eradicated from another country, might beat them," policy officer Marie Vitelli said.
Another issue for AgForce's members is education. "We have lots of landholders not connected to social media or not subscribing to the biosecurity updates," Ms Vitelli said. "I'm not sure how they are getting told that fire ants are in the areas."
South East Queensland Hay producer James Radke agrees. He lives outside the eradication zone.
When fire ants were discovered on his property, Mr Radke did not know that he should have had a chemical barrier around his shed, where up to 3,000 bales of barley were stored.
Mr Radke felt it was up to him to notify and educate his neighbours on compliance and regulations. "There's probably been about seven to eight farms that have been basically word of mouth from myself, so now they have implemented the chemical treatments as well," he said.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/brisbane/australia-claims-small-world-first-victory-against-fire-ants-but-not-everyone-is-convinced-of-the-strategy/ar-BB19SqTQ
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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16 October, 2020
Houses in good school zones sell in a flash
This is a case of a virtuous circle. Success feeds on success. Schools that already have good students and teachers attract parents who are very concerned about that and have the money to buy in to a place where their children will be well treated.
And because the school is a good one, that will push prices up in its area as so many people want in.
And a school with well-off parents will generally mean that the parents will be of higher IQ -- and high IQ parents tend to have high IQ kids, So that will keep the school results and standards up -- thus making the school and its area ever more attractive
Parents desperate to get their kids into a good public school have taken to sleeping in swags overnight in the hope of landing a coveted spot.
But it has never been cheaper to buy a house inside a sought-after catchment zone thanks to low interest rates, government incentives and flat house prices.
However competition is fierce, with one house in a sought-after catchment zone going under contract in less than 24 hours.
On Tuesday night, about a dozen parents camped outside the gates of Pimlico State High School, one of Townsville’s top performing schools.
The school, like many other top state schools in the city, is the subject of an Enrolment Management Plan (EMP), meaning the number of students accepted from outside of its catchment area is strictly capped.
Students living within the catchment zone are automatically guaranteed a place at the school.
A five bedroom fixer upper at 35 Latchford St was listed on a Thursday and under contract the following day, snapped up by a family with young children.
To put that in perspective, the median days on market in Townsville is 84, according to the latest data from realestate.com.au
Listed for $270,000 negotiable, it was sold by Sibby and Lucy Di Bartolo of John Gribbin Realty, with the contract due to settle today.
“There was a lot of interest in it, from first home buyers and families,” Mr Di Bartolo said.
“Buyers are keen to get their kids into that school (Pimlico) but the suburb also offers affordable houses.
“I wish I had 10 more like it because a lot of people missed out.”
A few doors down is 17 Latchford Street, a five bedroom Queenslander on a 971 sqm block.
It is listed with Julie Mahoney of Ray White Julie Mahoney and will go under the hammer on October 26.
One of its key selling points is the fact it is located within the school catchment.
“Being located in a good school catchment can be a huge drawcard for buyers,” Ms Mahoney said.
“And we have had huge interest in this property, mostly from families and young couples planning for the future.”
https://www.realestate.com.au/news/houses-in-good-school-zones-sell-in-a-flash/
Calls for Australian troops to focus on Asia region as fighting returns to Afghanistan
The region that saw the bloodiest fighting of Afghanistan’s 20 year war has again descended into chaos prompting calls for the Australian Defence Force to pull out of the embattled region.
The Afghan region Australian troops fought and died for during two decades of combat has descended into chaos with a resurgent Taliban campaign forcing 35,000 civilians to flee their homes and prompting fresh US air strikes.
Just a day after Defence Minister Linda Reynolds confirmed another Australian Defence Force withdrawal phase from the embattled Afghanistan, the Taliban moved back into Helmand Province with co-ordinated attacks.
It is here coalition forces fought some of the bloodiest campaigns of Afghanistan’s 19-year war including Australian troops from the Special Operations Task Group and others largely in support of British operations.
The US administration today vowed despite the violence in Helmand – which yesterday also saw nine ANSF troops killed when two troop helicopters crashed – the fragile peace accord between the Americans and Taliban remained.
Senate powerbroker independent Rex Patrick said Senator Reynolds’ confirmation this week the ADF had now wrapped up its training operation of the various Afghan security forces, now was a time for a full withdrawal and an independent review into the effectiveness of Australia’s involvement in the Middle East more broadly.
“Bringing an end to Australia’s remaining deployments in the Middle East is clearly overdue,” he said.
“After nearly two decades of operations in the Middle East, our special forces especially need time to rebuild and reorientate themselves towards possible future operations in Australia’s immediate strategic region. We are entering a new era of competition between major powers focused on East Asia and the Pacific … Australia may face significant strategic challenges closer to home.”
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/world/calls-for-australian-troops-to-focus-on-asia-region-as-fighting-returns-to-afghanistan/news-story/64907221290b3341e90b4622854a5e2d
Australia Post may be forced into early return to daily deliveries
Controversial changes to postal delivery services made during the coronavirus pandemic could be wound back before their planned expiry date amid a string of scandals within Australia Post.
Federal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has written to business leaders across the nation requesting feedback on the temporary regulatory changes the federal government granted to the organisation earlier this year.
The mail delivery service was given short-term regulatory relief in April to move to every-second-day delivery of mail in metropolitan areas until June 30 next year as part of a broader movement within the postal service to cut costs amid COVID-19.
A spokeswoman from Mr Fletcher's office said a review was under way and would determine whether the relief should continue to June 30 next year, incorporating feedback from business and industry. She said the review would be finalised by the end of this year.
Labor and the Greens failed at an attempt to reverse the regulatory changes in the Senate, however Liberal backbencher Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has expressed concern and will again attempt to force changes when sittings resume.
Mr Fletcher said at the time the new standards would give Australia Post the "flexibility to respond to the increased demand for parcels", but there are reports of major backlogs in parcel delivery and delays with deliveries surrounding Father's Day last month, and the postal service this week warned Australians to allow up to six weeks for deliveries ahead of Christmas.
Australia Post invited its Melbourne-based staff to volunteer their weekends or mid-week to help clear backlogs at its Victorian facilities using their own vehicles to help deliver parcels.
Staff were asked to declare they were able to carry and lift up to 16kg of mail and parcels repeatedly through the day.
Australia Post's profits have soared during the pandemic as it benefit from an eCommerce boom fuelled by the pandemic.
Revenue rose a record 7 per cent in the 2019-20 financial year, up more than $500 million to nearly $7.5 billion.
It has increased scrutiny on managing director Christine Holgate's performance despite her decision to take a pay cut and forgo bonuses for the recent financial year.
Australia Post confirmed it paid almost $120,000 for a reputation management consultant as the organisation attempted to defend the changes to delivery times.
In a written statement to the Senate this week, Australia Post said it had advised Mr Fletcher of its decision to engage PR guru Ross Thornton. The contract equated to about $3000-a-day.
A spokeswoman for Mr Fletcher said all questions regarding the hiring of consultants were a matter for the Australia Post board and "should be directed to Australia Post".
Australia Post said on Monday the company, Domestique, was still engaged but not on an ongoing retainer, and "provided advice on an ad hoc basis".
It has told customers via emails and on its website this week it is doing "everything we can" to keep delivering during the pandemic.
"Ongoing challenges presented by the pandemic mean there are still some delays as our business operates with additional safety measures to protect our people and customers," the company said on its website.
"We're also still experiencing reduced domestic and international flights, while processing unprecedented parcel volumes. The majority of parcels are arriving on time."
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-post-may-be-forced-into-early-return-to-daily-deliveries-20201013-p564o6.html
China steps up trade war ‘by slashing Australian coal imports’
Australia is urgently trying to confirm reports that China has slashed its coal import quota, with analysts warning that Beijing could be stepping up its trade war with the world’s largest coal exporter.
China has already moved to restrict Australian agricultural exports severely, including beef and barley — moves that were taken after Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, led the push in April for an international investigation into the Chinese origins of the coronavirus.
Australian coal analysts said on Tuesday that almost all major Chinese steel mills had been informed of the clampdown on Australian coal, including coal waiting to offload and sitting in China’s port stockpiles.
Australian coal miners could be forced to sell “distressed” coal cargos at cut-rate prices
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/china-steps-up-trade-war-with-australia-by-banning-coal-imports-clnrw6p8h
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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15 October, 2020
The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals
The heading above -- from a Warmist outfit -- is most implausible. If it were true,it would have been widely noted by now but it appears to be the first such claim. And the journal article they rely on contradicts it:
"The relative abundances of large colonies remained relatively stable"
And the reference to"greenhouse gases" is also not in the original report.
There has undoubtedly been some loss of coral cover in some places in recent years but the cause is conjectural. Many things affect coral abundance, not the least of wich is heavy weather in the form of cyclones etc.
One of the largest declines happened during a fall in the sea level in the general area. And that exposed corals to unusual dessicatory and other damage
And, finally, even research by doomsayer Hoegh-Guldberg has revealed that bounce-back of damaged coral is very good. So the mere fears in the article below are unpersuasive
Journal abstract included below
A new study of the Great Barrier Reef shows populations of its small, medium and large corals have all declined in the past three decades.
Lead author Dr Andy Dietzel, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoralCoE), says while there are numerous studies over centuries on the changes in the structure of populations of humans—or, in the natural world, trees—there still isn’t the equivalent information on the changes in coral populations.
“We measured changes in colony sizes because population studies are important for understanding demography and the corals’ capacity to breed,” Dr Dietzel said.
He and his co-authors assessed coral communities and their colony size along the length of the Great Barrier Reef between 1995 and 2017. Their results show a depletion of coral populations.
“We found the number of small, medium and large corals on the Great Barrier Reef has declined by more than 50 percent since the 1990s,” said co-author Professor Terry Hughes, also from CoralCoE.
“The decline occurred in both shallow and deeper water, and across virtually all species—but especially in branching and table-shaped corals. These were the worst affected by record-breaking temperatures that triggered mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017,” Prof Hughes said.
The branching and table-shaped corals provide the structures important for reef inhabitants such as fish. The loss of these corals means a loss of habitat, which in turn diminishes fish abundance and the productivity of coral reef fisheries.
Dr Dietzel says one of the major implications of coral size is its effect on survival and breeding.
“A vibrant coral population has millions of small, baby corals, as well as many large ones— the big mamas who produce most of the larvae,” he said.
“Our results show the ability of the Great Barrier Reef to recover—its resilience—is compromised compared to the past, because there are fewer babies, and fewer large breeding adults.”
The authors of the study say better data on the demographic trends of corals is urgently needed.
“If we want to understand how coral populations are changing and whether or not they can recover between disturbances, we need more detailed demographic data: on recruitment, on reproduction and on colony size structure,” Dr Dietzel said.
“We used to think the Great Barrier Reef is protected by its sheer size—but our results show that even the world’s largest and relatively well-protected reef system is increasingly compromised and in decline,” Prof Hughes said.
Climate change is driving an increase in the frequency of reef disturbances such as marine heatwaves. The study records steeper deteriorations of coral colonies in the Northern and Central Great Barrier Reef after the mass coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017. And the southern part of the reef was also exposed to record-breaking temperatures in early 2020.
“There is no time to lose—we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions ASAP,” the authors conclude.
https://www.coralcoe.org.au/media-releases/the-great-barrier-reef-has-lost-half-its-corals
Long-term shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the Great Barrier Reef
Andreas Dietzel et al.
Abstract
The age or size structure of a population has a marked influence on its demography and reproductive capacity. While declines in coral cover are well documented, concomitant shifts in the size-frequency distribution of coral colonies are rarely measured at large spatial scales. Here, we document major shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the 2300 km length of the Great Barrier Reef relative to historical baselines (1995/1996). Coral colony abundances on reef crests and slopes have declined sharply across all colony size classes and in all coral taxa compared to historical baselines. Declines were particularly pronounced in the northern and central regions of the Great Barrier Reef, following mass coral bleaching in 2016 and 2017. The relative abundances of large colonies remained relatively stable, but this apparent stability masks steep declines in absolute abundance. The potential for recovery of older fecund corals is uncertain given the increasing frequency and intensity of disturbance events. The systematic decline in smaller colonies across regions, habitats and taxa, suggests that a decline in recruitment has further eroded the recovery potential and resilience of coral populations.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.1432
Lockdowns are favoured by rich elitists at the expense of the young
Australia has been stress tested by the pandemic and the results are mixed. There is good news. With the diabolical exception of Victoria, our systems of government and public health have proved to be mostly competent and well-organised. In international terms, this turns out to be rare. But there are some harsh lessons.
Before the next crisis, we need to have a frank conversation about managing risk. A disease can be controlled by shutting everything down and placing your citizens under house arrest but it’s hardly ideal. It might be necessary if everyone faced a similar threat but, in this case, they did not. No society can guarantee everyone’s safety so the goal must be the old-fashioned notion of seeking the common good: the greatest good for the greatest number. That should be weighted to the future because, through history, most societies have preferenced their young as a simple matter of survival. In this pandemic, we reversed that. It was a bad decision.
Alas, we have lost the ability to have frank conversations. There are many reasons for this but let’s poke one highly sensitive bear: the most ardent lockdown enthusiasts come from privileged classes who don’t live and work in the front-line suburbs where their daft decrees fall hardest. They work in white-collar jobs and many are in the public sector where their wealth has grown as they worked from home. That is not something cleaners, security guards, cooks or factory workers can do. As ever, the poor suffered most.
The Morrison government has had a, mostly good, pandemic but its real test lies ahead in the transition from financial life support to economic reboot. It succeeded in building a safety net under most of the economy, but the budget is the dividing line between triage and recovery.
A fascinating political battle is now afoot with Big Government conservatives lining up against Bigger Government Labor and money is no object. One wants to pump billions through the arteries of taxpayers and business to reboot the engine of private enterprise, the other sees government itself building a shining new light on the hill.
Scott Morrison starts as favourite. He has proven to be a pragmatic and flexible leader who learns from his mistakes and adapts. This makes him a formidable foe and Labor needs to stop underestimating him. It also needs to ditch the cul-de-sac obsession with identity grievance and return to its roots.
In the looming battle, Labor’s text has already been written: “If the movement can make someone more comfortable, give to some father or mother a greater feeling of security for their children, a feeling that if a depression comes there will be work, that the government is striving its hardest to do its best, then the Labor movement will be completely justified.” The lesson? Be more Ben Chifley and less Ben Affleck.
The pandemic has starkly revealed the structural weakness of the Commonwealth in the federation. It pays the big bills, but it has been frozen out of some of the big decisions. The Commonwealth’s preference was always for a short hibernation to fortify the health system, suppress but not eliminate the virus, and return to something like normal as swiftly as possible. It wanted schools and borders to say open. It lost most of those fights. Nothing spoke more eloquently of the Commonwealth’s impotence than the Prime Minister calling a radio show in a failed bid to get the Queensland government to let a young woman out of quarantine to attend her father’s funeral.
National cabinet has yielded mixed results. It was a good co-ordinating system early on when there seemed to be a shared goal. But, when pressed, some premiers proved they have little regard for the idea of Australia. This is deeply disturbing. It is simply ludicrous that the borders in the European Union are open when Australia’s internal borders are shut.
If a state premier's success is measured by a low disease count and high approval ratings, then most did well. But to protect their virtue they have strapped an elimination chastity belt on their jurisdictions. That demands extremely limited international intercourse, the potential to swing state lines open and shut and eternal border vigilance.
And we need to talk about experts. Wise governments seek the best advice, but it should be drawn widely. Even the health experts’ views on how to manage this disease are divided and when the proposed solution is shutting society down then many voices must be heard. In the end, it is the politician’s job to decide and wear the consequences because it is both undemocratic and the height of gutlessness for a leader to say she/he has outsourced responsibility to a bureaucrat.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/historic-preferences-were-overturned-because-lockdown-enthusiasts-weren-t-going-to-feel-the-pain-20201013-p564m6.html
An arts/humanities degree has long been the butt of predictable joke but there's another side
Of course I have an arts degree. How could you tell?
I've always said that an honours degree in art history is the most useful preparation you can ever get for the kind of daily journalism and broadcasting I do: it's not until you truly understand the imagery and meaning of a Renaissance painting of a crucifixion that you will ever make sense of a federal leadership spill.
The blood; the sorrow. The weeping and rending of garments. And that's just on the Coalition side.
Yesterday the Federal Government revealed that the humble arts degree was now going to be nailed to the cross, with fees set to soar for humanities subjects from 2021.
An arts degree has long been the butt of many a predictable joke, but the other week a senior employment recruiter shared with me on air what organisations were telling her they wanted to see in new employees, and there was a familiar echo in what she had to say.
As AI replaces more and more of the jobs we once assumed our children could grow up to do, this recruiter's research with leaders across several industry sectors identified the most important character traits needed in a post-COVID-19 workforce. They include adaptability, emotional control and resilience, persuasion and negotiation skills, relationship building and “skin or soul in the game”.
Let's say your infrastructure firm needs to persuade the Queensland Government of your construction agenda. You had better check the above list. Or say you're an economist advising the loans division of a bank or the manager of a medium-sized business dealing with suppliers. Imagine you are a primary producer scouring for a new export market: check the list.
That list above describes my four-and-a-bit years at uni, travelling in and around art history, English, Russian literature and Australian history. It describes the self-reliance, organisational skills, critical and comparative thinking and sheer enthusiasm for new and challenging ideas that those years fostered in me and my peers.
Despite the Federal Government's announcement yesterday, they clearly get this too: indeed the Education Minister, Dan Tehan, was the one who funded and opened a new centre at RMIT in Melbourne last year to investigate the ethical use of emerging AI technologies. Humanities, eh?
Is 'job-ready' the goal?
I'm not going to bang on here about how our shared and contrasting human histories and experiences, and our emotional connections to and understanding of the world, are almost entirely contained within the study of the humanities — after thousands of years of human civilisation that much is clear.
One Vice Chancellor — with double degrees spanning the sciences and creative arts — remarked to me that viewing university education as fundamentally about turning out "job-ready" graduates misses the point.
The question now is what the consequences of this de-funding will be?
The late essayist and quicksilver intellectual Christopher Hitchens once argued that "above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment … and this Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person".
For many, the universality of the humanities degree is the most democratic expression of this ambition.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-20/arts-degree-humanities-university-fees/12375334
Spending on childcare is already very high
Josh Frydenberg has confirmed the Morrison government, fresh from bringing forward some tax cuts slated for 2022, still plans to lift the top marginal tax rate of 47 per cent to $200,000 in 2024.
That may not happen if Labor gets to implement its universal childcare policy, born of the absurd idea that the federal budget handed down last week was anti-women.
The government already spends more on childcare as a share of GDP than socially democratic Germany, The Netherlands and Austria, and about the OECD average.
Federal spending on childcare, supercharged by the Coalition’s 2017 reforms, is on track to rise 30 per cent from last financial year to $10.3bn by 2024, according to the budget.
That’s not enough for Labor which, we learned in Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech, wants to increase the subsidy per dollar families spend on childcare from 85c to 90c.
Reflecting its base among high-earning public sector workers, where two incomes easily lift household income above $189,000 a year, Labor would scrap the cap of $10,500 per child a year that applies at that level of household income. Households earning below $530,000 a year — basically all of them — would receive a subsidy.
The government screamed “upper-class welfare” but it was crossbench senators David Leyonhjelm and Derryn Hinch who imposed a modicum of discipline on the Coalition’s own childcare reforms in 2017, capping support at household income of $350,000.
We are well past the optimal quantum of childcare funding, which increasingly forces the childless to subsidise the career ambitions of well-off parents who would have had children anyway.
It’s understandable high-income earners advocate universal childcare, making all sorts of fabulous arguments about how it’s good for the economy and GDP. While formal childcare can pay developmental dividends for children in single-parent or lower socio-economic households, for children in other households it’s glorified childminding.
Of course putting children in childcare adds to GDP: parents caring for their own children don’t count in the formal economy. Fees to childcare centres do, as do wages earned in a job. But this says nothing about prosperity.
Advocates overlook the cost of raising the funding: the distortion of higher taxation and the goods and services those taxpayers would have bought instead.
But it’s worse than that. Excessive childcare subsidies create childcare jobs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. They can lure parents into work that — even with the taxpayer subsidy — pays little more than childcare workers earn, implying it would be better if they swapped jobs and left the poor taxpayer alone.
And, naturally, childcare centre owners cream off as much of the public subsidy as they can, knowing government will pick up the bulk of the fees charged.
Childcare funding is really about ideology, not economics or fertility. It’s about socialising child-rearing and “empowering” women.
Labor is opposed to the third stage of tax cuts, for instance, which would return years of bracket creep for those earning above $180,000, yet it is happy to give the same households sizeable handouts for childcare.
The great increase in female workforce participation — and collapse in fertility — occurred in the 1970s, long before significant childcare subsidies emerged.
Scandinavian nations spend double what we do and have similar female workforce participation and fertility rates. Even if childcare did boost fertility, with almost eight billion people on Earth (up from 4.4 billion in 1980) the case for subsidising people to have more isn’t obvious.
Economics has long considered work a disutility, something you avoid if you are fortunate enough to be able to. Childcare advocates see having women in paid work as desirable in and of itself, independently of what women themselves want.
If families want to use childcare that’s fine, of course, but why should others — including families that choose to look after their children — pay for it?
Government could make childcare more affordable by paring back the so-called National Quality Framework, which micromanages supply.
If parents don’t care whether staff have Certificate III, let them pick a cheaper centre that doesn’t care either.
If there’s to be a bias in the system it should be towards parents caring for their own children, the most efficient transaction of all, even if it’s ignored by GDP — one sustained by love, not money.
Taxpayers already fund primary and high school education, and a multitude of other payments and benefits in kind. Can we draw the line somewhere, please?
In economic terms, children once had the characteristics of an investment from the perspective of the parents: more hands to work on the farm, daughters to sell off for dowries, and for some help in old age, and so on. But today they are more akin to consumption.
“A very young child is highly labour-intensive in terms of cost, and the rewards are wholly psychic in terms of utility,” Nobel prize-winning American economist Theodore Schultz noted.
“From the point of view of the sacrifices that are made in bearing and rearing (children), parents in rich countries acquire mainly future personal satisfactions from them.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/australia-spends-too-much-on-childcare-now-but-it-is-not-enough-for-albanese/news-story/0259ed93d2bdcf09dcd1f9fb009a45ac
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 October, 2020
The public hospitals with no doctor
The pub with no beer was a joke. This is no joke. A hospital with no doctor is not a hospital at all.
The pretence that you can rely on consulting a doctor over the net is an absurdity. There are many ways in which a doctor has to feel the patient. The nurse can no doubt undertake such a routine task as taking the patient's blood pressure but much else will be beyond her skill level. Palpation is important in dignosing a lot of medical problems and you can't pull that through a computer monitor.
The classsical solution for country medicine was to have a resident GP who was paid a retainer by the government but who could also do some private practice. That does of course run up against the reluctance of most doctors to work in country areas. But the solution to that is money. And that is where the problem lies, as is reported below
But the problem is not the total overall funding. It is funding allocation. And a major drain on funding in all States is a corpulent medical bureaucracy. Fire a few health bureaucrats and you will have plenty of funding to expand your coverage of country areas. Health bureaucrats don't cure people. Doctors do
A woman bled to death in the emergency department of a regional NSW hospital that had no doctors physically present because authorities had replaced face-to-face doctors with treatment via videolink outside business hours.
Doctors and patients have voiced anger and alarm over the moves to treat critically ill patients via teleconference in at least seven hospitals across the Western NSW Local Health District, which spans 31 per cent of NSW.
In another example of the practice, a non-verbal patient who turned up to an emergency department in central-western NSW was offered a video conference with a doctor in Switzerland.
Some postcodes targeted for the changes have large elderly and Indigenous populations and extremely high rates of disadvantage, with preventable deaths up to 31 per cent higher than the state average and mortality rates up to 94 per cent higher.
"We couldn’t believe this is what a community has to live with," said Hayley Olivares, whose mother died from haemorrhaging while being treated by a doctor over teleconference in Gulgong Hospital, near Mudgee.
Dawn Trevitt, 66, was rushed to the emergency department – where only nurses were physically present – last month with dangerously low blood pressure.
She died within an hour.
Ms Olivares, who lives in Canberra, was stunned to discover the doctor had been treating her mother remotely when it was mentioned in passing by a police officer.
She said the case was referred to the Coroner because the doctor wasn’t comfortable signing off on the cause of death, which was ultimately determined to be a gastrointestinal bleed that sent Mrs Trevitt into cardiac arrest.
Mrs Trevitt, a school teacher, has been remembered as a "lively and funny and energetic woman".
Her family is tormented over whether the outcome could have been different had there had been a doctor on site.
"I really don’t want to see another family have the same experience," Ms Olivares said.
A spokesperson for the Western NSW Local Health District said it offers sincere condolences to Mrs Trevitt’s family and would undertake a review.
Gulgong has not had a doctor inside its hospital walls since June, when the town’s doctor was informed his contract with the hospital would not be renewed by the health district.
The health district has also failed to renew the contract of Rural and Remote Medical Services (RARMS), a non-profit organisation providing doctors to hospitals at Bourke, Walgett, Lightning Ridge, Brewarrina, Coonamble and Collarenebri.
The health district put the contract to tender last month, revealing it would now allow a mix of face-to-face doctors and telehealth in the hospitals.
Under new "minimum requirements" in the documentation, doctors will have to be physically present between 8am and 6pm on certain weekdays. Video conferencing can be offered at all other times.
A doctor will have to be present at least one day a week in Collarenebri, two days a week in Brewarrina, three days a week in Lightning Ridge and Coonamble, and five days a week in Bourke and Walgett.
Walgett is the largest of the towns, with a population of 6100.
Dr Phillip Jolly works in Lightning Ridge, servicing both the medical practice as a GP and the hospital.
He warned the "dangerous and inappropriate" changes could cost lives and would take "further resources away from an impoverished health system".
Dr Jolly said the initiative appeared to be being introduced by stealth as the new normal for rural communities.
"Telehealth should be a service for places that can’t get medical staff, not a service that replaces medical staff," Dr Jolly said.
"If we’re going down the path of hospitals not having doctors physically in them, that should be a policy discussed at a political level."
Another doctor with knowledge of the system, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said patients would have to hope to have "your heart attack between nine and five".
"It’s much easier to service Bourke from a doctor sitting there in Balmain on his bum and leave the nurses to deal with a difficult patient with half a leg cut off, or a spear in his leg, or a car accident," the doctor said.
A spokeswoman for the Western NSW Local Health District rejected suggestions the services were being cut back.
She stressed each hospital would continue to have full-time access to a doctor, whether physically or virtually, and the on-site hours were an "absolute minimum".
The aim of the tender was to secure sustainable access to medical services for the hospitals, the spokeswoman said.
"The use of innovative telehealth technology is commonplace in health facilities around the world," the spokeswoman said, noting it had been used in facilities much larger than the hospitals covered by the tender.
She said the health district had been successfully operating a virtual service to assist on-site staff for years, and it would be available to the successful tenderer.
A woman, who asked not to be named, turned up to the Gulgong Hospital’s emergency department earlier this year with a family member who was in severe pain and unable to speak.
They were put onto a teleconference with an Australian doctor who was in Geneva, Switzerland.
She said the nurses and the doctor were doing a "brilliant job", but she was concerned for non-verbal patients who did not have a relative to advocate on their behalf.
Sharelle Fellows, who has been circulating a petition against the move, stressed Gulgong was popular with tourists and grey nomads and did not have a dwindling population.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-couldn-t-believe-it-woman-bleeds-to-death-in-nsw-hospital-with-no-doctors-on-site-20201011-p563z1.html
Qld election 2020: Palaszczuk’s border policy frustrates most powerful but it’s working at home
It’s been slammed by the rest of the country as “cruel”, but the Queensland Premier’s harsh border move is actually a stroke of genius.
Australia’s most powerful politicians lashed the Queensland Premier this week for her refusal to open her state’s borders to New South Wales.
The Prime Minister, the NSW Premier and NSW Health Minister have all accused Annastacia Palaszczuk of putting her own re-election bid ahead of the lives of her constituents.
And it seems a large portion of the country agrees.
But in an expansive state that covers rough outback plains and unruly tropical heat, bucking national trends flowing from the south is commonplace and people take pride in delivering shock federal election results.
“Is she for jobs or not?” Scott Morrison spat on Thursday morning, accusing Ms Palaszczuk of forgoing her primary election pledge.
“The number of people who have come back in to jobs in New South Wales since we hit the pit of that COVID-recession is a 70 per cent increase. “In Queensland, it’s 44 per cent.”
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said her Queensland counterpart was unfairly shifting the goalposts on the requirements to ease border restrictions, while the boldest rant came from NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard who said Ms Palaszczuk’s policy was simply a “political agenda”.
“The date she keeps mentioning is the date straight after the election,” he told the ABC on Friday morning. “Why would it go straight after the election? Well, there is only one reason, because she’s focused entirely on the political outcomes. She believes it’s a political advantage to her.
“This is a completely reprehensible, uncaring and cruel approach by the Queensland Premier.”
All three, of course, sit in opposing political camps to the Queensland Labor leader.
Within the Sunshine State, the Premier has been greeted at campaign stopovers with placards declaring their gratitude for holding firm.
Her management of the coronavirus crisis led to a surge in popularity from just 29 per cent in February to 57 per cent in the YouGov Poll released earlier in the week.
According to the The Courier-Mail poll, Labor now leads the Liberal-National Party 52 per cent to 48 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.
“The border policy is undoubtedly popular,” said Tracey Arklay, a senior lecturer with Griffith University’s school of government and international relations.
“There are some parts of Queensland who don’t like it as much, particularly those who live down near the Gold Coast border.
“But, in the main, the overwhelming sentiment is that it is popular.”
Dr Arklay says it isn’t a crafted strategy curated to ensure her government is re-elected, it’s a “considered evidenced based approach to how to handle this COVID-19 situation”.
She said the political agenda was more likely from the Liberal side of politics, who are lobbying to get their colleague, Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington, into the Premier’s chair.
“The absolute attack that seems to be happening on Queenslanders, as opposed to Western Australia for example, is telling,” the government relations academic told NCA NewsWire.
She said interstate political operators had a proven record of misunderstanding the “broad church” of Queensland voters, evidenced in the shockwave of support that delivered victory to the Coalition Government in the 2019 federal election.
“People up in North Queensland don’t particularly like people from Brisbane telling them what to do, let alone someone from Sydney,” Dr Arklay said.
The border policy may not have the universal support among the inner-city voters in the southeast of the state, but it has support where it matters, the senior lecturer said.
Particularly in the three tightly held seats in the northern hub surrounding Townsville where it’s widely believed the October 31 election will be won or lost.
The incumbent government holds the central Townsville electorate and Mundingburra by 0.4 and 1.1 per cent respectively, while its more dominant margin in the outer and semirural Thuringowa — 4.1 per cent — is expected to be aggressively contested by both One Nation and Katter’s Australia Party (KAP).
Dr Arklay said, if anything, the outside lobbying over the border dispute from Liberal Party elites had a damaging effect on Ms Frecklington’s campaign, whose stance on the controversial topic has become blurred.
“It’s coming across as a bit unclear,” the Griffith University senior lecturer said.
“She wanted the borders open and then she supported the borders staying shut and she is now saying the borders should be open as soon as possible.”
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/health-safety/qld-election-2020-palaszczuks-border-policy-frustrates-most-powerful-but-its-working-at-home/news-story/5cb65f9f5a40b58544a2f93f28cab027
Brisbane transport business BajAIR can’t lure new workers
A transport business veteran run off his feet with work has been unable to find new staff despite Queensland’s unemployment rate topping 7.5 per cent.
BajAIR owner Brett Johnson, whose company builds refrigerated transport vehicles, has recorded a significant increase in work due to the Federal Government’s Instant Asset Write-off scheme.
Mr Johnson has months of jobs ahead for his 30-strong workforce, but a recent search for qualified and apprentice motor body builders and refrigeration mechanics has proved fruitless.
The 30-year veteran of the transport industry believes people are accessing JobKeeper and remaining at home for a similar amount to apprentice wages. “I advertised for qualified tradespeople and I didn’t get one application,” he said. “I got nothing, not even a response.
“JobKeeper is the biggest killer because it’s given to the wrong people.”
Mr Johnson fears the reliance on JobKeeper - paid at $1200 per fortnight until January 4 and then $1000 until March 28 - will leave thousands of people without an income when it ends.
“There will be an absolute nightmare of people who can’t find work,” he said.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/business/brisbane-transport-business-bajair-cant-lure-new-workers/news-story/4a6562716146d35c02bab578eb44a1bf
If you dare to tell it like it is, you’re a racist
Mike O’Connor,
If you want to express an opinion that is in anyway contrary to what is seen as politically correct in this great land of ours, don’t expect anyone to stand up for your right to freedom of speech.
Kerri-Anne Kennerley is the latest person to incur the wrath of the self-righteous following her acceptance of an offer to play the role of Pippin in the upcoming Gordon Frost Organisation’s musical of that name due to open in Sydney next month.
Her decision was immediately denounced by prominent theatre director Richard Carroll who said that the decision to cast Kennerley demonstrated that the musical theatre industry was not willing to change.
Pardon? Well-known performer lands acting gig? Where’s the problem and what hasn’t changed?
Kennerley’s sin was to air the view on television last year that people protesting to have the date of Australia Day changed were ignoring the alleged rape of children and women in the Outback.
“Has any single one of those 5000 people waving the flags saying how inappropriate the day is, has any one of them been out to the Outback where children, where babies and five-year-olds are being raped, their mothers are being raped, their sisters are being raped. They get no education” she said.
“What have you done?” she asked of the Invasion Day protesters. “Zippo!”
Predictably she was howled down for stating an obvious truth, the announcement of her role in Pippin firing up social media harpies who immediately cried “racist!” and demanded she be removed from the show.
It seems that for voicing her views, she should now be ineligible for future employment. How dare she expose the shallowness of urban activists who rant and chant and tell each other what a great job they’re doing and through indolence, ignorance or self-absorption, do nothing about the real problems in society.
Kennerley, bless her, is not one to fold in the face of criticism. “It matters not,” she said. “I am delighted to be doing Pippin. it’s wonderful to have jobs back for the theatre industry.”
I don’t place much credence in Australia Day awards, given that they are frequently handed out to people who have merely done what they have been well paid to do but if the gong givers want to give one to Kennerley next year for having the courage to speak her mind, that’s fine with me.
The outrage, however, has not been confined to Kennerley.
Performer Gabrielle McClinton has also been given a role in Pippin, having previously appeared in the Broadway production of the same musical.
The catch here is that not only is McClinton an American but he is also black.
“This is an opportunity for the Gordon Frost Organisation to formally acknowledge the lack of inclusion in our industry and adopt cultural competency in their productions,” said the actors’ union.
“It is important GFO recognises that moving forward there needs to be a formal agreement to ensure transparency and inclusion.”
Cultural competency? What precisely is that? Sounds like racism to me, denying Mr McClinton the role because he is a black American and not an Indigenous Australian.
This is another way of saying that theatrical producers should not be free to give the job to the person they feel to be best qualified but to a local whom they believe to be less qualified.
It’s their money they are risking. Surely they should be able to decide who they hire without being accused of lacking “cultural competency.”
The Gordon Frost Organisation has said that it looked for an Australian person of colour to fill the role but it couldn’t find anyone could with the requisite level of singing, dancing and acrobatic skills.
Giving jobs to people who are not qualified to perform them doesn’t do anyone any favours.
Moves gaining traction to force companies to have gender equality on their boards, now being made mandatory in California, are equally flawed.
Once you throw merit aside, the whole system becomes debased. The only winners are the underqualified.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/comment-if-you-dare-to-tell-it-like-it-is-youre-a-racist/news-story/dba117593332a1dc2cf2415168548ecb
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Also see my other blogs:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
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13 October, 2020
$1 billion pumped hydro scheme would open up NSW grid, backers say
Another idea that is great in theory but big in cost and unreliable in output. Pumped hydro requires the building of TWO dams -- and we all know how much Greenies love dams.
And in the end it only works when there is a substantial flow in the river. What happens during one of our frequent droughts? It's a nonsense
The Berejiklian government has given accelerated approval status to a billion-dollar pumped hydro project that will unlock twice as much renewable energy investment and reduce grid congestion.
The venture, backed by Alinta Energy, would generate as much as 600 megawatts of electricity by releasing water between two reservoirs near the Macleay River between Armidale and Kempsey.
Developed by the same consultancy EMM that is working on the larger Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme, the Oven Mountain energy storage project is expected to support a further $2 billion in new solar and wind farms in the New England Renewable Energy Zone.
The closed-loop or off-river system would could also boost the water security of Kempsey, located about 75 kilometres to the south-east of the freehold site.
Among the benefits would be the displacement of some 876,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, and a reduction of load-shedding risk to some 770,000 customers as coal-fired plants shut, according to an accompanying document seeking government fast-track approval for the project.
The new plant is within the New England Renewable Energy zone, one of three designated regions for supporting clean energy in the state. Its development would enable more clean energy to be added to the grid.
"[T]he current capacity to [can] host only 300 MW due to insufficient network infrastructure," the document says. "The project’s 12 hours of flexible and fast=acting
storage will directly help to overcome this challenge and accelerate the implementation of the [zone]."
Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean said that pumped hydro was "essential for the state’s energy future", using off-peak power to pump water to the higher dam and releasing it went prices rise.
“The Australian Energy Market Operator says that NSW needs more than twice the energy storage of Snowy 2.0 again by the mid-2030s and projects like Oven Mountain can help us reach that goal,” Mr Kean said in a statement.
“It can take about eight years to deliver massive pumped hydro projects and we need to get going now to create jobs and improve the reliability of the energy grid.”
Adam Marshall, Agriculture Minister and the MP for the Northern Tablelands, said regional NSW had some of the best pumped hydro resources in the world. It would also support the local economy by creating some 600 new jobs during construction alone.
“This project is the jewel in our region’s renewable energy crown and cements the New England as the renewable energy powerhouse of Australia," Mr Marshall said.
“We’re already home to the two largest wind farms in NSW and the largest solar farm in Australia is about to start construction, so this project is the cherry on top of us.”
The government is providing about $2.5 million to support the Oven Mountain project's feasibility study from its $75million Emerging Energy Program.
The program is supporting investigations into the prospects for three pumped hydro projects in NSW.
The proponent will still need to request assessment requirements for the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement Once received, the EIS will then on exhibition for community feedback and detailed assessment by the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment before a final decision is made, the government said.
SOURCE
'We may slip sometimes': WA university leaders talk free speech after whistleblower saga
The leader of a Perth university which sued a whistleblower for speaking out about questionable international student intake practices says “we may slip sometimes” but freedom of information was taken very seriously.
WA university vice chancellors were questioned in September about transparency and freedom of speech policies at a Committee for Economic Development Australia panel where Murdoch vice chancellor Professor Eeva Leinonen said she “absolutely” believed in academic freedom and freedom of speech.
It comes about three months after Murdoch withdrew all its legal claims against Associate Professor Gerd Schröder-Turk who blew the whistle over “moral concerns” about international student recruitment practices at the WA university in ABC’s Four Corners segment titled ‘Cash Cows’ in May 2019.
The university refuted Mr Schröder-Turk's claims and later sued the mathematics academic for what could potentially have been millions of dollars.
In June, Dr Schröder-Turk said he and the university had decided to drop all legal claims against each other as part of an agreed resolution.
Associate Professor Schröder-Turk had been supported by more than 50 Laureate professors around the country, who signed an open letter calling for the university to drop its case against him months before the institution did.
At the CEDA event, Professor Leinonen said universities had academic freedom and freedom of speech constrained in their policies, strategies and enterprise agreements.
“We also have a national model code for freedom of speech and academic freedom that universities are currently considering whether to adopt or adapt that code and that is a requirement by the current government that we consider that code,” she said.
“So we are taking it very seriously and, you know, we may slip sometimes, but it actually is not intentional. We absolutely believe in academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
SOURCE
Leftist judge wants more controls on the media
A High Court judge has come out swinging at the freedom of the press but his comments reek of a misunderstanding to the media’s role and his words should not go unchallenged, writes Des Houghton.
High Court judge Pat Keane has savaged the media, and suggested new laws to curb its powers.
And he has taken a swipe at the media industry’s Right-to-Know campaign, following the Australian Federal Police raid on journalist Annika Smethurst, cynically suggesting the crusade was motivated by “dollar signs”.
Keane goes further, saying that “it would not be surprising” if the High Court accepted a tort (a civil wrong) of invasion of privacy. He quotes from records that show judges favour protecting an individual’s private life “free from the prying eyes, ears and publications of others”.
His outspoken comments came in his Griffith Law School Michael Whincop memorial lecture. It was a scholarly, entertaining and dangerous speech in which he quoted some of civilisation’s greatest thinkers including Plato, Socrates, Sigmund Freud and Thomas Jefferson, and jurists like Louis D Brandeis, one of the great figures of the United States Supreme Court.
Keane said the electronic and print media cared little for the private lives of citizens.
“Should the law aid individuals to profit from the commercialisation of their intimate moments?” he asked.
Keane said drawing “satisfactory boundaries” between our private and public lives is one of the great challenges of Western civilisation.
Really?
He added: “The position taken by the media in Smethurst is a reminder, if one were needed, that, when the owners of the media are faced with a choice between the right to know and the right to privacy, they can be expected to favour the right with the dollar signs attached - and that will be so wherever one might think the balance of the public interests lies. The legitimate self-interest whose energy we need to harness is the interest that all of us have as citizens.
“It is definitely not the interest of media outlets, such as Fox News, which lies in pandering to the prejudices of its audience and stoking their distrust and disapproval of their fellow citizens.”
And others will see Fox as a bulwark against the increasingly left-wing media bias in the US led by the New York Times that routinely stokes distrust and disapproval against Republicans.
I could say that the ABC also stokes distrust and disapproval as it panders to the green-left.
Keane says laws to protect privacy had been “hit and miss”.
For me, his comments reek of a misunderstanding to the media’s role. His words should not go unchallenged.
True, the media sometimes does intrude. But it does not do so unless there is a strong public interest.
Much of the reporting of the intimate affairs of celebrities comes from the stage and screen and sporting luminaries themselves. They crave the limelight.
They frequently leak to the media because publicity feeds their egos and their bank balance.
Those of us who lead comparatively humdrum lives may find their trivialities an entertaining distraction. There is no crime in that. Not everyone spends their days off reading Plato, Your Honour.
While the media should not pander to the basest of instincts, nor should it be expected to change human nature and stifle an inquiring mind.
Paradoxically, much of the salacious gossip and scandal Keane seems to be complaining about comes directly from juicy court cases presided over by his fellow judges. There is an especially rich serving of the most intimate detail delivered weekly by Appeal Court judges of the Supreme Court as they forensically analyse the evidence.
More scandal, spice, humiliation and shame is delivered in Parliament in the time-honoured ritual of bucket-tipping.
In journalism, muckraking is a most noble art.
Keane puts a persuasive intellectual case, but an impractical one.
This is odd for a man who obviously has a brain the size of a planet.
He grew up in dreary, working-class Wilston in inner-city Brisbane and attended St Joseph’s Gregory Terrace where he was (of course) dux of the college. At the University of Queensland he won the university medal and then a scholarship to Oxford where he won the Vinerian prize for outstanding scholarship.
Later he was appointed Queensland Solicitor-General then a judge of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court.
Next he was appointed Chief Justice of the Federal court of Australia before ascending to the High Court in 2012.
The Australian reported in November 2012 that he was “a Labor man” and a friend of Kevin Rudd, although his appointments met with bipartisan support.
Keane spoke just as Crime and Corruption Chief Alan MacSporran ludicrously suggested that the media be gagged from reporting on matters he was investigating. I found his comments astonishing and arrogant.
Are MacSporran and Keane suggesting we curtail free speech, and therefore your right to know? I’ll quote Jefferson back at them: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
MacSporran already has extraordinary powers of investigation. He can drag innocent people from the street and compel them to give evidence in a so-called Star Chamber court that the media is forbidden from covering. What would life be like without a free press? Perhaps we should go to China or Russia to find out.
However, tensions between the media and the judiciary may not be a bad thing.
For all their legal smarts, I have a hunch that Keane and MacSporran know very little about journalism or the million wrongs we right every year.
Any more restrictions on the press would kill investigative journalism. A shackled press would not have uncovered the Watergate case that toppled Richard Nixon. Senator Ted Kennedy would not have been exposed as the Chappaquiddick Island coward who fled the scene and tried to cover up his part in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.
Without intrusive journalism, The Sunday Times in England would not have exposed the cover-up of the thalidomide children who were born with shocking deformities.
Without dangerous and meddling journalism, The Courier-Mail would not have exposed the corruption in the Bjelke-Petersen era that forced the Fitzgerald Inquiry which led to the Police Commissioner and several Cabinet ministers being sent to jail.
But MacSporran and Keane ought to reflect on what they are suggesting. They want to edit our papers, just as bureaucrats do in China.
Could MacSporran’s gag proposal be in breach of the new Human Rights Act that guarantees my freedom of thought and freedom of expression?
As irksome as it might sound to the MacSporran and Keane, they are often in the same boat as journalists. This is because journalists, judges and police ultimately strive to serve the same ideals.
If the press is seen to have too much power, so are the courts.
There is dangerous, totalitarian thinking in the belief that the media can somehow be “managed”.
The independence of the judiciary is paramount, as is the independence of journalism.
In protecting the citizenry from wrongdoing and injustice, may I humbly suggest, Your Honour, that the intrusive media quite often does a better job than your courts.
SOURCE
Closures undermined education
New CIS research confirms the breadth of educational damage of school closures — especially troubling for Victorian students finally returning to class next week.
The analysis paper Parents’ perspectives on home-based learning in the covid-19 pandemic revealed that around 1.25 million students (over 40% ) across NSW, Victoria, and Queensland may have fallen behind while learning at home. It’s estimated Victoria’s disadvantaged students may have gone backward up to six weeks in their progress over the extended period of closures.
The new research makes clear that the quality of schools’ support to children and parents is decisive in how students fared with their learning — and that the quality of this support was mixed.
The secrets to success with home-based learning are sophisticatedly simple: students need regular interaction online with teachers, and parents need regular contact with schools.
Yet, a concerning number of students — as high as 30% in Queensland — didn’t have regular contact online with their teachers. Instead, they were relegated to completing worksheets and working independently. It comes as no surprise that these students were much more likely to have fallen behind.
Parents who were regularly contacted by teachers felt more informed and confident helping supervise learning. However, while many parents were contacted daily or most days, some weren’t contacted at all. Over 50% of parents who weren’t regularly contacted by schools say their child fell behind.
The better equipped parents are, the more effective support they can provide for their child’s learning — a fact that’s as true during the pandemic as it is in more normal times.
It’s clear that the school closures experience will leave lasting impressions to schooling; for students, teachers, and parents.
In households where the home-based learning wheels were well-oiled, parents gained more positive opinions about teachers’ work and schools’ education standards, compared to pre-covid. That’s evidence that parents appreciate the lengths many teachers and schools went to under such difficult circumstances.
It also shows there’s goodwill to be tapped in order to forge more constructive relationships going forward. Capitalising upon this would better support the work of schools, see parents as informed participants in schooling, and ultimately be more conducive for students’ learning.
The pandemic has been an unwelcome disruption to students, teachers, and parents.
Not only is there students’ learning loss for schools to now contend with, but also an imperative that lessons are learnt so that more effective schooling may yet be a silver lining.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
12 October, 2020
Covid-19 facts now clear – let’s shout them out
Recent polls that show a majority of Australians support tough restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 may well reflect public perceptions of the risks associated with the disease.
Those perceptions were formed when the disease first emerged, with the dramatic scenes in Wuhan and the agony of the passengers stranded on cruise ships giving them tangible form. As hospital systems struggled to cope, terrifying images of overrun intensive-care units made the estimates of devastating death rates all too salient.
The strong — indeed, unprecedented — reaction of governments, in Australia and overseas, can only have confirmed the public’s fears, transforming vague impressions into deeply held convictions.
It has, however, become increasingly clear that while COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease that can be extremely dangerous for the elderly and for patients with extensive comorbidities, it can be effectively managed. And it is also clear that as the management of the disease has improved, infection fatality rates — that is, the proportion of cases resulting in death — have fallen steeply.
So have the best estimates of the IFR, with Stanford University professor John Ioannidis, in a paper soon to be published by the World Health Organisation, pointing out that the initial studies focused mainly on the epicentres of the pandemic with the highest death tolls, rather than looking at the full range of countries the disease had affected.
Correcting for that bias, Ioannidis concludes that the global IFR from COVID-19 is 0.24 per cent, while that in countries such as Australia is as low as 0.1 per cent.
The contrast with the IFRs used in the modelling that informed our successive lockdowns could not be starker: those IFRs were at least three times Ioannidis’s global estimate, and exceeded his estimate for Australian conditions six times over, as did that used in the modelling Premier Daniel Andrews relied on to justify the most recent Victorian lockdown.
But although it is widely recognised that fatality rates are far lower than initially thought, public perceptions have remained frozen in time. That is, in some respects, unsurprising. Ever since systematic studies of public attitudes to risk began in the 1950s, researchers have found that new threats are judged to be far more menacing than those that are longstanding, regardless of underlying differences in probabilities of occurrence.
Moreover, the greater the extent to which risks are viewed as being incurred involuntarily, and as affecting large groups rather than single individuals, the more likely they will be considered more dangerous than they are.
All those biases have been compounded by today’s media environment. Already in the mid-1980s, Roger Kasperson and his colleagues stressed the “social amplification” of risk that occurs through the media’s focus on catastrophic outcomes at the expense of those instances of a phenomenon that are managed successfully. Now, as the media competes frantically for attention, that process magnifies perceived risks more surely and swiftly than ever.
It is, for instance, a fact that 92,000 Australians have died since the virus first hit our shores; but although COVID-19 accounts for only some 890 of those deaths, and for an even lower share of the total years of life lost, every new case leads the evening news, reinforcing its image as the grim reaper. One might have hoped that the experts would set the picture straight. Perhaps because they see their goal as being to frighten the public into compliance, they have, more often than not, done the opposite.
Never was that clearer than when Jeannette Young, Queensland’s Chief Health Officer, grievously misinterpreting a simulation undertaken at the University of Glasgow, claimed that “on average, people who died from COVID-19 lost 10 years of life”.
Since the average age of the disease’s victims in Australia is more than 85, Young’s claim implies that those lost to COVID-19 would otherwise have survived into their mid-90s, despite multiple comorbidities. In other words, were it not for the virus, they would have died a decade after their cohort’s modal age at death — a claim that taxes the credulity of the credulous.
In reality, the best and most recent study — undertaken by France’s National Institute of Demography, drawing on the actual outcomes of France’s first wave — finds that the vast majority of the virus’s victims were already close to the end of life.
Overall, the disease reduced French life expectancy by one-tenth of a year for women and two-tenths of a year for men, which, while by no means trivial, is a smaller reduction than influenza caused in 2008, 2012 and 2015.
None of that means that COVID-19 should be viewed as no more serious than the flu. On the contrary, until a vaccine or a cure become available, the case for prudence remains compelling, as does the need for effective control measures. There is, however, a vast difference between prudence, which rationally weighs likelihoods, and panic.
Getting that balance right is no easy task, with plenty of scope for error either way. But if exaggerated perceptions of the dangers have dominated, it is not merely because of human fallibility; rather, it is also because they accord so readily with the catastrophic zeitgeist of the age.
Fuelled by an apocalypse industry that feeds off the fear it spreads, every threat — from bushfires and droughts to viruses such as Zika — portends the end of life as we know it. With nature unleashing its final revenge on mankind, the moment one drama recedes, another rushes in to sustain the sense of impending doom.
The result is a world view in which the chasms that yawn beneath us are invariably deeper and more menacing than the peaks that beckon us are high and inviting. Lost — or at least badly damaged — is the axiom of progress, the assumption, dynamic in its self-evidence, that although there are terrible setbacks, detours and blind alleys, humanity ultimately moves forward, with Australia advancing more than most.
But no society can live by dread alone. And a society that stands quaking in the antechamber of its own extinction is condemned to a stagnation that no amount of stimulus spending can cure. Eternally “keeping a-hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse”, it inevitably saps the ambition, aspiration and self-reliance on which sustained growth relies, replacing them with dependence and the desperate search for security. That, and not the staggering debt and unemployment the lockdowns have wreaked, is the greatest threat we face.
And that is why tackling the fearmongers is so important. The facts, as far as COVID-19 is concerned, are becoming clear; it’s time our governments and their advisers proclaimed them from the rooftops.
SOURCE
Strange but true … Donald Trump is better for Australia than Joe Biden
A Donald Trump victory would be better for Australia than a Joe Biden presidency. This counterintuitive view is widely, if semi-secretly, held in Australian national security circles, and it is almost certainly right.
On foreign policy, despite the crazy tweets, frantic and destabilising turnover of key administration personnel, frequent bouts of boorish personal behaviour from Trump, and numerous outright mistakes, the Trump presidency has been significantly more successful than Barack Obama’s. And much better for Australia.
A Biden presidency would likely reprise Obama, but in a weaker and more woke fashion.
These judgments are provisional, on-balance judgments. Either Trump 2 or Biden 1 could go in several different ways.
The question might seem academic, given how far ahead Biden is. But don’t write Trump off quite yet. The election still depends on turnout, and Trump voters are more enthusiastic than Biden voters. The Republicans have been registering more new voters than the Democrats. RealClearPolitics still has Trump a fraction closer in key battleground states than he was to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And consider this: at this point four years ago, the Access Hollywood tapes were disclosed revealing shocking remarks by Trump regarding his private behaviour. In reaction, there was hardly a cricket team’s worth of people in the whole of the US who thought Trump would become president.
Yet he won. That doesn’t mean he’ll win this time, but don’t count your chickens too early.
On Trump versus Biden, the arguments are strong that Biden would be more problematic for Australia. On bilateral issues, Trump has been a very good president for Australia. There is not a single issue where Canberra could have asked for much more. This reflects well on Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, the two PMs who have dealt with Trump, and on our diplomacy. It also reflects well on Trump, and the standing Australia has within the US system. Congress and the US bureaucracy supported Australia throughout Trump’s term.
Trump honoured Obama’s deal to take asylum seekers from Manus Island, even though he hated it. He levied tariffs, including on steel and aluminium, on many nations including US allies, but not on Australia. Intelligence co-operation could not be closer. Trump went to great lengths to be a lavish host for Scott Morrison’s visit last year. Such gestures inform the US bureaucracy, and political community, about a relationship’s standing. Military co-operation has increased. Though it started off under Obama, the US marine rotations in the Northern Territory continued to grow.
OK, Trump critics would concede he has been pretty good to Australia bilaterally but has trashed US standing internationally and hurt multilateral institutions. This ultimately damages Australia’s interests. But this is not quite true, or at least there are two sides to it. Trump has done much better in Asia than in Europe. Much of what is labelled global disgust with Trump is actually European hostility, plus The New York Times and Hollywood. But a global outlook that doesn’t include Asia isn’t a global outlook at all.
The Trump administration, though it prefers deals to institutions and unilateralism to multilateralism, will build institutions, especially in Asia, where it’s useful. This week in Tokyo, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue had its second foreign ministers’ meeting. Foreign ministers of the US, Australia, India and Japan convened. This is a significant stage in the Quad’s evolution. It is the first time an Indian foreign minister has travelled overseas specifically for a Quad meeting, rather than a Quad gathering on the sidelines of a big multilateral meeting. It was important in bedding down the strategic identity of the government led by Japan’s new Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. And it was the umpteenth visit to the region by US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who held a long bilateral meeting with Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, the night before the Quad.
This development of the Quad owes a great deal to the statecraft of Pompeo and US diplomacy. As ever, Asia prefers a Republican administration in Washington rather than a Democrat administration. The Republicans are the party of the Pacific, the Democrats the party of the Atlantic.
Many of Trump’s most ardent critics in Australia demonstrate the narrowly derivative and inadequate nature of their international outlook by slavishly replicating the trans-Atlantic critique of Trump, while displaying no appreciation of the Asian view.
Of course, within Asia the Chinese don’t like Trump at all. But the five Asian nations that have stood most strongly for their national interests and against Chinese hegemonic tendencies in the region — Japan, India, Vietnam, Singapore and Australia — have all had a pretty productive experience of Trump.
Asian nations are, like Trump, characteristically much more concerned with results than with process. Trump himself is concerned with what nations do more than with what they say. Australia, partly because of our increased defence effort and our straightforward political style, has achieved a unique closeness to the Trump administration — certainly much greater closeness than we ever achieved with Obama. This is most unlikely to be repeated under Biden. That is important, because we would likely have less influence with a Biden administration than we do with a Trump administration.
Southeast Asia, too, has generally found the Trump administration quite OK to deal with. It is true that Trump withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership, but Hillary Clinton had promised to do likewise and Obama had never submitted the TPP to Congress.
The other area where Trump has manifestly done much better than Obama is the Middle East. Trump has midwifed two new peace treaties between Israel and Arab nations. Everything Obama touched in the Middle East turned to absolute dust. Trump has been a force for stability in the Middle East, while Obama was a force for chaos — as in the fallout of the Libyan intervention and, earlier, the Arab Spring. Biden would re-adopt all the destructive elements of the old-think Obama paradigm in the Middle East, including recommitting to the plainly inadequate Iran deal.
On China, Trump has been ahead of the US political leadership class. He has been erratic at times, and has certainly made some serious missteps, but he has understood the profound ways in which Beijing flouts international norms, and the depth of the challenge it poses to the US and its allies. If these issues are now more widely understood, this is partly because of Trump’s advocacy, even as Trump has not been able to make a comprehensive and coherent case.
What about Biden?
In some ways, the future trajectory of a Biden presidency is unknowable. There are at least three separate foreign policy traditions in the Democratic Party. One is the hard-headed Democrats associated with Kurt Campbell, the former Assistant Secretary of State and author of the Obama pivot to Asia, which promised more than it delivered but was better than nothing; and Michelle Flournoy, who if we are lucky, might become Biden’s Defence Secretary.
These are muscular Democrats, particularly realistic in their views of China.
Then there are the Obama-era global engagers and multilateral institution types, associated with John Kerry, the former secretary of state; Susan Rice, who could well become Biden’s secretary of state; and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser.
This group tends to believe that engagement itself is the objective of foreign policy. It is preoccupied with global institutions and global issues. It is deeply conventional — indeed solidly and anachronistically old-fashioned in its analyses. It suffers acute paradigm paralysis. It is drawn to the lyric poetry of foreign affairs as a kind of spiritual substitute for religion. It is perennially preoccupied with climate change and with sweeping, grandiloquent declarations on such issues. And it is very uncomfortable with, and ineffective in, the use of power.
The Chinese have learned to play this group like the strings of a harp. Thus Xi Jinping recently declared that China would be carbon neutral by 2060. This earned Beijing worldwide good publicity, but only a very few commentators stopped to ask how you could square this alleged commitment with the fact that Beijing has approved the construction of more new coal-fired power stations this year than in the past two years; that it is financing new coal-fired power stations all over the developing world; and that a vast proportion of its Belt and Road initiative projects are fossil fuel projects.
The reconciliation is actually simple. The year 2060 is science fiction territory for any government commitment. Beijing can make these announcements and not be impeded or constrained by them in any way, do just what it likes at home, and gullible Western opinion — European opinion, especially — will fall for it every time.
Biden gives every sign that he will be a dithering and weak president. He often tells friends that all politics is personal. Kamala Harris said at the vice-presidential debate that Biden told her foreign affairs is not complex, it’s just relationships.
In this, Biden betrays the same conceptual confusion as both Trump and Obama, to think that personality will seriously influence geopolitics. But it is surely London to a brick that Beijing will seduce Biden with some nonsensical falderal on climate change, and in return face significantly reduced geostrategic pressure from Washington.
The third Democratic Party foreign policy tradition is the “new left” wave of woke activism, which is where all the energy in the contemporary Democratic Party resides. That will merge with the second tradition to almost certainly make climate change the centrepiece of Biden foreign policy — a priority he has already announced anyway.
Biden and Harris are both committed to cutting US defence spending, which means probably an inferior US presence in Asia.
Taken altogether, this all likely means trouble down the track for Australia. Obama sandbagged former prime minister Tony Abbott with a viciously partisan speech at the G20 summit in Brisbane. It was the most blatant US interference in our domestic politics in decades, and it was done without notice or consideration for Washington’s Australia ally.
The hyper-partisan Democrat activists who produced that monstrosity, on fire with self righteous zeal for their pet causes, are influential in Biden’s camp today.
A second Trump administration, on the other hand, would likely be a somewhat moderated version of the past four years. Trump has much more experience now. He will still be constrained by the fear of impeachment and all the normal checks and balances of the US system, plus the normal loss of authority a president experiences in his second term.
Anchored as we are in Asia, not Europe — even less Manhattan, Hollywood or Silicon Valley — Trump Mark II would likely be better for Australia than Biden.
Strange, but true.
SOURCE
Queensland Fisheries Minister Mark Furner labels Greenie plan to replace shark nets as 'pure madness'
Conservationists have sent a report to Queensland Fisheries Minister Mark Furner outlining a $33 million plan to replace shark nets and drumlines with non-lethal alternatives.
Biologist with the Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS), Dr Leo Guida, said their report offered non-lethal shark mitigation methods that "modernise and improve beach safety".
"The current methods are 60 years old, and there's nowhere else in our daily lives that we would accept safety standards that are 60 years old."
"The wildlife cost is too high and quite literally for no safety benefit whatsoever," he said.
But Mr Furner has described suggestions to remove drumlines and shark nets as "pure madness".
The renewed call for the replacement of shark nets comes as hundreds of images of marine life caught in nets and drumlines off Queensland's coast are released under a right to information request made by a documentary film crew that is associated with AMCS.
What are the alternatives?
There have been two fatal shark attacks at Queensland beaches with nets or drumlines in place since 1962, including at Greenmount Beach in September.
Alternative shark mitigation measures recommended by the report include the use of drones to monitor beaches and eco-shark barriers.
Eco shark barriers are made of plastic with 25 to 30-centimetre-wide gaps, aimed at deterring marine life from entering an area, without entangling them like nets do.
SMART (Shark Management Alert in Real Time) drumlines, which alert a Department of Fisheries contractor when a shark has been caught so it can be tagged and relocated, have not been recommended as a replacement to nets or traditional drumlines in the report.
The report, co-signed by AMCS, Humane Society International, Sea Shepherd, No Shark Cull QLD, Ocean Impact, and the documentary Envoy: Shark Cull, has called for both major parties to provide a timeframe for the removal of shark nets and drumlines.
The conservation groups have estimated that replacing nets and drumlines would cost $33.4 million, with ongoing costs of $4.1 million per year — based on a 2019 review of the shark control program and the market price of the suggested alternatives.
However, eco-barriers have had mixed success, with a trial in northern New South Wales showing they have a minimal impact on marine life but can be damaged in strong surf conditions, posing a moderate risk to surfers.
Call for more immediate action
The State Government removed drumlines from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park after a 2019 Federal Court ruling found that killing sharks did nothing to reduce the risk of unprovoked attacks.
The State Opposition has since committed $15 million to replace drumlines in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park with SMART drumlines.
Dr Guida said "it's great to see" both parties taking steps toward more modern methods, but more immediate, state-wide action is needed.
"We don't want to see our wildlife destroyed."
But Fisheries Minister Mark Furner said the State Government had allocated $1 million per year towards shark control innovation, including the use of drones along some Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast beaches.
"Their proposal to remove shark drumlines and also nets from the waters is just pure madness," he said.
But Mr Furner said drones could not be used along beaches close to airports, making drumlines and nets necessary.
"You would leave swimmers, surfers, beachgoers, unsafe by not having that protection."
According to data from Queensland Fisheries, at least 3,400 turtle, mammal and other bycatch species have been caught in nets or drumlines since 2001.
But Mr Furner said the state's shark control program has "served Queenslanders well in both persuasions of government".
"I'm convinced that the officers of Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol and contractors do their very best to make sure bycatch is released live."
State Government to re-visit potential trial
Mr Furner said the cost of replacing all nets and drumlines in Queensland had not been calculated by the State Government.
"We're looking at trialling different measures first and then coming up with a suitable alternative," he said.
In March, a Department of Fisheries Shark Control Program Scientific Working Group voiced its support for a trial that would see some nets replaced by traditional drumlines during the 2020 whale migration season.
"Shark drumlines aren't ones that you can go into Bunnings and purchase. It's something you need to manage and provide for." "We'll revisit that next year," he said.
The State Opposition's spokesperson for Fisheries, Tony Perrett has been contacted for comment.
SOURCE
Sarah Holland-Batt reveals horrific story of father Tony’s time in aged care home
Your regulators will NOT protect you
A Gold Coast man, much loved by his family, was sent to one of the city’s best aged care homes after developing Parkinson’s. But before long trouble started, and his daughter discovered a horrifying secret.
Set among lush tropical gardens in the heart of the Gold Coast, the aged care home seemed an oasis of peace in a desert of decline.
But appearances can be deceiving. While the facility’s fountain splashed prettily in the courtyard – just like in the brochure, there was abuse occurring behind its closed doors.
The horrible secret was uncovered by award-winning poet and academic Sarah Holland-Batt, who discovered that her father, retired mining engineer Tony, was not only being deliberately targeted by a carer, but was also the subject of catastrophic failures of our aged care system.
In August last year, Sarah was called to testify at the Royal Commission into Aged Care, to detail the five years of maltreatment her father suffered after leaving the family’s Sorrento home due to the progression of his Parkinson’s Disease.
Despite searching for the best aged care address on the Coast, Sarah describes her father’s experience as a “drumbeat of failure” – from being left in soiled clothes, to being given the wrong drugs, to suffering repeated injury and not being treated for serious infections and even broken bones.
In March this year, just one week before Australia’s aged care accommodations were forced into lockdown, Tony died after contracting pneumonia. Surrounded by his family, and at last away from his nursing home nightmare, he passed away peacefully in hospital.
While she misses her father every day, Sarah says she is so grateful his battle is over – that he never again need fight against Parkinson’s, the pandemic, or his aged care provider.
And even though his funeral was held virtually, thanks to Covid restrictions, Tony’s legacy may be greater than he ever imagined, with his daughter being hailed a crusader who is both hoping and helping to overhaul the ailing aged care industry.
With a glittering literary career behind her at the age of just 37 – including winning the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, as well as being a critic, editor, poetry columnist for The Australian and an Associate Professor at QUT (and holding a few Masters degrees and a PhD), Sarah is now finding herself increasingly absorbed in her voluntary work to reform aged care.
“When all of this happened to my dad, I thought surely his case had to be an anomaly. Then I started reading and researching and really following the Royal Commission – as well as giving evidence to it – and I’ve ended up with a very good sense of just how badly the system works,” says Sarah, who was born and raised on the Gold Coast but now lives in Brisbane.
“What happened to my dad is actually frighteningly common. The failures that he experienced are emblematic of the industry, not an anomaly at all.
“What is really terrifying is knowing how extremely hard it was to fight against that system for any sort of care, let alone justice, for my dad. And I’m well-educated and relatively young. I have the time and resources to do it, but I barely could. How does anyone stand a chance?”
Sarah says she and her mother noticed the first signs of neglect within weeks of her father moving into the aged care home in 2015.
She said despite fighting for better care, and even after referring issues to police, they continued to battle for his safety and wellbeing throughout those last years of his life.
“Even after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Dad was able to stay at home for the next 15 years, but ultimately he had to move for safety’s sake,” she says.
“So Mum and I did all the inspections, we were extremely diligent and we chose the aged care provider that appeared to have the nicest environment … we didn’t just pick any old one, and it was not cheap.
“But almost immediately we noticed these small things started happening, little things were not being tended to. He had a cold sore that no one had noticed – but how could you not notice when you’re brushing his teeth?
“These small things were really bothering me. I’d come in and he’d be wearing clothes with dried food on them, but they weren’t breakfast foods. Did they dress him in dirty clothes?
“The first big thing we realised was that he wasn’t getting his medication on time. Madopar is extremely important for Parkinson’s patients as it stops the tremors, which then prevents falls, but it must be delivered at an exact time so that it’s an uninterrupted coverage.
“They were missing the window by hours and hours, so he was experiencing huge troughs of no medication and he was repeatedly falling.
“Then he was prescribed medication which actually cancelled out the Madopar altogether, and as a result he fell and broke his hip. That is a catastrophic injury for someone of his age, let alone with Parkinson’s. He never walked again.
“Then no one would come when he called to go to the toilet so he’d try to get there without his wheelchair and fall again … it was a constant drumbeat of failure.”
While these systematic failures were shocking in both their regularity and damage, it was the next injury which up-ended the lives of the Holland-Batts.
After questioning an enormous swelling the size of a tennis ball on Tony’s elbow, Sarah and her mother were pulled aside by another carer and told a horrible secret.
“We were trying to figure out how this infection had occurred, it had obviously been swelling for days, but no one had any answer,” she says.
“But then one carer pulled us aside and said the woman who had been showering Dad had been victimising him. That this woman had let this infection fester and didn’t report it because she didn’t like him.
“She was the night shift carer, she worked alone and she was in charge of showering, she just watched him suffer.
“The whistleblower told us she had seen the woman close the door on Dad, telling the other carers that he was sleeping when he was actually awake and sitting in a dirty incontinence pad, she’d heard this woman yell at him to get his ‘nappies’ in the hall – knowing he can’t walk.
“She’d seen her push his wheelchair away from the bed so that it was out of reach, and tell him that she was ‘sick of your sh**.
“Well, after we heard this, I hit the roof.
“Mum and I wrote to the facility manager demanding answers and insisting this woman be dismissed and asking for assurances that this would never happen again.
“Instead, the manager rang us up to organise a mediation between the carer, my father and ourselves. It just … it was beyond belief. There was nothing to ‘mediate’, she hurt my father when he was at his most vulnerable.”
NO FACT-FINDING, NO INVESTIGATION, NO EVIDENCE SOUGHT
Sarah says their concerns were never met with appropriate regard and the carer was simply moved to a different ward.
She says she then turned to police and the aged care regulator, but still no action was taken.
“When we finally met with the manager, he showed up wearing a St Patrick’s Day T-shirt and mardi gras necklaces. Just no respect for the seriousness of the situation. It was just a small detail but so indicative of the whole situation. It was profoundly inappropriate.
“The manager was not shocked or surprised or even interested in what had happened to Dad, just upset that we’d been told. He was only worried that the whistleblower hadn’t followed ‘protocol’.
“But as she said to us, she told us because she knew he’d sweep it under the rug.
“He said he couldn’t do anything unless the whisteblower came forward, which was frightening for her, and so I went to the police instead.
“They said it was a civil, not a criminal, matter – which is something that needs to be changed, elder abuse should be considered a criminal act – and so I contacted the aged care regulator.
“That was beyond a farce. There was no fact-finding, no investigation, no interviews, no evidence sought … just a flurry of letters, false statements and false promises – which were simply accepted at face value.”
Sarah says she felt physically ill during this time, worrying that the carer in question would abuse other residents or that she would sneak back to her father’s room.
Ultimately, she says all she could do was ask the whistleblower to come forward, which she eventually did.
“I was then called by the aged care manager who said the carer was no longer at the facility, effective immediately. But I later found out they just moved her to a different aged care home.
“I could not have done any more than I did, but I was never even able to affect any action. What hope do we have to protect our loved ones when the system prefers to protect its failures?”
ANOTHER DARK SECRET
Sarah says even after the carer left the facility, her father’s care was still sub-par.
She says he suffered another fall where he broke four ribs, but at the hospital they discovered another dark secret.
“They found two other broken ribs that were partially healed. So he’d broken bones and no one had noticed it, or reported it. He was given no pain relief, no treatment, not even any supervision.
“This was a man who was fiercely loved and cared for by his family, but he had years of neglect that we actually paid for. How is this happening? How are we not marching in the streets to change it?
“We should all be terrified of the future if we don’t change the present situation.”
Sarah says while her father’s battle is over, she will never stop fighting for change within the industry until it’s a place where not just basic care is guaranteed, but the best care is delivered.
She says she is eagerly awaiting the final recommendations of the Royal Commission, due to be delivered in February, but says she is concerned that the Federal Government will not commit to all of the changes.
“I initially wrote a submission to the Royal Commission and they called me up to testify, ever since then I’ve continued to write about it and speak about it.
“The commission’s final report will be handed down in February 2021, but the Government will no doubt just cherry pick what it wants to action. It has no appetite for the overhaul we need.
“Why even have the commission if we’re not going to commit to change?
“We need to see a change in staff-to-resident ratios and more stringent training and skill requirements for staff. Right now, you can work as a carer with absolutely no qualifications. None. This is hard physical, mental and emotional work for which you receive little pay and little support … add to it that anyone can do it, and it’s little wonder we’re not getting the best staff.
“Having said that, so many of the staff are wonderful people but they have way too much work and no support. They are breaking under the strain and when they do, it’s the residents who suffer.
“We also need to see financial accountability from aged care providers. They’re given enormous federal funding - resident fees make up only 20 per cent of the funding, and 80 per cent is contributed by the taxpayer - but there are no regulations on how they spend it. All they have to do is meet accreditation standards, which are ridiculously low, and then they get a pile of cash which they don’t have to account for.
“The provider can choose to spend that money on care, on their grounds, on staff or just keep it for profit.
“We need a national register of aged care workers so that if there is abuse, as with my father, that worker is not just quietly moved around like a Catholic priest. We need absolute transparency.
“And we absolutely need to overhaul the regulator so that it has teeth. We need someone to complain to and who will take action when we do. That was the most outrageous thing of my family’s journey.
“It felt like I was screaming into the abyss while my father was being ground down.”
Sarah says while the outcome of her fight to change aged care is yet to be determined, she’s confident that her father would be proud.
“Dad was a very private person and so I worry sometimes about sharing so much about his life,” she says.
“But above that, he was a very ethical person with a strong sense of justice. I believe that, on balance, he would want me to tell his story. He would want to serve the greater good.
“I just want to see some action come from this. I’m tired of hearing the government say they will ‘consider recommendations’ and yet do nothing. It’s about creating meaningful change, it’s not about paying lip service or keeping up appearances.”
Because as Sarah knows far too well, appearances can be deceiving.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
11 October, 2020
Australia is sailing into the eye of an unimaginable storm
We will not know whether we have blown the pandemic response — economically, medically and socially — until the worst of it is over. Yet 10 months in, early fears that we have opted for expensive and damaging temporary measures to stave off a permanent pest have only grown.
After a year of jobs axed, industries shut, schools closed, families separated, events cancelled, travel prevented and communities crushed, this week we saw the fiscal side of the equation; it broke our budget deficit record, smashing Wayne Swan’s 2009 and 2010 efforts four times over, and notched up our first trillion dollar debt forecast.
On budget day, the health crisis all this was aimed at tackling had fewer than 50 people in hospital and less than a handful in critical care. Measuring risks, costs, benefits and proportionate responses has never been more difficult. Obviously, the reason our medical toll has been so modest so far is, in large part, because of the intense response.
But with state borders closed, Melburnians chained to within 5km of their homes and many businesses and families stuck in financial cryogenics, we must strenuously interrogate the effectiveness of every measure. Melbourne’s curfew provides an exemplar of what to avoid — now scrapped, we know it was imposed without medical or law enforcement advice and that it had no beneficial impact on public health.
The people of our second-largest city were confined by law to their homes for more than 50 nights for no good reason. Avoiding or dismantling this sort of government overreach has obvious social and economic benefits, and carries no health costs. If only politicians took a Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm”.
We might never know what else was unnecessary. Should pubs and restaurants have stayed open with social distancing and customer registration (much as they operate in most of the country now)? The nation’s best medical advice said schools should have remained open all along.
How many extra jobs would have been saved, how many more outbreaks and deaths would have occurred, and how much less social dislocation would have been triggered with more modest restrictions? What we do know is that, with the notable exceptions of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, our politicians are more interested in competing for space under the doona than emerging, however tentatively, to confront the day.
Opposition politicians have toyed with pushing for greater freedoms and debating alternative approaches, but it is easier for them to seize on every infection or death as a gotcha government failure. The way we are responding is both a symptom and a cause of our long march down the bigger government road.
Given mindless faith in ever-expanding government has people blaming politicians for the weather, it is hardly surprising that they expect governments can control invisible and highly infectious viruses. (Not the Chinese government, mind you, they are the one government immune from COVID criticism — go figure.)
Elevated expectations of government drive the sort of responses we have seen; the draconian lockdowns and border belligerence of the states, and the eye-watering largesse from Canberra. After working hard in its early budgets to pull federal spending below 25 per cent of GDP, the Coalition blew it out to 29 per cent in the financial year just finished, even though the virus only arrived on our shores in January.
This year, federal spending will top 34 per cent of GDP. Government has gone viral. We are now talking about a two-year plan, with all this pain, aimed at protecting us from the worst of the pandemic until an effective vaccine is widely available late next year. We were told back in March that a vaccine might rescue us within six months. Morrison has been as frank as possible in changing circumstances. “I really want Australians to understand that we need to be in this for that haul,” the Prime Minister said in April. “It will be months. We need to make changes that we can live with and that we can implement day after day, week after week, month after month.”
Yet the states and the federal government are running policies that cannot be sustained month after month or year after year. Too much is predicated on a game-changing vaccine that might never arrive.
Those who happily cheer for this lockdown approach — this idea of getting to “the other side” — should think about how silly Donald Trump sounds every time he heralds another drug as the “game-changer” or announces how a “fantastic” vaccine is imminent. Many world leaders hold out the same false hope, with more prosaic language, basing policy settings on it.
We need to consider what we would be doing if we knew there was no hope of finding a vaccine. Policies that presume no vaccine would protect vulnerable communities while we prevent the virus running amok and get on with our lives to the greatest extent possible. A vaccine, if and when it comes, would be a bonus.
This would be prudent. It is why Sweden’s experience is so compelling and why we should not scoff at nations with higher mortality rates — we can’t remain closed off forever so, without a vaccine, our most difficult times might be ahead.
Something like the current NSW model should be our starting point. Those able to work from home do so, large outdoor crowds and smaller indoor crowds are banned, social distancing measures are in place in pubs and restaurants, along with customer registration. There will be cases and clusters for the foreseeable future, but they are quickly identified, publicised and, so far, touch wood, contained.
Other states are being far less sensible. Victoria has been an incompetent and authoritarian shambles, while the others are obsessively determined to keep the virus out — even if it kills them.
Given this virus does not harm most people, especially the young, and that we know who is vulnerable, the NSW measures are proportionate. As a nation, we set out to flatten the infection curve and ensure our health system was not overwhelmed, and the only significant breakout was in Melbourne — even then, less than 2 per cent of the nation’s critical care beds were required.
It is instructive to realise the COVID-19 restrictions have virtually killed our flu season. “This is virtually a non-season,” is how Melbourne University professor of microbiology and immunology Ian Barr described it to CNN. “We have never seen numbers like this before.”
This means our coronavirus shutdowns have prevented anything up to 900 flu deaths — and many of them would have been children. If you truly cannot put a price on any life, why don’t we shut down like this every year?
We need to ease up and gain perspective. Whether you are frightened by a trillion dollars in debt, women arrested for going to the beach or young people losing their employment and educational opportunities, the need for proportionality is clear.
Our response needs to be sustainable for a year, or five. Whether or not the coronavirus would leave a historic imprint on our nation, we know the response will.
The budget papers told us “Australia’s population growth is expected to slow to its lowest rate in over one hundred years.” Over coming years, net annual migration will be negative for the first time since World War II (we saw more people leave than arrive during The Great Depression and World War I as well, so this COVID-19 era is in ignominious company).
The budget also assumes lower birthrates because of economic uncertainty, and lower internal migration because of the constricted economy and hard state borders. The very basis of our federation — free trade and movement between the states — and the central ingredient of our post-settlement prosperity — positive net migration — are being squandered.
Unlike the Great Depression or the two world wars, this trauma is one where we are in control. It is our own decisions about how to deal with the virus that are determining the balance between health, economic and social damage.
There will be decisions that save lives and protect livelihoods, and mistakes that harm people and burden generations with unnecessary debt. But we need a broader debate about the policy alternatives.
With these heady questions and vital discussions to be had, Labor’s main criticism of the budget was that it did not mention women enough. The bigger the governments, the smaller the minds.
SOURCE
The Black Summer bushfires that killed a billion animals and destroyed a fifth of the continent's forests last summer were a normal outcome of fluctuating weather patterns, a new book has claimed
'Climate Change: The Facts 2020', written by biologists, atmospheric physicists and meteorologists, rejected the claim that climate change could be linked to the devastating fires between October 2019 and March 2020.
A number of scientists have blamed the changing weather patterns and drought for the fires but the book says there is 'nothing unusual about the current rate or magnitude of climate change'.
Its authors state the earth regularly goes through cycles of dry and wet weather and that the fires were not unprecedented.
It claims the naturally occurring cycle was combined with poor hazard reduction burns and fire management which set the grounds for a catastrophic blaze.
Editor and Institute of Public Affairs senior research fellow Jennifer Marohasy said Australia had a history of bushfires that burned up large parts of the country as early as 1851.
Thirty-three people died directly from the fire while more than 400 are estimated to have lost their lives because of the smoke pollution.
More than 2,000 homes were burned almost 20 million hectares destroyed.
'A similarly vast area of 21 million hectares was lost to unplanned fires as recently as 2012-13,' Dr Marohasy told Daily Telegraph.
'However, this is not the largest area burned by uncontrolled fires. In 1974–75, 117 million hectares burned.'
Dr Marohasy went on to dismantle a number of studies that showed a string of unseasonably dry years had contributed to the ferocity of the fires.
She noted that Australia had recorded its wettest summer since 1990 as early as 2010.
'If anything, these official statistics suggest it is getting wetter, rainfall statistics for the entire Australian continent, available for download from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, also indicate that more recent years have been wetter, especially the past 50 years,' she said.
University of Melbourne's Andrew King conducted a study that looked at a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), which has a direct effect on rainfall levels in Australia and elsewhere.
Since 2017 much of Australia has experienced widespread drought, something the study attributed to a relative lack of negative IOD events.
This sees warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the east Indian Ocean with cooler waters in the west.
These events tend to shift weather patterns and typically bring greater rainfall to southeast Australia, and are made less frequent as global sea temperatures warm.
Dr King and the team examined rainfall statistics and found that the winter of 2016 saw extremely heavy precipitation and a corresponding negative IOD event.
Since then, the Murray-Darling Basin has experienced 12 consecutive seasons with below-average rainfall, the longest period on record since 1900.
'With climate change there have been projections that there will be more positive IOD events and fewer negative IOD events,' King said.
'This would mean that we'd expect more dry seasons in Australia and possibly worse droughts.'
A comment piece from two researchers, from the CERFACS in France, claim the fires are unequivocally related to climate change.
'Mean warming levels are now sufficiently large that many high temperature extreme events would be impossible without anthropogenic influence,' Dr Benjamin Sanderson and Dr Rosie Fisher wrote.
'In the case of recent events in Australia, there is no doubt that the record temperatures of the past year would not be possible without anthropogenic influence, and that under a scenario where emissions continue to grow, such a year would be average by 2040 and exceptionally cool by 2060.'
Climate Change: The Facts 2020' is now available for sale.
SOURCE
Parents say children’s education should be put first, not assessment ban
Queensland’s peak body for state school parents has hit out at the NAPLAN boycott, saying they’re disappointed the dispute over the controversial test has led to the ban and children’s education should be put first.
The Courier-Mail yesterday revealed that the Queensland Teachers’ Union would boycott any work associated with preparing for and administering NAPLAN in 2021.
P&Cs Qld chief executive Scott Wiseman said the organisation was disappointed the dispute over NAPLAN had reached this loggerhead, and hopes that all parties continue to put the children’s interests first.
“Every child deserves every chance at the best education possible and we hope the matter can be worked through and resolved constructively,” he said.
Mr Wiseman said P&Cs Qld held the view that NAPLAN provides useful information to parents about how their child performs in line with other students on a broader measure.
“P&Cs Qld feel parents should have as much information made available to them as possible to actively participate in their child’s education,” Mr Wiseman said.
“Our position is that parents must continue to have the ultimate say in their child’s involvement in the NAPLAN or not, and that it needs to be used as intended and not as a school versus school score sheet.”
The National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy program has been subject to numerous reviews and has been contentious since it was first introduced in 2008.
Queensland Teachers’ Union President Kevin Bates said the industrial action followed reviews which had shown “NAPLAN was broken” so governments needed to introduce an alternative replacement.
“We have a national review by four jurisdictions, the state review from the Queensland government, all saying the same thing, we now have widespread acceptance that the NAPLAN test is broken,” he said.
“You can’t keep having reviews that say it’s bad and then keep doing it.”
It comes as the Catholic sector and Independent schools continue to prepare for the testing to resume next year, ramping-up its online delivery.
Queensland Catholic Education Commission executive director Dr Lee-Anne Perry said NAPLAN provided teachers with important information for planning and to discuss each student’s progress with families.
“NAPLAN is an important part of a large array of data gathered by teachers to determine how students are learning,” she said.
“No one test can provide all the data needed to form a comprehensive picture of each student but what NAPLAN provides is a national benchmark in the key areas of literacy and numeracy with a test that’s based on the curriculum.”
SOURCE
You’ll be shocked at surgery wait times due to COVID-19
Hospital waiting lists were at record levels before the COVID surgery ban but now most Australians will have to wait years for their operations, experts warn
Inflexible public healthcare
Hospital waiting lists have skyrocketed by up to 40 per cent as a result of the COVID-19 surgery ban.
A News Corp investigation has found there were more than 260,000 people waiting for elective surgery in Australia’s public hospitals at the height of the pandemic in June.
And those needing cataract surgery, hip and knee replacements and tonsillectomies face some of the longest waits.
A further 280,000 surgeries were deferred in the private sector due to COVID, according to industry analyst Andrew Goodsall.
And he predicts it will take almost two years to address the pre-pandemic backlog.
The crisis comes as a Breast Cancer Network of Australia (BCNA) survey has found one in eight women had their breast cancer surgery delayed by the pandemic and four in 10 can’t get a breast reconstruction.
A further one in eight have missed out on being able to take part in a clinical trial of potentially life saving new treatments as a result of COVID-19.
BCNA CEO Kirsten Pilatti said she feared that because breast reconstruction is an eight-hour surgery it was being given less priority than other surgeries that use operating theatres for only an hour or so.
State and territory governments need to make more funding available for elective surgery to deal with the surgical backlog and consider contracting work to private hospitals, she said.
Adding further pressure to public hospital waiting lists is the fact that tens of thousands of people dumped their private health cover.
Cancer specialists are warning there is a backlog of undiagnosed cancer cases about to hit the health system, given people put off going to the doctor during COVID.
There was a 37 per cent drop in the number of breast cancer diagnoses and 145,000 fewer screening mammograms conducted in the first six months of this year.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
9 October, 2020
No English, no visa - even if you're married to an Aussie: Huge change brings in language test for loved ones who want to settle Down Under
Immigrants applying for a partner visa will be tested for 'functional levels' of English before they are granted permanent residency.
The government may require immigrants who do not speak English to have 500 hours of free class under the plan announced in Tuesday's budget.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the new requirement would promote social and economic inclusion.
'It's a much more basic level of English language competency and we think this is important to just enable people to engage to access government services,' Mr Morrison said on Wednesday.
'For example, to engage with those who are seeking to assist to access and get the best possible medical treatment, to understand what teachers are saying at school at parent-teacher conferences, and to understand their rights.'
Partner visa are processed in two stages. First an applicant gets a temporary visa for about two years after which they can apply for permanent residency.
The English language requirements will need to be fulfilled at the second stage when the partner wants to become a permanent resident.
'What this will mean is that we will require an applicant and a sponsor to have met functional level English or to have at least made reasonable efforts to learn English,' said Immigration Minister Alan Tudge.
'And by reasonable efforts we mean for most people that would be doing about 500 hours of free English language classes.'
Mr Tudge said the English test will be much simpler than the one needed to be met for economic migration.
Earlier this year the government made English classes free for migrants.
The policy will kick in from the middle of next year. The requirements will apply to applicants and their partners who are permanent residents not citizens.
Mr Tudge said about one million partners who are in Australia cannot speak English.
'In some cases, the husband will not want his partner or wife to learn English. And in part that's for control reasons,' he said.
The announcement has been slammed by the Opposition, who claim the new rule ignores Australia's multicultural values.
Andrew Giles, a Labor MP and the party's spokesman for Multicultural Affairs and Assisting for Immigration and Citizenship, said the government needs to understand the impact of the new measure.
'It's come about without any context ... and it seems to reflect an understanding of Australian society that's anchored in the past, that doesn't recognise the multicultural nation we are today,' he told SBS.
People can apply for partner visa from inside or outside of Australia.
It can set applicants back about $8,000.
Applicants are often allowed a bridging visa while their visas are processed.
Other visa changes announced on Tuesday include waiving or refunding application charge for temporary visa holders affected by the COVID-19.
There is also a push on the Family Stream Visa, with a temporary application increase from 47,700 to 77,000.
SOURCE
Why an Australian company could be the world's answer to ending the coronavirus pandemic after it won a $42million contract with the US - but our own government haven't bought a SINGLE test
An Australian company is determined to bring an end to the coronavirus pandemic, creating tests that can give results back in just 15 minutes - but the government hasn't bought a single unit.
Ellume, a Brisbane medical technology company received a $42million contract with the US government to roll out the testing kits, which are expected to be available in the country in the coming weeks.
The three COVID-19 tests can be used at home, by medical professionals and in areas with large crowds like airports and stadiums.
But while the tests are set to be available in America next month, the Australian government is yet to offer any interest, The Australian reported.
Ellume's Chief executive and founder Sean Parsons said it was frustrating to receive no word about rolling out the tests locally.
'We have been having discussions with the Queensland state government, which have largely fallen on deaf ears,' Dr Parsons told newspaper.
'I'd be lying if I said it wasn't frustrating.
'We have unique technology that has been hard fought over a decade and it is a little bit disappointing the Australian government hasn't been interested and understood the value that could bring to COVID.'
The three tests under production by Ellume all involve devices that transmit patient samples digitally before the results appear on screen.
Ellume's at home test requires patients to take their own sample from their nostril.
The test then uses an analyser that's connected to their smartphone via Bluetooth which then digitally transmits the results onto the phone.
The second test allows for eight samples to be examined at the one time and will be a useful tool for laboratories.
The test is ran on Ellume's 'Access eHub' which is a portable, digital device that can give results back in just 15 minutes, while in strong positive cases results can appear in just three minutes.
Experts believe faster testing would encourage more people to take part as they wouldn't have to isolate for long while awaiting results.
The last test is designed for healthcare professionals and involves a handheld device that can be connected to a smartphone and can examine two samples simultaneously.
These kits are recommended for doctors and provide clear instructions on how to be used.
Dr Parsons is hopeful the tests could be used in conjunction with the coronavirus vaccine which is expected to be released at the start of next year at the earliest.
Ellume are aiming to have the tests ready by the end of November in the US.
America has been severely impacted by the global health crisis with more than 7.5 million coronavirus cases and 211,000 related deaths.
Currently, COVID-19 test results in Australia take up to 72 hours, as they need to be posted off to specialist labs.
SOURCE
The grim reality of Townsville’s childhood trauma battle
This is almost all an Aboriginal problem so is essentially intractable
Aborigines are a powerful example of the destructive effects of unbridled welfare. They don't need to work for anything so they have all the normal energies and nothing to do with them. So they resort to drugs, mainly alcohol. And in the throes of intoxication they are often violent towards one-another, including towards women and children
And their children emulate them, as children tend to do
What they need are jobs and very limited welfare but no government seems able to arrange that. Various State and federal governments of all political stripes have tried all sorts of things but nothing works
Anybody who thinks he has a solution to the Aboriginal "problem" is almost certainly a fool
The only thing that DID work was when they were supervised by the missionaries -- but that is unthinkable in these times. Aborigines are basically very spiritual people and the missionaries had plenty of that. When God is watching you it does tend to lead to better behaviour
Shocking figures have revealed hundreds of Townsville children, some as young as three, are growing up amid scenes of drug abuse, violence and sexual assault.
Child safety charity Act for Kids are working with 800 children and 350 families across the city, with their services in such high demand they were forced to move their national base here.
The scourge of ice on the community is leading to violence and heartache inside homes across the city, according to the charity, which says the complexities of the city’s youth crime problem can, in some cases, be traced back to horror home lives.
The need for therapy and support is so high, the charity has had to operate its services on a triage system, with Townsville seeing a significant waitlist for children and families.
The child safety heroes are dealing with cases of deep trauma that have led children to act out violently, adopt anti-social or sexualised behaviours, develop learning difficulties and in some cases, become “selective mutes’’.
The trauma sustained in their home environments can lead to young people spiralling out of control, unable to self-regulate their behaviour and without the proper guidance their ability to deal with stressful situations is all but muted.
Working closely with James Cook University, Act for Kids is developing clinically proven programs and medical research via its Townsville centre of excellence to come up with ways to help the young people living through the trauma.
Amid the ongoing political tensions around Townsville youth crime situation, Act for Kids, Executive Director Stephen Beckett said he wanted to shed a light on the complex and often heartbreaking situations kids in their care were responding to.
“A lot of people sometimes don’t understand that trauma that can have an impact on a child’s mind (and) a lot of these parents have their own childhood trauma and are kids themselves emotionally,” he said.
“The surge of ice in Townsville in particular brings a level of aggression into the house we’ve never seen before and it’s incredibly addictive and people will do almost anything to get their hands on it.
“The complexity of cases that we’re dealing with is through the roof.
“With more resources we can do more, Act For Kids has had to open to sexual assault clinics for children in Gladstone and Rockhampton to keep up with the demand.”
Medical research suggests the greater the severity and duration of childhood trauma the more severe the psychological and physical health consequences. People who have experienced complex childhood trauma often have multiple diagnoses.
Mr Beckett said neuroscience findings had proven that ongoing stress or trauma affects the structure and function of the developing brain. It also affects it chemically, releasing stress hormones over time which in turn created inflammation.
“A child who has six or more experiences of trauma will die 20 years earlier than people without,” he said.
“They are more likely to develop depression, more likely to get cancer.
“It often leads them to risky behaviour and criminal activity because they haven’t had that safe environment to learn how to self regulate emotions using both sides of the brain.”
Mr Beckett said the charity received referrals from the Child Protection and Youth Justice Departments, Queensland Police Service, health care providers, schools, domestic violence support services and self referrals where more than 50 staff members, including specialist trained trauma psychologists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists and social workers stepped in to provide “wrap around treatment”.
He said to achieve the best outcomes for the child, it was important to include the entire family in intensive treatment programs.
“What’s seen as scary behaviour and unacceptable to community standards is often a defence mechanism and it’s complex stuff,” he said.
“If we keep sending them back to a dysfunctional environment at home the outcome is not going to be good and so it’s really important to take a deep dive into the root of the issues, especially when intergenerational trauma is involved.”
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Humanities degrees set to double in price as federal Parliament passes higher education bill
Parliament has passed contentious laws that will dramatically increase the cost of some university degrees, while cutting the cost of others.
Under the changes, the cost of a social sciences degree will more than double, while nursing, mathematics and teaching degrees will become cheaper.
The laws also remove government support for students who fail too many courses.
The cost of degrees will change due to a major shake-up of how much the Commonwealth will pay for students' degrees.
Education Minister Dan Tehan says the changes will give students cost incentives to study subjects that will prepare them for fields where jobs are needed.
"The … legislation will provide more university places for Australian students, make it cheaper to study in areas of expected job growth and provide more funding and support to regional students and universities," he said earlier in the week.
The changes were passed in the Senate with the support of One Nation and Centre Alliance senator Stirling Griff, whose crucial vote the Government secured earlier this week.
In securing his support, the Government made concessions to give South Australia more Commonwealth-supported places, and offer some protections to students who failed courses.
Opponents of the laws say the changes saddle university students with substantially higher debt if they pursue their preferred study paths.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
8 October, 2020
Eskimo Pie to change its ‘derogatory’ name
An almost 100-year-old ice cream brand has settled on a new name for its Australian version saying “now is the time for change”.
Multiple brands have announced their decision to rebrand or rename products with "racist" or "offensive" packaging and labelling.
An iconic Australian ice cream brand is changing its name, saying it’s “committed to being a part of the solution on racial equality”.
Peters Ice Cream has told news.com.au it will change its name from Eskimo Pie to Polar Pie.
“Peters Ice Cream is committed to being a part of the solution on racial equality and we acknowledge that now is the time for change,” a spokesperson for Peters said in a statement.
“Eskimo Pie is a brand which has been within our portfolio for many decades and has a loyal consumer base who adore the product. We have chosen to rename the product ‘Polar Pie’ as this retains a strong association back to the original brand and product idea – a frozen treat you eat much like a pie – with your hands and hence the name Polar Pie!”
According to Peters website, Eskimo Pies are the oldest ice cream in the company’s range, and were introduced to Australia in 1923 by the Peters family.
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Mining giant BHP splits with Greens
Multinational resources giant BHP has split with the state’s powerful resource lobby after it urged Queenslanders to vote for anyone but the Greens.
Multinational resources giant BHP has split with the state’s powerful resource lobby over its foray into the state’s political campaign after it urged Queenslanders to vote for anyone but the Greens.
The company issued a statement in which it said it had given notice to the Queensland Resources Council that it was suspending its membership immediately after advertising that targeted a specific political party.
“BHP has expressed to the QRC on several occasions its opposition to this advertising approach and had formally requested that it be withdrawn,” the statement said.
“Unfortunately this has not occurred.”
BHP said it supported campaigns around policy issues that affected the mining industry and its workers, and the current approach was “not consistent with that contribution”.
It follows the QRC publicly calling for Queenslanders not to support the Greens party this October 31, and to preference them last.
QRC chief executive Ian Macfarlane said: “The Queensland Resources Council has made a decision in relation to the anti-jobs policies of the Greens that is in the best interests of Queensland mining and gas members and the 372,000 people and 14,400 businesses who rely on the resources sector for their livelihoods.
“The resources industry will continue to support the economy and jobs of Queenslanders despite the Greens wanting to shut the industry down.
“The current situation is so dire the QRC has to stand up for its industry, particularly people in regional areas.”
The council also put out a media statement welcoming Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s “promise of ‘no deals’, ruling out a power-sharing alliance with the Greens to stay in office”.
“Now is not the time to risk a single job in Queensland by voting for the Greens or by putting them anywhere but last on your ballot paper,” QRC chief executive Ian Macfarlane said.
“The Greens want to stop jobs in our sector and others.”
Mr Macfarlane said he would continue to warn Queenslanders about the risk to jobs of voting for or preferencing the Greens up until 6pm on election night.
Greens MP Michael Berkman issued a statement acknowledging BHP’s criticism.
“We know the vast majority of Queenslanders support raising mining royalties and it looks like BHP has acknowledged this by splitting from the QRC’s nasty campaign to attack the Greens,” he said.
“The Greens terrify the QRC because if we win, multinational mining corporations will have to pay more in royalties so we can invest in jobs, health and education.
“The ultimate question for this election is who benefits from Queensland’s enormous mineral wealth. The Greens are the only party who have proposed raising mining royalties so every Queenslander can benefit, so it’s no surprise the QRC has had a little meltdown.”
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Australian government cuts refugee places by thousands
The Morrison government has slashed the maximum humanitarian intake by thousands on the basis it is too difficult to bring refugees into Australia in the same numbers as before the coronavirus pandemic.
The humanitarian intake was reduced from 18,750 places to 13,750 over the next four years in Tuesday's budget.
Asylum seeker advocates have slammed the move, which is expected to save almost $1 billion, saying the country should be accepting more refugees at a time when its net overseas migration will drop by hundreds of thousands a year.
But the government insists the number of humanitarian places had to be slashed because of international travel grinding to a halt and refugee services around the world being significantly impacted.
Most of Australia's refugees are taken through the UNHCR's resettlement program - meaning they have to fly here from other countries to get to Australia.
The humanitarian intake will still be reviewed every year, allowing the government to return the cap to pre-pandemic levels if the global situation improves.
The change will keep Australia as accepting the third-highest number of refugees via the United Nations resettlement program, behind the United States and Canada.
Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge said the new cap was in line with last year's outcome of 13,171 and reflected the "global impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic".
"The government will continue to focus on settlement and integration support for humanitarian entrants," Mr Tudge said.
"This will include prioritising supporting people in work and improving English language skills."
Opposition immigration spokesman Andrew Giles said the reduction in the humanitarian intake was a "very big change".
"And while we are in very novel and uncertain circumstances it does require a proper explanation and then a very serious examination," Mr Giles said.
"Who will be the next Frank Lowy, Majak Daw or Anh Do that Australia will miss out on due to the Morrison cuts to our humanitarian program?
"We can recover from COVID-19 and continue to provide a lifeline to people in need - like Frank, Majak and Anh who have contributed so much."
Australia's collapse in overseas migration and a falling fertility rate has forced Treasury to downgrade the nation's population forecasts by about one million over the next two years, which is a long-term blow to economic growth.
Amnesty International campaigner Shankar Kasynathan said the government's decision was "inhumane and makes no sense".
"Throughout COVID-19, refugees across Australia have gone above and beyond to help their communities get through these difficult times," he said.
"Instead of seeing these people as a financial burden, this government should be welcoming them with open arms.
"It's the humane thing to do; it's also, economically and for our communities, the most sensible thing to do. When refugees move to regional communities like Wagga Wagga and Armidale they restart their lives and in doing so support schools, infrastructure and businesses."
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Universities welcome $1 billion research bailout package
Universities say their pleas have been answered after the federal budget contained a $1 billion research bailout package to help plug the hole caused by the collapse of the international student market.
The funding lifeline comes amid a horror year for the sector as many universities were forced to slash hundreds of jobs in response to a sudden decline in international student enrolments due to border closures.
The Group of Eight - which represents the eight institutions that account for 70 per cent of Australia's university research - said the funding would "reverberate positively" through industry an security sectors which rely heavily on research advancements in technology and science.
"We have been quite desperate in past months as researchers were being stood down and research programs faltered or halted all because we were missing the International student fees which previously paid for Australia's research" chief executive Vicki Thomson said.
"With no idea when or even if that market will ever recover, the silver lining is that Australia can once again claim it is funding its own research. That will be welcomed much further afield than our university campuses."
The coronavirus pandemic has underlined the over-reliance of Australia's universities on the high fees paid by international students which are used to cross-subsidies research programs.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education have estimated the shortfall in research funding could hit $7.6 billion over the next four years due to the loss of international student revenue.
The Rapid Research Information Forum, chaired by Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel, found universities job losses could hit 21,000 full time positions by the end of the year, of which up to 7,000 could be research-related academic staff.
In his budget speech on Tuesday evening, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the $1 billion injection for research over the next year was about "backing our best and brightest minds whose ideas will help drive our recovery."
Peak body Universities Australia said the government had "heard the alarm bells" and the funding would stabilise research programs and jobs.
"This will ensure world-class research and discovery can continue on Australia's universitycampuses," Universities Australia chair Professor Deborah Terry said.
Higher education expert Andrew Norton, from the Australian National University, said lifeline was bigger than the sector had been expecting and would save some jobs in the firing line.
"This will give universities breathing space meaning they will have sack fewer people in the next few months," Professor Norton said.
"It would've been much much better if they had announced it a few months ago because the universities have already set in motion some of these job cuts."
National Tertiary Education Union president Alison Barnes criticised the announcement as insufficient, saying the funding represented only "a fraction" of the research shortfall universities were facing.
"The budget also fails to seriously address the funding and jobs crisis that universities are experiencing. Livelihoods and careers have been demolished in the past six months with 12,000 jobs lost and $3 billion in revenue disappearing," Dr Barnes said.
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Australia's Federal debt not a big problem
The federal government is spending roughly an extra $75 billion over the next two years to keep you and your boss happy and positive as we go through the deepest economic recession in living memory.
Yep, this is all about you and your job … because you are the economy. It’s that simple. Unemployment will peak at 8 per cent in December and take another two years to get back under 6 per cent.
That’s what is wreaking havoc with the economy. Jobs really are at the core of a healthy economy … and recovery from this recession.
If you’re in a job, you’re earning an income. Part of that income gets paid to the government in tax and by spending what’s left over keeps businesses open so they can pay tax (from profits) to the government and employ staff who, in turn, earn an income, pay their own tax and spend more.
What makes the economy go-round is pretty simple really. You earning an income from your job, spending it with a business so they can create jobs and everyone pays tax.
Yes the $213 billion Budget deficit and net government debt of over $700 billion looks scary but — and I know this may sound weird — don’t worry about it.
While the figures look huge, our economy is also huge by comparison and our debt as a proportion of the economy is much lower than virtually every other advanced economy in the world.
As a bonus, the government is paying less that one per cent interest on that debt … so it’s cheap money.
So what’s in the Federal Budget to make you feel good and positive?
* The tax cuts due to start in July 2022 will be brought forward two years to start last July. Yes that means you’ve been paying too much tax for the first four months of this financial year but it also means you’ll get a bigger tax refund and there will be less tax taken out of your wage from now on.
For most working Australians that’s an extra $3000-$5000 (depending on your tax bracket) a year extra to go out and spend.
* Aged pensioners will receive a $500 bonus in two equal payments in December and March.
* There are a raft of new job training programs, and billions being spent on infrastructure projects, all designed to create new job opportunities if you’re made redundant.
There will be new job training programs available.
There will be new job training programs available.
Now to your boss. What’s in this Budget to keep them positive, keep you in a job and create more jobs?
* As we know already, the $101 billion JobKeeper program keeps going until the end of March even though the amount is reduced and eligibility rules have been tightened.
* For businesses not on JobKeeper, they can receive a “hiring credit” of $200 a week if they add an eligible under 30-year-old to their staff and $100 a week for a 30-35 year old new employee.
* If their business makes a loss this financial year they can offset that loss against profits they’ve made in the past two years (usually they can only offset losses against future profits). While they’ve already paid tax on those past profits, they’ll get a refund back once the losses are offset against them.
* Any investment in new assets for the business can be written off against their tax immediately instead of over a few years. Less tax means more money to spend or hire more staff.
The Australian economy was in pretty good shape going into this pandemic. It’s fair to say, if you had to be in any country in the world to get through this recession it would be Australia.
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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
7 October, 2020
Coronavirus: Sweden defied zealots and never met its Waterloo
Sweden’s impressive legacy — ABBA, dynamite, Ikea, for instance — has expanded significantly in 2020, having provided the world with an example of a sane response to what’s turned out a relatively mild pandemic.
The Scandinavian nation deserves enduring credit from reasonable people everywhere for resisting the destructive authoritarian mindset that enveloped democratic nations this year. Sweden was viciously attacked by supposed experts and mainstream media all year that if it didn’t crush commerce by fiat and suspend civil liberties indefinitely, as has occurred in Europe, many US states, and of course Victoria, more than 90,000 Swedes would die.
The army of lockdown zealots will never be able to say lockdowns are essential to avert disaster, if that wasn’t already clear enough from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Historians will struggle to see a public policy disaster in Sweden. The number of deaths there from all causes so far this year, just less than 68,000, is fewer than over the same period in 2015, adjusted for population size. Far from an apocalypse, the total death rate from January 1 to September 20 is barely distinguishable from recent years, notwithstanding a jump from 2019, during which it was unusually low.
While its European neighbours, which bludgeoned their economies for months, now battle “second waves” (albeit with far lower death rates), Sweden has barely had any COVID-19 deaths since mid-July alongside a much milder uptick in so-called cases, which in any case often mean little.
The feared “exponential growth” never occurred (it never occurred anywhere). Swedish hospitals were never “overwhelmed”.
But Sweden’s GDP, which plunged 8.3 per cent in the second quarter, tanked anyway so should it have locked down too and “saved lives”? It’s a fatuous argument, faulty on its own terms, even assuming lockdowns do “save lives” overall.
For a start, its economy suffered in part because its larger neighbours, which themselves endured far bigger drops in GDP, locked down. Second, media fear-mongering left people unreasonably terrified, which, naturally, saw Swedes curtail economic activity.
In any case, looking at GDP over three months is hardly definitive. Sweden’s economy is expected to grow 4 per cent next year, twice as fast as ours, according to the Reserve Bank.
Having inflicted less economic chaos, Sweden’s gross government debt won’t rise beyond 40 per cent, according to its September budget papers, while Canberra’s debt ceiling will be lifted to the equivalent of 55 per cent of GDP along with far bigger budget deficits.
The bigger point is this: the short-term trajectory of GDP matters little. As I’ve argued for years in this column, it’s a flawed, dated measure of prosperity.
In Sweden, no one will be cowering in masks for years; Swedish police are not dragging people screaming from cars or invading homes to stop Facebook sharing. They aren’t shutting internal borders, stopping weddings, funerals or undermining children’s education. The Swedish parliament, unlike Victoria’s, isn’t using the pandemic as an excuse to increase police power. And the Swedish people never had to endure rambling, ridiculous daily press conferences for months about “cases” that belong in a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And the Swedish government hasn’t set a precedent, which will hang over business investment considerations here for a generation, that whenever a virus emerges, businesses and households will be shut down for months.
None of these factors is reflected in GDP.
There was never a health crisis in Sweden. And there hasn’t been one in Australia, either.
In the first six months of the year, there were 134 fewer deaths from respiratory diseases in Australia, which includes pneumonia and influenza, and 617 additional deaths from cancer compared with the average over 2015-19, according to the ABS’s provisional mortality statistics, released last week. Doctor-certified deaths are within the normal range.
Sweden hasn’t hitched its economic future — and the mobility of its people — to the prospect of a vaccine, either.
As our budget will make clear, forecasts of a return to normality will be contingent on an effective vaccine emerging, and one people will want to take. Given the survival rate for people under 70 is about 99.9 per cent — if they get the virus — it’s unclear how many will want to. Drug companies, under immense pressure to find a vaccine in months rather than the usual eight to 10 years, are understandably trying to wriggle out of liability if something goes wrong.
There are 243 candidate vaccines, of which nine are in stage-three trials, where the wider population testing takes place. There’s no guarantee of success. There’s been no vaccine developed for HIV, for instance.
“It is likely individuals will need two doses of a vaccine and this may need to be repeated every year,” says JP Morgan analyst David Mackie, who took stock of vaccination developments last month. “With a global population of 7.8 billion, this would require 4.7 billion individuals to be vaccinated with two doses each, separated by three to four weeks, and possibly repeated every year.”
Australia’s coronavirus elimination strategy leaves many questions unanswered. How long will we be prevented from leaving, if there’s no effective vaccine? Given the virus is contagious, is it realistic to keep it out forever (assuming it’s not prevalent here)? If not, why has Victoria imposed a 20-week lockdown on its biggest city?
Nations that don’t lock down their populations for months have been cast as immoral, but the truth is more complex. Leadership requires balancing competing objectives, governing for the long term, and being honest with people when new information emerges.
It will require a few more years of data to work out the optimal strategies to fight future pandemics. But what’s clear already — certainly to citizens of Victoria, New Zealand, Israel, the UK and Europe — is that one lockdown, as promised by proponents, does not eradicate the coronavirus.
And let’s drop the idea Swedes care less for their elderly than we do. Sweden spends the equivalent of 3.2 per cent of GDP on its aged-care facilities, compared to about 1 per cent here.
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Permitted NSW fire-prone clearing doubled
About time
The NSW government will more than double the amount of native vegetation that can be bulldozed around fire-prone homes — from 10m to 25m — ahead of the upcoming bushfire season, according to leaked documents.
The proposed amendments, contained in a cabinet-in-confidence memo obtained by The Australian, fall significantly short of the 50m buffer sought by some senior Berejiklian government ministers, setting up further division over contentious environmental policies.
“Amendments include … 25m of vegetation clearing along fence lines according to a yet-to-be- approved code covering clearing in endangered and threatened species habitats, riparian corridors and clearing for non-bushfire risk mitigation purposes,” the document reads.
Cabinet will on Tuesday consider the government’s response to the NSW bushfire inquiry that was established in July in response to the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires.
The fires, which lasted four months, killed 34 people and destroyed more than 3000 homes across the country.
The cabinet documents also reveal that funding required to put in place the inquiry’s 76 recommendations would reach $220m in 2020-21 and $1.09bn in the next four years.
The most significant costs this year would include $28m for a state strategic fire trail network, $27m for protective clothing and equipment and $18m for a tanker fleet upgrade.
While the inquiry, led by former NSW police deputy commission Dave Owens and former chief scientist Mary O’Kane, made no findings in relation to land clearing, it did make observations about the current scheme.
Under the “10/50” policy, homeowners are allowed to clear trees within 10m of their property and underlying vegetation — but not trees) up to 50m away. “Many question the effectiveness of the scheme, given many properties cleared in accordance with the scheme were still affected by the fires,” the inquiry report noted.
The cabinet submission will propose 25m of vegetation clearing to take place along fence lines “to simplify complex vegetation clearing requirements”.
“The (Rural Fire Service) case is that 25m is needed for effective firefighting regardless of the state of the boundary,” it reads.
Sources with knowledge of government discussions said moderate-aligned ministers, including Environment Minister Matt Kean and Planning Minister Rob Stokes, were pushing for as little change as possible to the existing scheme.
Others, including Deputy Premier John Barilaro and Emergency Services Minister David Elliott, wanted more clearing.
Critics of the “10/50” rule contend that it has been misused by landholders to enhance development opportunities, scenic views and property values.
In its submission to the inquiry, the National Parks Association of NSW recommended repealing the rule in part because it relied on self-assessment.
The NSW Wildlife Council agreed, saying: “Allowing clearing without expert approval risks environmental considerations, threatened species and ecological communities being either disregarded or inadequately assessed.”
Mr Barilaro and the Nationals publicly brawled with Gladys Berejiklian over another environmental policy — the protection of koala habitats — only last month.
He has since taken mental health leave and is absent from parliament, meaning he will miss the cabinet discussion.
Mr Elliott, Mr Kean and Mr Stokes all declined to comment, citing cabinet confidentiality.
“(The) financial impacts for the state government will be substantial,” the document reads. “The plan would implement all 76 of the report’s recommendations over several years to spread financial impacts (sic) over several budgets.”
Cabinet will also discuss whether the government should compensate landowners for damage caused to fence lines, a question that featured prominently during the inquiry.
It heard that public land managers — including the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and Forestry Corporation — were often perceived as “bad neighbours” because they did not always reduce fuel loads on their side of the boundary.
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University funding reforms set to pass Senate after Centre Alliance confirms support
The new funding will prioritize STEM courses
An overhaul of university funding that will see fees for humanities courses more than double will soon become law, after minor party Centre Alliance threw its support behind the changes.
Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie confirmed on Tuesday morning the party would support the reforms, handing the federal government the crucial vote it needs to pass its Job-Ready Graduates bill through the Senate.
Ms Sharkie, the party's education spokeswoman, said Centre Alliance had negotiated a deal with the Morrison government that would secure more places for South Australian students and more protections for students who failed first-year subjects in exchange for its support.
"These legislative reforms are by no means perfect but overall Centre Alliance recognises what the government is trying to achieve and what the university sector is calling for, which is funding certainty following the 2017 indexation cuts," Ms Sharkie said in a statement. "Without change, many universities were at risk of significant job losses and campus closures going into next year."
The government needed one extra vote to pass its reforms, which will be debated in the Senate on Tuesday, after striking a deal last week to secure One Nation's two votes.
Centre Alliance senator Stirling Griff emerged as the make-or-break vote last week, after Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie ruled out her support, saying the reforms would "makes university life harder for poor kids and poor parents".
Labor, the Greens and Independent senator Rex Patrick also oppose the bill.
With Centre Alliance's support, the Job-Ready Graduates bill could pass the Senate as early as this week. The changes will cement a major restructuring of university funding by hiking fees for some courses, including by 113 per cent for humanities, to pay for fee cuts for STEM, nursing and teaching courses.
The government says the reforms will create 30,000 new places next year, while cheaper fees in certain fields will deliver more graduates in areas of expected job growth.
Under the amendments negotiated by Centre Alliance, South Australia's three public universities – Adelaide University, the University of South Australia and Flinders University – will be given up to 3.5 per cent extra funding to grow the number of student places at their institutions.
The minor party said it had also secured more protections for students who, under the reforms, would be cut off from accessing HELP loans if they failed 50 per cent of their first-year subjects, through an amendment that would legislate the criteria for exemptions for "special circumstances".
Senator Griff said the deal was "an excellent outcome for South Australia".
"This means substantial extra funding for our three universities over four years, over [and] above current funding allocations, and an additional 12,000 students will have access to a university education over a four-year period," Senator Griff said.
Greens education spokeswoman Senator Mehreen Faruqi slammed the deal, saying Centre Alliance had "chosen to sell out students, young people and our universities".
"They've bought the government spin hook, line and sinker. They should be ashamed of condemning generations of young people to decades of debt," Senator Faruqi said.
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Police camera ruling 'denies courts critical evidence'
Victoria Police officers cannot be compelled to release footage from body-worn cameras in civil proceedings following a County Court decision last month which has prompted calls for urgent reform of the laws that regulate their use.
The court ruling is expected to deny crucial evidence being tendered during civil trials that could prove an abuse of power or potentially exonerate a police officer against such an allegation.
It could also have significant implications for other civil cases, including Transport Accident Commission claims, where a law enforcement officer or paramedic was present and equipped with a camera.
Lawyers and civil libertarians have urged Attorney-General Jill Hennessy to amend legislation from 2017, when the cameras were first trialled in Victoria in response to recommendations by the Royal Commission into Family Violence.
Robinson Gill lawyer Jeremy King warned of a serious miscarriage of justice without government intervention.
"It is in the interest of plaintiffs, police and the TAC that this gets fixed straight away," he said.
"There is a massive black hole in the legislation regarding courts being able to access and utilise body-worn camera footage in any civil proceeding. Courts are being denied critical evidence that may determine the outcome of a case."
Mr King is representing former prisoner Konstantin German, who claims in court documents to have been bashed by prison guards and bitten by a dog during riots at the Melbourne Remand Centre in 2015.
Two of the guards were wearing body-worn cameras, but lawyers for the Victorian Government Solicitor's Office opposed the release of the footage to the plaintiff.
In her judgment on September 25, County Court judge Sandra Davis found there were no specific provisions in the Surveillance Devices Act for the footage to be handed over in civil proceedings.
Liberty Victoria president Julian Burnside, QC, called on the government to change the legislation.
"If this is the law, then it's wrong. Video footage from these body cameras is precisely the type of evidence that should be available during civil litigation," Mr Burnside said.
Ms Hennessey said body-worn cameras were an important way to ensure greater accountability and create a safer environment for officers, staff and the community.
"I am aware of this case and will consider the legal implications of the ruling," she said.
More than 8000 frontline police and protective services officers are now fitted with cameras, which are also worn by some prison guards and Ambulance Victoria paramedics.
Police claimed the technology helped provide "better and more efficient justice outcomes by streamlining evidence gathering and corroboration" at a a briefing to IBAC in February 2020.
It was also claimed the cameras would encourage "more transparent interactions between police and the community while enhancing member safety," according to the briefing by Superintendent Jason Kelly.
However, The Age revealed last year that police officers could deactivate their body-worn cameras at their discretion and edit footage before court cases, while the Andrews government had given police the power to deal "in-house" with any potential breaches.
Gregor Husper, principal solicitor at the Police Accountability Project, said the use of body-worn cameras had failed to make police more accountable.
"It's completely useless to members of the public wanting to allege misconduct by police. You can't get the footage under freedom of information laws. And now the footage can't be obtained during discovery in civil cases," Mr Husper said.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see . To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
6 October, 2020
Controversial Aboriginal activist and incoming Greens senator declares she has NEVER sung the national anthem and finds the Australian flag offensive
You can see that she is just about as Aboriginal as I am. And my ancestry is entirely British. She's just a far Leftist approval-seeker. But she is in the right party. The Australian Greens are far-Leftists.
The question remains whether she is approprite to sit in our parliament. Before sitting, all members have to make the oath of allegiance. It is a constitutional requirement. It reads:
"I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II' Her heirs and successors according to law. SO HELP ME GOD!"
If she doesn't like Australia, she surely would not like swearing allegiance to our Head of State. But she must have taken the oath to be seated. So she is a fraud and an impostor
An incoming Greens senator has revealed she has never sung the national anthem and found the Australian flag to be offensive.
Lidia Thorpe will next week become the first-ever indigenous senator for Victoria when she swears an oath of allegiance to the Queen.
The 47-year-old activist and grandmother from Melbourne, who is replacing former Greens leader Richard Di Natale in federal Parliament, has declared she doesn't associate herself with Advance Australia Fair.
'I've never participated in the Australian anthem,' she told the ABC's 7.30 program.
Ms Thorpe has also expressed misgivings about the Australian flag, especially when it is displayed on Australia Day, January 26. 'Yeah, and I feel that pain in terms of, I know what it's like to feel offended,' she said.
'When I see Australian flags all over the media on the 26th of January and drinking and partying, when that day represents so much loss to our people. 'I feel that pain too.'
Like some left-wing indigenous activists, Ms Thorpe regards the 1788 arrival of the British First Fleet as an 'Invasion Day' and the start of land being dispossessed.
Last year, she told UK-born actress Miriam Margoyles' Almost Australian documentary she saw herself as an indigenous woman and not an Australian.
'I don't identify as being Australian. It's a concept that's been imposed on our people since we're invaded,' she told the program, which aired on the ABC in May. 'The colonisers came and set up the colony which they now call Australia. 'Mass genocide occurred.'
When she takes an oath in the Senate, Ms Thorpe will become just the eighth indigenous member of federal Parliament since Federation in 1901.
Ms Thorpe, who is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of female indigenous activists, said she was more than just a campaigner for Aboriginal rights.
'I know that people see me as this radical angry black woman and, yes, I can be that, but I am a nice person too and I'm a mum, I'm a grandma, I'm a sister, auntie,' she said.
Ms Thorpe, who became a mother at age 17 and lived in public housing, will be among five indigenous MPs in Canberra, alongside Labor's Linda Burney, Malarndirri McCarthy and Pat Dodson, and Liberal Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, who in 2010 became the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives.
Neville Bonner made history in 1971 as Australia's first indigenous senator when he filled a casual Liberal Party vacancy in Queensland.
Aden Ridgeway in 1998 became the next indigenous senator with the Australian Democrats in New South Wales.
Olympic hockey gold medallist Nova Peris in 2013 became the first indigenous senator for the Northern Territory after Labor prime minister Julia Gillard insisted she replace Trish Crossin at the top of the party ticket at that year's election.
Ms Thorpe in November 2017 became the first Aboriginal woman elected to the Victorian Parliament by winning the Melbourne inner-north seat of Northcote.
Ms Thorpe lost her seat a year after that by-election victory, sparked by the the death of Labor minister Fiona Richardson.
That led to her in June defeating Queens's Counsel barrister Julian Burnside for Greens preselection to replace Senator Di Natale in Parliament.
SOURCE
Needle-free vaccine system to be made in Brisbane
A WORLD-CLASS medical technology company will manufacture a needle-free vaccine in Brisbane under a partnership with the State Government set to create up to 140 jobs over the next decade.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will today announce her Government’s partnership with Vaxxas to manufacture its High-Density Micro-projection Array Patch (MAP) vaccine delivery system in greater numbers in Queensland.
Construction will take place in a building owned by Economic Development Queensland in the Northshore Hamilton Priority Development Area, with manufacturing to begin in early 2022.
Ms Palaszczuk said Vaxxas expects to deliver 300 million doses each year.
“Over the next 10 years, this rate of production is expected to contribute $497m to the Queensland economy,” she said.
“This partnership will give a great boost to our economic recovery strategy in the weeks and months to come.”
Vaxxas chief executive David Hoey said Vaxxas would be able to ramp up production and put the company and Australia at the forefront of vaccination technology worldwide.
Vaxxas has been backed by the World Health Organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical multinational company, Merck.
It grew out of the Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at The University of Queensland, before relocating to the Translational Research Institute in Woolloongabba. State Development Minister Kate Jones said medical manufacturing was a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
“Through this partnership, we’ll create jobs in Queensland by tapping into this sector,” she said.
“Queensland boasts some of the world’s leading experts in medical technology.”
SOURCE
Australian death rates have fallen despite the coronavirus pandemic
So far, COVID-19 has killed 888 people in Australia - a fatality rate of 3.3 per cent from 27,096 cases since January.
A closer reading of the overall death statistics, however, shows overall fatalities during the first six months of 2020 were lower than average, with fewer people dying of the flu, respiratory illnesses and even cancer.
Between January and June this year, 68,986 deaths were certified by a doctor.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics said deaths since mid May had been 'below historical averages', with more social distancing most likely reducing flu cases.
Fatality levels had also been 'below baseline minimums' since the week to June 9.
Deaths from respiratory diseases and heart diseases were below historical minimum counts throughout June.
During the first six months of this year, 225 people died from a respiratory disease, compared with the average of 293 between 2015 and 2019.
The same time period saw 41 deaths from influenza, a fraction of the 400 people who died in 2019 and the 70 who died in 2017.
Even cancer deaths have fallen, despite fears the lockdowns would discourage the sick from getting a check-up.
Between the New Year and the end of June, 23,571 people died from, a level below the average of 22,954 between 2015 and 2019.
SOURCE
Pauline Hanson calls for a 'Minister for Men' to tackle soaring male suicide rates as she claims blokes are 'overwhelmingly disadvantaged' and targeted by feminists
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson says a new office needs to be established in the government to deal with high rates of suicide and homelessness among men.
The Queensland-based politician called for the appointment of a 'Minister for Men' on Friday.
'Political parties have long called for equality across both genders, but only a Minister for Women exists across all levels of government,' she said.
'But as we focus on strengthening women’s economic security, their involvement in leadership positions, and ensure that women and their children are safe from violence, the plight of Australian boys and men is on the decline.'
Ms Hanson cited a 2019 report that compared the rates of suicide, homelessness and workplace deaths between men and women.
The number of men dying in workplaces outpaced women by more than 1,000 per cent.
For every 100 women who die at work there are 1,294 deaths among men.
There are more than 240 men living rough on the streets for every 100 homeless women.
There are also 1,000 men living in adult correctional facilities for every 100 women.
'On the subject of alcohol, drug addiction, overdoses, suicide, murder, violent crimes, and incarceration, boys and men are again overwhelmingly disadvantaged,' Ms Hanson said.
'As a mother of three boys and one girl, this raises significant concern for my own children, let alone my young grandchildren.'
The study also showed an imbalance between the number of school boys and girls who are expelled and who suffer from emotional trauma.
For every 100 girls who are expelled, 291 boys are turfed out.
Around 355 boys also report an emotional disturbance for every 100 girls.
'If we truly want equality in society, it’s time to drop the hardline feminist attack on men and start treating each other with the same level of support, based on need,' Ms Hanson said.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
5 October, 2020
Qld government and builders to collaborate to create "affordable" accommodation
What a joke! This has played out often elsewhere so we know what will happen. One scenario is that smarter people will quickly grab the cheap apartments with no guarantee that the occupants will be in any sense poor
The other is that some income limits will be imposed -- meaning that there will be great competition for the places, which the savvy will win, probably excluding the real poor. This is the most likely outcome.
The third option is that standard welfare housing limits will be imposed, which will tend to create the near slum condions that arise in high rises that accommodate welfare tenants -- a quite miserable result. Welfare accomodation needs to be created in small blocks
More than 400 jobs will be created in two build-to-rent apartment projects in popular inner Brisbane locations that the State Government says will deliver affordable housing to hundreds of people who miss out on social housing.
It comes almost two years after the Government announced the scheme, which Treasurer Cameron Dick claimed was slowed down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And it follows a question on notice released in June, which revealed the Government was yet to spend any of the $70 million allocated to the project and had not delivered any rental properties.
But Mr Dick, with local member MP Grace Grace, today announced that Frasers Property Australia and Mirvac would construct the projects in Fortitude Valley and Newstead.
The build-to-rent program aims to deliver affordable housing for tenants who don’t necessarily qualify for access to social housing.
Mr Dick said the pilot program would support 440 full-time jobs over two years.
“The build-to-rent properties in Fortitude Valley and Newstead will offer around 750 apartments in total, with up to 240 of the dwellings to be provided at a discounted rent,” he said.
Asked why it had taken so long, Mr Dick referred to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I became the Treasurer in the second week of May and in the first week of October, about five months later, I’ve now delivered this project,” he said.
Under the agreement, Frasers Property will develop 354 apartments in a 25-storey tower at 210 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley, near the train station.
Upon practical completion, Frasers Property will own and operate the development with the State Government subsidising the rental of 144, or 40 per cent, of the apartments by 25 per cent. The remaining 210 apartments in the building will be offered at market rental.
Frasers Property Australia’s chief executive Anthony Boyd said the build-to-rent project will encourage further partnerships between government and the private sector and stimulate institutional investment in the new asset class,
“The outcome will be a greater diversity and supply of affordable rental housing and that’s a positive thing for the community and the economy,” he said.
Construction will commence in mid-2021 and is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024.
There will be 99 apartments in the proposed scheme, which will be offered to eligible tenants also at a 25 per cent discount to market rent.
Mirvac’s managing director Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz said the company had a deep commitment to establishing the build-to-rent sector in Australia.
“Our (build-to-rent) platform and operating model, LIV, has been designed to elevate the customer experience and offer our residents greater security, flexibility and housing choice,” she said.
SOURCE
University of Queensland barred from holding hearing over medical student rape allegations
A small blow against a university kangaroo court -- but via some very complex and questionable jurisdictional reasoning -- with the costs award not reflecting the verdict
University of Queensland cannot hold a disciplinary hearing into allegations that a medical student sexually assaulted a fellow student two years ago, after losing an appeal.
The university disciplinary board’s appeal against a judge’s decision barring the hearing was dismissed, because the accused male medical student graduated at the end of last year.
The Court of Appeal found the former student, only identified as Y, who has never been charged with a criminal offence, is no longer subject to the university’s disciplinary process.
However, it found the male student’s Supreme Court bid to block the disciplinary hearing should have been dismissed last year, under the facts and circumstances that then existed.
It was alleged the female student was digitally raped by the male student while both were staying in student accommodation, while doing a clinical placement in a regional town in 2018.
After being told the allegations involved a number of acts of “unsolicited physical intimacy’’, the male student applied to the Supreme Court for an order to prevent the disciplinary hearing.
The student’s lawyers claimed the proposed inquiry was unlawful, because it was into an allegation of a criminal offence of rape and the board did not have jurisdiction.
The university disagreed, claiming it was a hearing to determine whether student integrity and sexual misconduct policies had been contravened.
Last year, Supreme Court Justice Ann Lyons said the particulars of the alleged sexual assault could be categorised as including at least three counts of rape and a number of counts of sexual assault.
Justice Lyons said the university only had jurisdiction in relation to criminal acts of a sexual nature where the alleged offence was proved.
However, in the Court of Appeal, Justice Philip McMurdo disagreed with that interpretation of the university’s sexual misconduct policy.
The policy said the university did not have jurisdiction over criminal acts, but could take action in respect of breaches of its rules, policies and procedures.
Justice Lyons said the policy removed the university’s jurisdiction to determine whether acts occurred, if commission of those acts constituted a criminal sexual offence.
But Justice McMurdo said the policy did not remove the university’s jurisdiction to decide whether there had been any breaches.
Justice McMurdo said Justice Lyons should not have concluded that the disciplinary proceeding was beyond the university’s power.
As a result of that finding, the Court of Appeal unanimously set aside a previous costs order against the university.
SOURCE
'No evidence' Melbourne's draconian curfew keeps coronavirus cases down - admits the senior bureaucrat who extended the policy
Melbourne's night-time curfew was extended despite there being no evidence the measure would slow the rate of COVID-19 infection on its own, according to the senior health official who renewed the draconian rule.
The city's five million residents were on August 2 banned from leaving their homes between the hours of 8pm to 5am except for work, medical or care-giving reasons.
Health officials extended the curfew on September 14 but with shortened hours from 9pm to 5am.
The curfew - which was only removed on Monday evening amid a rapid decline in daily case totals - was one of a range of sweeping coronavirus restrictions brought in as part of Victoria's state of emergency powers.
Department of Health and Human Services senior medical adviser Michelle Giles admitted at a Supreme Court hearing on Thursday there was no physical evidence the policy alone reduced transmission.
Bourke Street is pictured deserted after a citywide curfew was introduced in Melbourne on August 2. The bureaucrat who signed off on the measure has admitted there was no evidence it would slow the rate of COVID-19 infection on its own +4
Bourke Street is pictured deserted after a citywide curfew was introduced in Melbourne on August 2. The bureaucrat who signed off on the measure has admitted there was no evidence it would slow the rate of COVID-19 infection on its own
'What I say is the curfew is part of a package of directions that aim at reducing movement and interactions between people and there is evidence that reduces transmissions,' she said.
But Associate Professor Giles - who had final say on the extension while standing in as Victoria's Deputy Public Health Commander - told the court there was no proof the policy by itself would be effective.
Professor Giles also said she disagreed with the premier's assertion when the curfew was announced it would help Victoria Police enforce the lockdown.
'I actually considered the curfew in relation to public health,' she said, according to The Australian.
'I don't agree with those comments, particularly the law enforcement one.'
The Supreme Court case has been brought by Mornington Peninsula cafe owner Michelle Loielo - who is suing the government claiming COVID-19 restrictions have caused a 99 per cent drop in her revenue.
'Every time I see the premier, Daniel Andrews, on the television and every time I hear the premier speak, I feel a sense of dread and anxiety,' she said.
Last month, Mr Andrews said he decided to bring in the unprecedented 8pm curfew even though it was not recommended by scientists.
'That's a decision that I've made,' he said on 10 September, adding governments are 'free to go beyond' advice given to them by doctors.
The previous day Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton said he did not recommend the curfew.
Ms Loielo, a Liberal Party supporter, claims the curfew violates her rights to freedom.
She says her business in Capel Sound used to bring in up to $20,000 a week in earnings.
SOURCE
Trump is fighting the culture wars
The US president has exposed the racket of racism
By James Allan, a Canadian who has made aliyah to Australia
Earlier this month the president of Princeton one Christopher Eisgruber, a former constitutional law professor of exquisite progressive lefty sensibilities, published a declaration saying that racism was embedded in the structures of the university he led – Princeton being perhaps, student-for-student, the greatest of the Ivy League American universities and one-time home of Albert Einstein.
Eisgruber’s declaration included the claim that ‘anti-black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus make-up’. This is just the sort of thing you expect from the virtue-signalling ‘wokerati’ who infest the upper echelons of virtually all Anglosphere universities (most definitely including here in Australia too). And in Britain, Canada and here that sort of bumper sticker moralising declaration would be allowed to pass uncontested. Certainly no Coalition government would do anything about it. Nor would Boris in Britain.
Not so in the US where President Trump seems to understand that ultimately everything is downstream of the culture and that fighting the culture wars is by far the biggest battle that matters. So in response to the president of Princeton the federal Department of Education said, in effect, ‘if that’s true, then Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funding in violation of the Race Discrimination Act.’ The department also announced it is opening an investigation of Eisgruber and of Princeton. It has sent a formal records request, which means the president and all his top people will have to produce every single email and communication they’ve sent. Ouch! The Princeton president and other head honchos will likewise have to give evidence under oath. And what the Department of Education will be looking for is what, if any, evidence there was that Princeton relied on to claim the university is racist.
It has also demanded a spreadsheet identifying each person who has, on the ground of race, colour or national origin, been excluded or discriminated against as regards any program or activity at Princeton. Oh, and Princeton must also respond to all written questions regarding the basis for claiming that racism is embedded in the university.
To quote the Bard in Hamlet, Eisgruber has been hoist with his own petard. All sentient beings know that there is no racism on any university campus, at least none against the usual minority groups portrayed as victims. (There may well be some against Asian Americans who require much higher marks to get into top US universities than blacks, but that is patently not what Eisgruber meant as these are university-imposed roadblocks.) But there is no way Eisgruber can now come out and say ‘Nothing to see here folks. Just kidding. A little bit of harmless virtue-signalling on my part.’ Nor can he admit there is real, actual racism. This is just wonderful. And from what I’m hearing behind the scenes some of the (extremely) large Princeton donors are fuming mad at Eisgruber and threatening to withhold the big bucks. The only palatable play Eisgruber has is to try to run out the clock in the hope of a Biden win when he, and everyone else, knows that this will be quickly dropped.
But notice what happened here. Trump adopted the street fighting tactics of the Left and fought back. This is basically unheard of amongst right-of-centre politicians around the rest of the Anglosphere.
Seven years of Coalition governments have not fought back on a single front of the culture wars – not on free speech, not on the universities, not on the ABC, not on appointing a few real conservatives to important posts. Nada, nothing, zippo, zero. Sure, with Trump you’re buying a brawler who’s a vulgarian. But you know what? For a long time now I’ve been ready for anyone who’ll fight back. Give me a brawler any day! Lord knows there is not a scintilla of evidence of any fight in the dog in any Coalition party (federal or state) in this country.
Or take appointments to the top court in the US. No other right-of-centre anglosphere leader would have stood by Brett Kavanaugh, the man Trump nominated for the Supreme Court and who the Left then attempted to destroy based on, well, zero evidence. Or take the Supreme Court vacancy that has just come up with the death of Ruth Ginsburg. All the Vichy Never-Trumpers urged the president to wait to make a nomination. Nope, Trump said he’ll make a nomination and he expects the Senate, controlled by the Republicans, to confirm the nominee before the election. This puts incredible pressure on these Republican senators, most of whom need the Republican base much more than they need a few inner- city Christopher Pyne type voters.
It gets better. Trump opted to nominate Amy Coney Barrett, the person most hated by the left wing of the Democrats because she is solidly interpretively conservative, a practising, devout Catholic (with seven kids, five her own and two adopted from Haiti). There were others on the shortlist less inflammatory to the Left. Trump went for the most inflammatory pick. He did this in direct response to what the Democrats shamelessly did to Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Now we have two High Court of Australia openings coming up here. In the aftermath of the woeful Love judgment, where Coalition Brandis appointees were way to the left of Labor appointees, who is confident that A-G Porter and Mr Morrison will make two solid, not-inner-Melbourne-progressive type picks? Not me, I can tell you.
Last point worth making. You won’t hear this on the ABC or any mainstream US media. Ginsburg, darling of the Left who insulted candidate Trump before the 2016 election, spent 27 years on the Supreme Court. Each US top justice hires about five top law student law clerks each year. So that’s about 150 clerks hired by Ginsburg over the years. How many blacks did this darling of the Left hire during all that time? If you guessed ‘one’ (and zero in her 13 years as a federal appeals court judge before that), you’re a winner.
Now don’t get me wrong. If Ginsburg hired based solely on what she saw as merit I applaud that. I am stridently opposed to affirmative action. The trouble is that in her judicial decision-making Ginsburg consistently voted to uphold affirmative action type requirements that stopped all sorts of others from doing what she did. One out of 150 would be deemed, by her (not me), to constitute solid evidence of systemic racism.
What’s the word I’m searching for in describing that sort of behaviour? Ah yes, ‘hypocrisy’.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
4 October, 2020
How coronavirus is linked to an increase in complex mental illness, including psychosis, in young adults and older people
I can relate to that. Around February, I was hit with a triple whammy. The lockdowns were beginning, I lost my relationship of 14 years and my son moved out of my place into a place of his own. And at 77 my physical resources were much depleted.
So I did fall into a depression, which is always dangerous. But with the help of friends and family I survived. And amid all the restrictions I have actually found a new lover. So my depression has vanished. Amazing what can happen in your 70s.
A counselling psychologist I know has also sent me some remarks on the matter. See following:
<blockquote> "Social isolation might be increasing psychosis more than covid is. For most elderly ladies, old age is one big social event. Their social routines mark the hours and days of the week....
Church on Sunday, followed by lunch with the church ladies, then Monday lunch with the Monday lunch ladies, water aerobics Tuesday morning followed by bingo at the RSL in the afternoon, Wednesday morning is the appointment with the handsome physiotherapist, the afternoon is the card playing group, Thursday is lunch with the Thursday lunch ladies, Fridays is shopping and cuppa with Myrtle, Agnus and Ethel at the cafe, and Saturday is RSL lunch.
During the covid lockdown many elderly ladies have been getting disoriented, losing their sense of what day of the week it is.
Men and younger people too, benefit mentally from socialising and getting out doors. Just walking and getting out of the house can be greatly therapeutic. Outdoor scenery and distractions break the in-home thinking patterns and ruminations. And walking activates the brain both sides and overall, and so emotion can be more easily subject to reason when walking and thinking, and when walking and talking." </blockquote>
However you look at it, the lockdowns have been a foolish and evil thing. The jurisdictions where there have been no lockdowns show a death rate that is in the middle of places that did have lockdowns. Lockdowns were originally a Chinese idea, well suited to a Communist country but inappropriate in a democracy
Back in March, that question was playing on the minds of mental health researchers such as counselling psychologist Ellie Brown.
Dr Brown and colleagues at Orygen Youth Health and the University of Melbourne wanted to know whether the numbers of people presenting with psychosis would increase either from coronavirus itself or from social isolation, and how people with complex mental health issues would cope.
"We wondered what was out there in the evidence, and what could we pick out that might help us understand what was coming down the track," Dr Brown says.
Early studies warn COVID could increase psychosis
While it was still very early days in the pandemic, evidence from a handful of papers from other viral diseases, including SARS and MERS, and studies from the unfolding situation in Asia suggested coronavirus might actually lead to an increase in people experiencing psychosis.
What is psychosis?
Psychosis describes a group of experiences that relate to the loss of contact with reality.
This can include one or more of the following:
Feeling confused about what is real and what is not real (psychosis)
Hearing voices when no one is there (hallucinations)
Seeing, tasting or smelling things that other people do not (hallucinations)
Believing things that others find strange (delusions)
Feeling that people are going to hurt you when this is not the case (paranoia)
Speaking in a way that others find hard to follow (thought disorder)
An episode of psychosis describes a time when someone has these symptoms lasting for more than a week, which negatively affects their day-to-day life.
The onset of psychosis is usually seen in people in their late teens to early 20s.
But the data coming out of China suggested there was also a significant increase in people in their 50s and 60s experiencing psychosis for the first time.
"It's really the older people who were more isolated who were presenting with a first episode, which was very unusual," Dr Brown says.
But it's not just the pandemic's potential to trigger a first-time episode that health professionals are worried about.
Isolation, the mass psychology of fear, and other stressors can exacerbate symptoms or cause relapses for vulnerable people already living with chronic illness.
While the numbers are hard to pin down, months down the track there is a sense that there has been a rise in the number of people accessing mental health services.
According to Orygen there has been a 17 per cent increase in referrals to youth mental health services in north-west Melbourne over the past four months, up 8 per cent from the same time last year. There has also been a 14 per cent increase in contacts with clinicians compared to the months before the first lockdown began.
"We're just getting the data in the increase in the number of people presenting with psychosis. And that's just going to be the young people," Dr Brown says.
Carmel Pardy, who oversees the telephone and online support centre for mental health charity SANE Australia, which supports people 18 and upwards, has also noticed an increase in people accessing the service since the pandemic began.
"We have had an interesting cohort of people who've come to us for the first time during COVID," Ms Pardy says.
The charity is also seeing an increase in the number of carers calling.
But, she says, we won't truly see the fallout of COVID on mental illness until next year.
The impact of isolation and anxiety
Isolation, disrupted routines, and lack of access to care are some of the themes emerging.
"A lot of people we work with struggle with relationships, so a relationship with a therapist might be the one constant and safe relationship in their life and if they can't do that it's been really, really problematic," Ms Pardy says.
When SANE set up new services for COVID-19, they found many people needed a daily chat.
"You have to remember some of the people we work with may not get incoming calls, so this is an opportunity for someone to call and just check in on them."
Increasing anxiety is a common report.
SOURCE
Women know all about pushing men's buttons
Bettina Arndt writes
It is good to see that the Federal Government now seems likely to force the universities to address academic freedom issues raised following the violent protests against me at Sydney University. Many of you will remember that the riot squad was needed to remove protesters blocking the entrance to the venue where I was speaking out about the campus kangaroo courts.
That led to Education Minister Dan Tehan appointing former Chief Justice Robert French to enquire into free speech on campus. French originally suggested legislation guaranteeing the rights of staff and students to engage in free-flowing commentary and discussion and enjoy freedom of association. But he backed down after pressure from the sector and ultimately promoted a voluntary code which has led to little discernible change in the culture of our universities– as the Drew Pavlou fracas clearly demonstrates.
Now the courageous Pauline Hanson is horse-trading for her One Nation votes that the government needs to pass its new tertiary education bill by demanding the government include legislation on the free speech issue – as explained in the SMH today, which reports the predictable whining from the universities.
Although Hanson’s controversial views attract a barrage of criticism from our captured media, she is a rare politician in speaking out about important issues like this and also the impact of false violence accusations in family law matters. She was the one who pushed for the current Family Law Inquiry and is prepared to use her political muscle to ensure real change on key issues – so don’t write off this inquiry yet.
Mark Latham and the looming coercive control battle.
Her equally brave One Nation colleague Mark Latham is heralding that he proposes a fight-back against efforts to introduce coercive control laws into law in NSW.
See how Mark Speakman is playing lackey to the feminist groups demanding this change. Speakman is the NSW Attorney General who earlier this year regurgitated all the manufactured feminist bile against me, whilst demanding my award be rescinded.
Coercive control is all about psychological abuse – manipulation, surveillance, degrading putdowns, humiliation, threats – that perpetrators use to dominate their partners. Over the last few years coercive control laws were introduced into England and Wales and more recently Scotland, with predictable results.
The laws are supposed to be gender neutral which made the feminists rather nervous. This ABC article spells out there were initial concerns that “women might be misidentified as the perpetrator of abuse” but quotes reassuring research from Deakin University reporting that in England and Wales males comprised 106 out of the 107 offenders convicted of this new crime.
Now if I was to interview ordinary folk about which gender is more skilled at psychological manipulation, what’s the bet most people would say the fair sex are past masters at this tactic? Women are the ones who tend to show up in psychology research as more tuned into their partner’s vulnerabilities. We know exactly which buttons to push to drive our partners crazy.
There’s no question that any objective study of this issue would conclude that women are more likely than men to exert this type of control in destructive relationships. But laws like this will never result in large numbers of convicted female offenders because men are reluctant to put themselves forward as victims and they know they won’t be taken seriously if they report a coercive partner to the police. The feminists have the justice system sewn up and everyone knows it.
That’s all the more reason to do our bit to help Mark Latham stop this pernicious legislation from being introduced in NSW next year. Last week Latham was busy on social media spreading the word about what is happening. "The NSW Orwellian Liberals are now aiming to put marriages and families on trial for the newly invented DV offence, coercive control," he tweeted. "A shocking, misleading grab for power." Latham pointed out that under the proposed legislation husbands could be jailed for 14 years for withdrawing money from a joint bank account and driving the family car without permission.
As a starting point we are gathering a group of clinical psychologists and other experts to conduct a literature review, gathering evidence that women are just as likely as men to exhibit behaviours characterizing perpetrators of “coercive control”. We’re looking to launch a campaign, hopefully recruiting eminent social science experts and academics as well as practitioners – psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors – who will speak out about this effort to further tilt laws to demonise men, denying the reality of couple relationships. Please contact me if you’d like to come on board.
Violence orders dominate small-town justice systems
Recently I was contacted by a lawyer who works in small town on the South Coast of NSW. Neill McCarthy was briefly a public prosecutor but then went into private practice working mainly in criminal law. He wrote telling me that the working life of a small-town lawyer is now consumed by protecting men from false accusations of violence, which are generally being used to gain advantage in family law battles.
I’m doing a live chat on thinkspot with Neill on Wednesday Oct 7 morning, at 11 am AEST. Here’s the link to book in – https://www.thinkspot.com/products/GyuK9a?category=Event (Don’t worry if you can’t make it at that time. You can watch a recorded version on thinkspot, probably later that day, and eventually I’ll have it on YouTube)
Neil will talk about some of his recent cases. He has fascinating tales to tell of a broken justice system where police are given no option but to take action against accused men, even when there is no evidence and they suspect the woman is lying. Magistrates and prosecutors don’t dare speak out about the miscarriage of justice occurring every day in their courts. And women bear no consequences from perjuring themselves in court.
Amy Coney Barrett on campus due process rights.
Now for some fascinating news about Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee. I was delighted to discover that Judge Barrett has spoken out about lack of due process for college students accused of sexual assault.
Ruling in a lawsuit against Purdue University, which has been accused of discriminating against a student suspended from the college after sexual assault allegations, Barrett condemned Purdue’s 'fundamentally unfair' adjudication of sexual assault claims. Barratt said that it was plausible Purdue officials chose to believe the female accuser "because she is a woman" and to disbelieve the male student accused "because he is a man".Barratt’s truth-telling on this issue is one more reason for the Democrats to oppose the nomination of this conservative judge, particularly as Joe Biden is the major architect of the campus kangaroo court system.
Bettina Arndt newsletter: newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au
Reports of Reef’s demise greatly exaggerated
If we are to believe the Queensland Labor Government, sugarcane farmers are evil and are destroying the Reef in their pursuit of greater profits with their use of fertilisers.
To counter this, new regulations are going to be introduced.
These will have the handy effect of allowing the Government to trumpet its environmental credentials while at the same time pandering to the Greens, the latter being an article of faith held dear by Labor governments.
Given this, it was intriguing to hear the head of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Paul Hardisty, concede under questioning before an ongoing Senate inquiry that only 3 per cent of the Reef, the inshore reef, was affected by farm pesticides and that even that 3 per cent was at “low to negligible risk”.
This in effect means that 97 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef, which lies 50km to 100km off the coast, is completely unaffected.
It is also worth noting that while scientists regularly shriek warnings that the Reef is dying and in so doing damage the tourism industry, no one has bothered to measure coral growth or the lack of it for the past 15 years.
Marine scientist Peter Ridd, who questioned the validity of claims made regarding the imminent death of the Reef by his peers, was sacked by James Cook University for his impertinence.
James Cook has since spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of university funds pursuing him through the courts.
AgForce reef taskforce chairman Alex Stubbs says cane farmers have been persecuted by the Queensland Department of Environment and Science over the issue of water quality and the health of the Reef.
The proposed legislation, he said, had been cooked up by bureaucrats, was fundamentally flawed and would do untold damage to the sugar cane industry. Guess which political party cane farmers will be putting at the bottom of their ballot papers at the October 31 state election.
If sugarcane farmers are the bad guys, then coal miners are the devil incarnate which is why the State Government keeps stalling approval of a planned expansion of the New Acland mine near Oakey.
There is also the small matter of pandering to – you guessed it – the Greens.
Coal is bad, we are told. Coal kills. It causes climate change, bushfires and if it continues to be mined, will lead to the extinction of civilisation.
The world, we are lectured, is abandoning coal and it’s pointless for Australia to keep mining it because nobody wants the stuff.
Companies that do business with coalminers are threatened with consumer boycotts, and cowardly executives acquiesce in the face of the baying of the mob and divorce themselves from coal.
Driven by fear, not reason, they abandon their responsibilities to their shareholders in their desperate efforts to appear to be ”woke.”
The Chinese, who don’t care in the least about being woke, must be more than a little bemused by all this as they continue to build and approve coal-fired power stations at a record rate.
Germany recently commissioned a new coal-fired power plant, Japan has plans to build more than 20, India is increasing its coal-fired electricity generation by more than 20 per cent, while Indonesia, Mozambique, Malawi, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Philippines, Vietnam and Serbia are all building coal-fired power plants.
The Age of Reason may be dead, but on the evidence it appears that coal is not.
The Reef also stubbornly refuses to fulfil the prophesies of its imminent demise, even when it is forecast by such towering intellectuals as Leonardo Di Caprio, who has never seen the Reef but pronounced it to be near death in 2016, as did then US president Barack Obama when he treated Australians to his ignorance in 2014.
This brings us to politicians. Is it true or false that a person like, let’s say Victorian Premier Andrews, would lie after swearing on the Bible to tell nothing but the truth?
Have a guess.
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Anti-discrimination commissions have tyranny built into their design
God deliver us from the hands of zealots.
They exist in different guises in every age, lay claim to being the era’s moral guardians and demand no more than complete obedience to their ordained order. They only burn heretics in sorrow, for their own good and that of society.
Zealots know those who defy them are sinners. So, any means is justified in the restless hunt for evil.
Arthur Miller explained it in The Crucible: “… the necessity of the Devil may become evident as a weapon, a weapon designed and used time and time again in every age to whip men into a surrender to a particular church or church state.”
Now the bureaucratic state dictates morality and the devil is discrimination, in all his endlessly evolving forms. The crime is giving any perceived offence. The weapon is the law.
There is now a witch hunt afoot in Tasmania.
The witch is Liberal Senator Claire Chandler. On July 17 she wrongspoke in the pages of The Mercury: “You don’t have to be a bigot to recognise the differences between the male and female sexes and understand why women’s sports, single-sex change rooms and toilets are important.”
This elicited a response from an unnamed Hobart man who emailed the senator confronting her crimethink. The senator doubled down: “I do understand the difference between sex and gender. That’s why I’ve made the point in my article that women’s toilets and women’s change rooms are designed for people of the female sex (women) and should remain that way.”
The article and email were referred by the constituent as a complaint to Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Sarah Bolt. Ms Bolt then wrote to Senator Chandler, noting that the complainant was not a member of the trans-community and dismissing the argument that the article had offended the law.
But Ms Bolt determined the complaint about the email had merit. She found, “a reasonable person is likely to anticipate that a person who is a member of the LGBTIQ+ and gender diverse community would be humiliated, intimidated, offended and insulted”.
Having identified the possibility of an anticipated offence Senator Chandler has been called to a hearing before the commission on October 1.
The senator made a fuss in the media. This drew a second missive from the commission. It noted that it was also an offence to “hinder” or “use insulting language” against the commissioner.
A few issues arise.
First, Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commission, and all such commissions, have tyranny built into their design. It is meant to be a mediation service – and often is – but can also be advocate, prosecutor, judge and jury in one. This invites quasi-judicial bodies to become star chambers. They now deny a keystone democratic right of a fair hearing before an impartial tribunal. The right to freely complain about this injustice has also been removed by law.
Second, the senator is expressing what was, until recently, a pretty conventional worldview. What has changed is a new protected group has evolved, the trans community, whose advocates demand that those who self-nominate a gender must be accepted as male or female.
Laws are being made about this so debate is demanded, starting with when should someone be considered to have transitioned? Is it after reassignment surgery or just on the strength of nominating the change? This is no small difference and both are claimed.
In a free society, an individual’s right to make personal choices about the course of their lives should be respected and defended. But why should someone else’s subjective truth become an objective reality for the whole of society and the law used to enforce it?
This highly contestable, and evolving, space runs far deeper than a fight over public toilets. It involves questions of truth and identity, which concern us all. There has been little community debate, yet bureaucracies everywhere are conforming with demands in fear of being branded transphobic, the latest in a long list of identity crimes.
But here there is also a clash of ideologies, on what it means to be a woman. Some old-school feminists fear their homeland is being colonised by strident activists. The author J.K. Rowling is one. For defending her truth she has been vilified and “progressive” bookshops have banned Harry Potter from their shelves. And how are these book burners morally superior to the many who marched before them through history?
There is much to debate but that is being silenced in the name of defending human rights, and who dares mount an argument against such a righteous cause?
Because, above all, it is forbidden to question a victim, as Miller wrote, “Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem – vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
2 October, 2020
A solution to Australia's toad problem?
Cane toads, bufo marinus, come originally from Brazil. They were imported into Australia in the hope that they would eat cane beetles, which attack Australia's sugar cane crop. They did eat some cane beetles but they ate lots else besides -- including small rodents, reptiles, other amphibians, birds, and even bats.
So they have now proliferated mightily. They threaten the survival of many native species and are poisonous -- so they kill birds and dogs which are unwary enough to eat them.
Much has been tried to reduce their numbers but nothing works well. Though some predators have emerged. The snake described below might be just what we need.
Pity the toads that encounter Asian kukri snakes in Thailand. These snakes use enlarged, knifelike teeth in their upper jaws to slash and disembowel toad prey, plunging their heads into the abdominal cavities and feasting on the organs one at a time while the toads are still alive, leaving the rest of the corpse untouched.
While you're recovering from the horror of that sentence, "perhaps you'd be pleased to know that kukri snakes are, thankfully, harmless to humans," amateur herpetologist and naturalist Henrik Bringsøe, lead author in a new study describing the gruesome technique, said in a statement.
This grisly dining habit was previously unknown in snakes; while some rip chunks from their prey, most snakes gulp down their meals whole. Scientists had never before seen a snake Bury its head inside an animal's body to slurp up organs — sometimes taking hours to do so, Bringsøe and his colleagues reported.
The victims of this horrific organ-slurping were poisonous toads called Duttaphrynus melanostictus, also known as Asian common toads or Asian black-spotted toads; they are stout and thick-skinned, measuring about 2 to 3 inches (57 to 85 millimeters) in length, according to Animal Diversity Web (ADW), a wildlife database maintained by the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology. During the deadly battle, the toads fought "vigorously" for their lives, with some defensively secreting a toxic white substance, according to the study. The snakes' grisly evisceration strategy could be a way to avoid the toad's poisonous secretions while still enjoying a tasty meal, the researchers wrote.
Kukri snakes in the Oligodon genus are so named because their slashing teeth resemble the kukri, a forward-curving machete from Nepal. While kukri snakes aren't a threat to people, their teeth can cause painful lacerations that bleed heavily, because the snakes secrete an anticoagulant from specialized oral glands, according to the study.
"This secretion, produced by two glands, called Duvernoy's glands and located behind the eyes of the snakes, are likely beneficial while the snakes spend hours extracting toad organs," Bringsøe explained.
Macabre mealtime
The researchers described three observations in Thailand of kukri snakes (Oligodon fasciolatus), which can measure up to 45 inches (115 centimeters) long, consuming Asian common toads. In the first incident, which took place in 2016, the toad was already dead when the witnesses discovered the scene, "but the soil around the two animals was bloody, indicating there had been a fight which eventually killed the toad," the scientists wrote. The snake sawed through the toad's body by swinging its head from side to side; it then slowly inserted its head into the wound "and subsequently it pulled out organs like liver, heart, lung and part of the gastrointestinal tract."
In a second event, an epic battle between a kukri snake and a toad on April 22, 2020 lasted nearly three hours; the snake attacked, withdrew, and attacked again, deterred only temporarily by the toad's poison defense. After finally subduing the toad, the snake extracted and swallowed organs while the toad was still breathing, according to the study.
On June 5, 2020, a kukri snake took a different approach and didn't disembowel the toad at all, instead devouring it whole. But in a fourth observation this year on June 19, the snake eviscerated its toad prey, slicing into the abdomen to reach its organ meal.
Young toads potentially produce less poison than adults do, which may have enabled the snake in the June 5 observation to safely gulp it down in one piece; another possibility is that kukri snakes are immune to the toad species' toxins, but they disembowel adults anyway because the toads are simply too big for them to swallow, the researchers reported.
However, there's not yet enough data to answer these questions, Bringsøe said in the statement.
"We will continue to observe and report on these fascinating snakes in the hope that we will uncover further interesting aspects of their biology," he said.
The findings were published online Sept. 11 in the journal Herpetozoa.
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African child snatcher
A young mother has spoken of the terrifying moment a stranger snatched her two-year-old daughter and tried to pull her away while she was riding her tricycle to childcare.
Rebekah, 32, was cycling with her daughter Keirah, 2, and Brodie, 5, in Harkness in Melbourne's far-west at 9.20am on Tuesday when she saw a man grab her youngest child - who had been riding behind her family.
The would-be abductor only let go of Keirah and ran off towards a nearby primary school when Rebekah chased him down suburban Weeks Avenue on her bicycle.
'My son wanted to race me so I sped off with him. Keirah wasn't far behind me - but when I stopped and turned around I saw there was this man grabbing my daughter and spinning her around,' she told Daily Mail Australia.
The mother said she and her children had never felt like they were in danger in their neighbourhood until Tuesday.
CCTV footage showed the man - who is described as being of African appearance, in his early 20s, wearing dark clothes and a white baseball cap but no mask - stood beside the child before bending down to her height.
Seconds before the offender grabbed the young girl, he had calmly walked past her mother and her brother - raising no alarm bells for Rebekah who thought he was just a normal pedestrian.
Rebekah said the youngster bravely went to childcare despite what happened, but struggled to sleep on Tuesday night.
'She was scared the man was going to come and get her again so her dad had to lie with her to get her to go to sleep,' Rebekah said.
Victoria Police said on Wednesday they were increasing patrols in the Harkness area and are treating the incident as 'extremely serious'.
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Australian scientists insist hydroxychloroquine COULD prevent people catching COVID-19 after giving the controversial drug to hundreds of health care workers
Australian scientists have vowed to continue investigating whether taking hydroxychloroquine can stop people becoming infected with coronavirus.
Researchers from the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne believe the drug could prevent people catching SARS-CoV-2 - the virus that causes COVID-19.
Hundreds of health workers in NSW and Victoria have been given the drug in the Institute's COVID SHIELD trial in an effort to try and determine its effectiveness as a prophylactic.
Hydroxychloroquine was brought to public attention when US President Donald Trump said he was using the malaria drug to 'protect' himself from coronavirus.
Prescriptions for the drug subsequently skyrocketed, before it was removed from major testing trials as it proved to be ineffective in reducing the impact of COVID-19.
Scientific journal The Lancet published and later retracted a study based on false data that claimed coronavirus cases taking hydroxychloroquine had an increased death rate.
COVID SHIELD co-lead investigator Marc Pelligrini said researchers were not considering the drug as a treatment, but as a preventative.
'The evidence that shows that the drug doesn’t particularly help with treatment really never deterred us because we always thought that ... if the drug did have a role in preventing people from getting COVID-19, it has to be even before they were exposed to SARS-CoV-2,' he told The Australian.
Test tube studies have found hydroxychloroquine can work to impede the replication of COVID-19 and discourage proliferation.
Claire Lobb is an emergency care nurse at The Alfred Hospital and among about 230 frontline healthcare workers signed up for the four-month trial.
'Hydroxychloroquine is a drug that is cheap and readily available, with very few side effects. If there is a chance this drug could help prevent frontline healthcare workers from getting COVID-19, I think it is important that we do a proper clinical trial to test it,' she said.
Ms Lobb said she was keen to be involved and excited at the prospect of finding out whether the drug was useful as a prophylactic.
'To have a drug that is cheap and widely available to reduce transmission of the virus to frontline healthcare workers would be really helpful, especially while we are waiting for a vaccine,' she said.
While the Australian researchers remain hopeful hydroxychloroquine could prevent COVID-19, a U.S. study found on Thursday the drug offers no protection.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found about 6.3 per cent of hospital workers who took the drug regularly caught the virus, compared to 6.6 per cent of people who didn't.
The effect, they said, was 'negligible' and although a slightly higher proportion of people without the drug became sick, it was not a big enough difference to suggest hydroxychloroquine worked.
Whether or not the medicine could help treat people who already had Covid-19 was not studied.
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Leftist Qld. government inks deal with coal miner, days out from election campaign
The Palaszczuk government has finally struck a deal with Adani for royalties from its controversial $2 billion Carmichael mine, days before the government goes into caretaker mode before the October election.
Treasurer Cameron Dick confirmed the government "settled terms for a royalty agreement" this week, more than one year after it was originally intended to be finalised.
"I can assure you that Adani will pay every dollar in royalties that they have to pay to the people of Queensland and the taxpayers of Queensland, with interest," he said.
"That is absolutely locked in now and that is something we have now concluded as a government."
"Obviously you spend a lot of time negotiating royalty agreements, not just in relation to this mine but to many mining projects across Queensland, because we want to work through the details."
A deadline for the deal, which Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk pledged to have finalised a year ago, was extended to November last year. That date also passed without any confirmation.
The project has led to divisions in the Labor Party at state and federal levels for years, after Ms Palaszczuk and then-Queensland treasurer Curtis Pitt agreed to a royalty holiday for the company without cabinet approval in 2017.
Former treasurer Jackie Trad later blocked the deal with the backing of the party's Left and Centre factions. Labor's deputy federal leader, Richard Marles, conceded the party's "clumsy" attempts to "walk the tightrope" on Adani during the federal election campaign had left its traditional voter base feeling abandoned.
The exact details of the deal will remain confidential, but it was reached under the government's Resources Regional Development Framework (RRDF).
The framework, drawn up after months of tense negotiation with the Labor caucus in 2017, allows mining companies to defer payments to the state government and then repay their debt in full, including interest.
A company may be eligible to defer royalties if it shared infrastructure and if it "assisted in opening up undeveloped resource basins".
A 388-kilometre track linking the project to Adani's Abbot Point coal terminal was originally slated, but later swapped out for a cheaper option.
Adani now plans to build a 200-kilometre rail line, valued at about $1.5 billion, to link its mine to Aurizon's Central Queensland Coal Network, near Moranbah, in central Queensland. The company will be required to share the rail line with other proposed mines in the Galilee Basin.
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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
1 October, 2020
A controversial gas project in northern NSW has been given the green light to go ahead
A controversial gas project in northern NSW has been given the green light by the state’s independent planning authority.
The NSW Independent Planning Commission has given “phased approval” for Santos’ $3.6 billion Narrabri gas project in the north east of the state.
The decision allowing the coal seam gas project comes more than six months after the state’s planning minister referred it to the regulatory body.
Phased approval has been granted for the project with 134 attached conditions.
Santos has said the project will create up to 1300 construction and 200 operational jobs.
“Following its detailed deliberations, the commission concludes the project is in the public interest and that any negative impacts can be effectively mitigated with strict conditions,” the commission’s statement said.
“The commission has granted a phased approval that is subject to stringent conditions, which means that the applicant must meet specific requirements before the project can progress to the next phase of development.”
During the hearing process communities and scientists raised concerns the project would put the area’s water resources at risk.
In its consultation phase, the project attracted approximately 23,000 submission, with opposing views that it would hinder the quality of the groundwater and concerns surrounding greenhouse gas emissions.
Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Daniel Walton said the Narrabri project would ensure NSW was provided with lower gas prices, which would mean cheaper electricity for households.
“Our union has never accepted the false choice between gas and renewables – you need the reliability of the former to allow the latter to flourish,” he said.
“New South Wales should be a thriving global heavy manufacturing hub, and that’s exactly what we can become if we better harness our gas wealth. This approval is an excellent step.”
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State Government funds research into ‘game changer’ in fight against COVID-19
Aussie scientists are on the verge of a major breakthrough in the fight to track and control coronavirus that could see a return to normal life.
A leading coronavirus expert in the UK has pointed to research showing children display a different set of COVID-19 symptoms to adults.
Researchers at Xing Technologies are developing an ultra-rapid coronavirus test that can detect whether a person is infected and contagious within moments.
The State Government has already invested $1.5 million into the project and the company has also received $1 million from the US Government.
The Courier Mail reports that trials for the test are already underway in the US.
Brisbane-based Xing Technologies CEO Tom Esplin told the newspaper that a rapid test could pave the way for a return to normal pre-COVID activities, including travel.
“People are saying we need a rapid point-of-care test to let people get on aeroplanes,” Mr Esplin said.
“We’d like to be able to offer it. The highest viral loads occur in the three days before you develop symptoms. This test is perfectly suited for those who’ve got the highest risk of spreading it.”
The test has been designed to use a nasal swab that those who have taken COVID-19 tests are familiar with.
A solution would then be applied to the swab to produce a rapid result.
The Today show reports the test “could be used to test people before they go into high risk areas” like “aged care facilities, shopping centres, planes and hospitals”.
Queensland Innovation Minister Kate Jones told the Courier Mail that funding the project through the Palaszczuk Government’s Industry Tech Fund was an important step in moving forward with the lingering threat of COVID-19.
“It could be a real game changer in the fight against this pandemic,” Ms Jones said.
The test could cost as little as a cup of coffee, 9 News reports.
There are hopes that it could be used in a spray to be applied to personal protective equipment like face shields and face masks.
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Why ‘micro’ courses are catching on
When Michael Elwan’s commute disappeared when Covid-19 prompted him to work-from-home in March, he decided to invest his freed-up time in a 10-week “micro-masters” in leadership at the University of Queensland (UQ). The contracts manager at the not-for-profit Uniting WA was already completing a Masters in Social Work but wanted to focus on leadership for more immediate career progression plans.
Despite the entire course being online, he was “amazed” by the networking opportunities he had with fellow students from all over the world.
“The course taught me how to lead teams from different backgrounds in turbulent times, which was especially relevant,” he says.
Elwan isn’t alone.
UQ’s leadership course saw a jump of almost 300 per cent in enrolments this year compared to the first half of last year. A total of 40,000 people have enrolled in the university’s top three micro-masters courses in 2020.
It comes as hundreds of thousands of Australians stare into one of the grimmest consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic: higher unemployment and underemployment, and greater anxiety about job security.
Like in previous recessions, demand for higher education and skills training is tipped to rise – in part because there aren't many well-paying alternatives, but also due to necessity in a more competitive and changing jobs market.
However, not everyone has the financial means or appetite to tackle an entire degree. And with many industries undergoing profound upheavals, it’s difficult to know whether the skills learnt will be relevant by the time they are acquired.
Micro-credentials, by contrast, offer a short, sharp and cost-effective opportunity for learning. Course length varies from a couple of hours to several months and anything from email etiquette to data analytics can be learned.
“Micro-credentials offer a way to rapidly refresh your professional profile. It could help you scale some kind of career hurdle, get a pay rise, change jobs or move into an adjacent area,” says Dr Robert Kay, Executive Director of Incept Labs.
In April, Education Minister Dan Tehan announced that the government would subsidise six-month micro-credentials in nursing, teaching, health, information technology, with fifty-four universities responded by creating micro-credential courses. The government is now creating a nationally consistent digital platform to compare micro-credential course outcomes and credit point value, among other things.
This is important, because a current lack of standardisation means that outcomes and even quality can vary, says Kay.
“Ultimately, the value of a micro-credential is determined by who recognises it and for what. The risks relate to their currency at present, because micro-credentials aren’t mapped to the Australian Qualifications Framework. It’s therefore difficult to find an equivalence with other forms of qualifications,” Kay says.
Nonetheless, many employers already recognise the value of micro-credentials as a form of professional development. For example, Westpac in 2018 rolled out The Business Institute, an internal “school” for business bankers developed in consultation with leading business schools that delivers educational content, access to world-class teachers and credits towards external qualifications.
Laura Tien, digital content and partnerships associate at co-working hub Workit, says micro-credentials can help differentiate businesses from competitors, “especially during tough times like now”. She recently completed a six-hour micro-credentials course in Google Analytics, using her newfound skills to help Workit leverage data to make better decisions on ad spending. She also has a digital badge to add to her Linkedin profile.
“It was really interactive – I had to click through the actual application before being able to move onto the next part, which helped me retain the information,” she says. “My university degree taught me theories of marketing, but it wasn’t useful in terms of technical skills, which are so important these days,” she says.
UQ Associate Professor Tim Kastelle, who runs the corporate innovation micro-masters course, believes that micro-credentials will be a disruptive force in Australia’s education system and much needed add-ons for professionals.
“The idea that an undergraduate degree gives you the skills you need for the rest of your career is obsolete – if it was ever really true. The nature of work is changing and there is an almost constant need to be learning new things: and shorter forms of learning can accommodate that,” he says.
“Someone might say to themselves, ‘I’ve just been promoted to team leader, so I’ll do a course on leading high performing teams.’ It’s about figuring out how to do a specific thing, rather than wanting to develop an integrated body of knowledge as you get from a degree.”
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Why your health fund premium is rising
Health fund premiums will rise by as much as $400 a year from tomorrow with many fund members slugged more than twice the promised average 2.9 per cent increase.
The nation’s largest health fund Medibank is raising the price of some of its Gold policies by 6.7 per cent and many Silver Plus policies by 5.9 per cent.
Bupa, Australia’s second largest insurer is raising the cost of one Silver policy by 5.6 per cent.
Some HCF members are facing premium rises of 3.2 per cent on their family cover, while
NIB’s Silver and Basic plus policies will increase an average of 4.3 and 3.9 per cent respectively.
It comes as News Corp can reveal the so called “average” 2.9 per cent premium rise figure – used by the government — is not an average of the premium rises of the policies offered but instead the percentage rise in premium income health funds receive.
“The percentage change in forecast contribution income is considered to be the most appropriate way of reflecting the price change in premiums that will be received by an insurer,” the Department of Health said.
Health Minister Greg Hunt and the insurance industry used the 2.9 per cent figure to boast that this year’s average annual premium rise was the lowest in two decades.
“From 1 April 2020, a single person will pay an average of $0.68 extra per week ($2.72 month $35.36 a year) family on average will pay $1.99 ($7.76 month $103 a year) more a week,” Mr Hunt claimed when he announced the premium rises.
But consumer group Choice said the five to six per cent rises most fund members face from tomorrow will hurt far more than advertised.
“That figure is almost, I guess, misleading it’s definitely not how people will interpret that figure,” Choice health spokesman Dean Price told News Corp.
“And it helps explain some of the shock that people feel when they get that notice from a health insurer notifying them of the increase, which is above the publicly stated average increase that there fund is passing on,” he said.
Health funds delayed their annual April 1 premium rises for six months after the government imposed surgery bands due to COVID-19 so now their members face two rises in six months.
Insurers have saved hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns and surgery bans.
Professor of Health Economics, University of Melbourne Yuting Zhang has calculated payouts for hospital treatment fell 7.9 per cent in dollar terms between December and March and a further 12.9 per cent between March and June.
Payouts for extras cover plunged 32.9 per cent between March and June this year.
Private Healthcare Australia chief Dr Rachel David said since the surgery bans were lifted in states outside Victoria surgery rates lifted to up to 124 per cent above normal as doctors sought to catch up on their treatment lists.
Health funds have offered their members hundreds of millions of dollars worth of rebates for telehealth consultations, automatic coverage for COVID-19 illnesses and discounts if members lost their job and could not pay premiums.
Medibank’s said across its hospital products, the lowest premium increase is 0 per cent and the highest is 7 per cent.
Seventy one per cent of Medibank customers on a singles policy will get an average increase on their premium of $3 or less per week ($12 per month), while 77 per cent of family policies will get an increase of $6 or less per week ($24 per month), the fund said.
SOURCE
Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here
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For the notes appearing at the side of the original blog see HERE
Pictures put up on a blog sometimes do not last long. They stay up only as long as the original host keeps them up. Some newsapers keep their published pictures online for as little as a week. I therefore keep archives of all the pictures that I use. The recent archives are online and are in two parts:
Archive of side pictures here
Archive of this year's pictures in the body of the blog. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here