Australian Politics
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Scientists unravel history of climate change upheaval on the Great Barrier Reef
Natural fluctuations in reef health
FOR the first time ever, a group of Australian scientists have unravelled the history of climate change upheaval on the Great Barrier Reef over the past 8000 years.
A team led by University of Queensland graduate Dr Marcos Salas-Saavedra analysed rare earth elements in drilled reef cores, unveiling a deep history of wild weather.
“Eight thousand years ago, extreme run-off from an intense Indian-Australian summer monsoon affected water quality in the southern offshore Reef,” Dr Salas-Saavedra said.
“Water in the GBR was much dirtier, and poor water quality is known to be a major cause of reef decline around the world. “But 1,000 years later, monsoonal rains eased and the water quality greatly improved.
“We noticed water quality declined during times of dampened El Nino Southern Oscillation frequency, which may have led to more La Niña-dominated wet climates in Queensland at those times – just like the weather we have seen this year in Queensland.”
But as El Nino-dominated weather patterns became established, he said the southern Great Barrier Reef water quality improved to give us the beautiful Reef we know and love.
The new data allows researchers to understand for the first time what water quality was like on the Great Barrier Reef over an extended period.
UQ Professor Gregory Webb said the study provides a new and independent source of palaeoclimate data, not only for the Great Barrier Reef, but potentially for reefs around the globe.
“Knowing more about how the Great Barrier Reef responded to past environmental changes is essential to help inform us how reefs can be better managed in the future,” Professor Webb said.
“We have created a toolkit to understand subtle differences in water quality – even in offshore reefs – and it can be applied over much longer time frames where reef core material is available.
“Importantly, this type of analysis enables us to examine how ancient water quality may have impacted coral growth rates, overall reef growth rates, and any shifts in reef ecology at the same time.”
He said knowing more about how the Great Barrier Reef responded to past environmental changes was essential, helping to inform how it could be better managed in the future.
Reef cores were recovered from Heron and One Tree reefs by UQ’s Dorothy Hill Research Vessel, before Professor Jianxin Zhao dated and analysed the cores at UQ’s Radiogenic Isotope Facility.
The analysis focused on rare earth elements preserved in microbialites – rocks made by microbes – that have been growing throughout the Great Barrier Reef’s history.
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Bushland wiped, homes at risk: Fears over land gift to Queensland Aborigines
The Leftist state government has been accused of steamrolling Redland City Council by using its superior planning powers to make permanent the allocation of 249ha of bushland on North Stradbroke Island to indigenous housing development.
Under the plan the Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation would take administrative possession of 25 parcels of land, which would then be offered to traditional owners for housing, tourism and community uses.
Redland City Council is undergoing community consultation for the rezoning, which local experts say could see 800 dwellings housing almost 2000 people built in prime bushland on the island.
However, council officers have raised concerns some sites won’t be able to be built on due to overlay risks including the potential for erosion, bushfire and flooding.
They fear, because the land has been zoned urban residential, landowners would have an expectation their application to build a home would be approved by the council.
Any rejection of an application could lead to prolonged legal battles between landowners and the council at a significant cost to ratepayers.
A planning study undertaken by the state government in 2014 noted a number of the sites were “not suitable for development”.
Huge swathes of bushland at Point Lookout and Amity Point could be destroyed to make way for the 25 parcels of land, which are not serviced by trunk infrastructure such as town water or electricity.
Redland City Council Mayor Karen Williams said the council had been “directed” to undergo community consultation on the land rezoning and acknowledged local government had little power in controlling what could be built.
“In this instance we don’t really make the decisions,” she said. “We have no choice as council to do this. “It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
While the state government has agreed to a partnership with the council for community consultation, it has not provided any funding.
Opposition MP Mark Robinson, whose electorate of Oodgeroo includes North Stradbroke Island, said the government’s plan had raised concerns among traditional owners.
“There are serious questions about the suitability of some parcels of land for what the draft plan proposes,” he said.
“In one case, some locals have described the situation of a conservation area and a duck pond being earmarked for residential development.
“The Quandamooka people deserve to be treated better than that.
“The draft plan could also dramatically increase the size of the island’s population without a plan for infrastructure and services, and who pays for that?”
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Global ratings agency issues warning on Albanian $45bn spending spree
Labor risks putting the country’s triple-A credit status in danger if it races to implement nearly $45bn in “off-balance-sheet” election promises, one of the top rating agencies warns.
As Anthony Albanese flags the potential for additional cost-of-living support, Standard & Poor’s Global Ratings lead country analyst Anthony Walker told The Australian that further government spending risked stoking inflation and a more aggressive Reserve Bank response.
Mr Walker also said those risks would provide a further brake on the economic recovery, and place pressure on the commonwealth’s finances.
The Prime Minister has promised a $10bn fund to increase social and affordable housing and a $20bn “rewiring the nation” fund to modernise the electricity grid and build transmission infrastructure. In addition, the government has also pledged a $15bn “national reconstruction fund” to revitalise manufacturing.
While such spending commitments tend not to appear in the underlying cash balance, Mr Walker said the rating agency would include them in its assessment and that they could “pressure the AAA rating” if the spending was frontloaded.
A top credit rating provides a stamp of approval for how the country’s finances are managed and the ability to access cheaper funding from international lenders.
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The Covid jab data which reveals one VERY surprising detail about pandemic deaths - and it’s certain to spark HUGE debate
Over two thirds of Victorians who died from Covid-19 this year had received at least one vaccination jab - but were still killed by the virus.
Statistics released by the Victorian government showed that 68 per cent of people who died with Covid in 2022 were vaccinated. But less than a third of those who died were unvaccinated.
However medics warn the figures are not quite as they seem.
Just four per cent of the Victorian population aged 16 and over is unvaccinated - which means the 32 per cent dying unvaxxed is eight times higher than it should be.
Between January 1 and May 25 this year, 2022 so far 1,742 Victorians have died from Covid, the Herald Sun reported.
Of those, 558 were unvaccinated (or had an unknown status), about 32 per cent of the total Covid deaths in 2022.
The doubled vaxxed accounted for 41 per cent of deaths (720 people), while 24 per cent has three shots. Three per cent (53 deaths) had just one jab.
A Department of Health spokesman argued that the numbers showed per capita vaccinations save lives because 5.1 million Victorians over 16 years of age were double-dosed, compared to several hundreds of thousands remaining unvaccinated.
Out of the 1,742 deaths, 349 were genomically sequenced to reveal the strain that killed the patients. Omicron was by far the deadliest strain, at least in raw numbers. The Omicron BA.1 sub-variant caused 201 deaths, while Omicron BA.2 strain was responsible for 110.
A third dose gave up to 97 per cent better protection against hospitalisation and death for people over 50 compared two or fewer doses, he claimed UK research showed.
Meanwhile, pathologists are sounding the alarm over the low uptake of coronavirus vaccine boosters as the national immunisation group suggests a fourth dose for some Australians.
The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia says third doses are particularly low in Queensland and NSW even as COVID-19 cases rise.
'With winter commencing, it is important for everyone that they are fully up to date with all relevant vaccinations,' RCPA fellow Professor William Rawlinson said.
'The RCPA recently highlighted that it is very likely that we will experience far more influenza cases in Australia this winter. This, combined with the current, rising trend of COVID-19 cases, is likely to put an extraordinary strain on the healthcare system.'
Western Australia has the highest uptake of third doses about 80 per cent, while Queensland is the lowest at 58 per cent. Nationally, about two-thirds of eligible Australians have received a booster.
On Wednesday, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation expanded eligibility for a second booster to people with health conditions or a disability.
Leading immunologist Peter Doherty, of the Doherty Institute said it was too early to say for sure how effective third and fourth doses were in protecting people against 'long Covid'.
But he said people could be 'confident' they would help prevent the severest forms of the illness.
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Election 2022: Change agents at teal heart not all ex-Liberals
Of the dozens of suburbs that turned teal last Saturday, turfing six Liberal moderates out of parliament and contributing to the downfall of the Morrison government, beachside Avalon on Sydney’s northern beaches was the tealest of them all.
But electoral analysis by The Weekend Australian has disproved the widespread belief that all of the new Climate 200-backed independents picked up the majority of their votes from disaffected Liberal voters.
In the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, the swing against Josh Frydenberg was smaller than the swings against each of the Labor and Greens candidates, while in another three teal victory seats, the swing against the sitting Liberal was smaller than the combined swing against Labor, the Greens and all other candidates.
Nationwide, voters at 12 booths in three different seats were so attracted to the teal option, the majority gave the independent their first preference.
In the quiet enclave of the sunburnt and the wealthy that is Sydney’s northern peninsula, four polling booths in Jason Falinski’s seat of Mackellar reported more than 50 per cent first preference votes for Sophie Scamps.
Avalon South recorded 56.3 per cent, the highest teal independent primary vote of any large booth in the country, followed by Avalon Beach (55.4 per cent), Bilgola Plateau (53.1 per cent) and Avalon (52.4 per cent).
Former state independent upper house member for Pittwater Alex McTaggart said Avalon was a wealthy, well-educated community that prioritised climate as a key issue. “Avalon’s right on the coast and the average young person here is involved in the surf or the surf club,” Mr McTaggart said.
“They see the effects of climate on the coast.”
Mr McTaggart said a federal anti-corruption commission and health – the nearest hospital is 22km away – were other issues on which Dr Scamps successfully campaigned.
Most of the teal independents picked up many of their votes from Labor or Greens voters. In Kooyong, the former Liberal treasurer’s primary vote fell by 6.3 per cent while Labor lost 11.1 per cent and the Greens 15 per cent.
In nearby Goldstein, where former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel overcame Tim Wilson, the swing against Labor almost hit 18 per cent, compared with the ousted Liberal MP’s 11.7 per cent.
The vote pattern was different in North Sydney, where Liberal MP Trent Zimmerman suffered a primary vote fall of 13.7 per cent, much larger than Labor’s 3.6 per cent and the Greens’ 5.7 per cent. And in Wentworth, teal victor Allegra Spender’s 38.8 per cent primary vote drew largely on the vote former independent Kerryn Phelps won in 2019 and Liberal MP Dave Sharma’s support. Labor and Greens votes held steady.
Redbridge executive director Kos Samaras, whose polling company undertook research for the Climate 200 candidates, said the location of polling booths influenced how the primary vote split. A high proportion of younger voters and renters translated into a stronger turnout for teals.
Four of the top five teal booths in Kooyong weres in Hawthorn, a suburb that mixes wealthy families in $20m mansions and students in rental apartments, while top of the list in North Sydney was Greenwich, another suburb with a high proportion of apartments. And Wentworth’s top booths were in renter-heavy Bondi, Paddington and Bronte
Dr Scamps had a campaign budget of $1.4m, half of which was raised from the community and the other half coming from millionaire climate activist Simon Holmes a Court’s fundraising war chest Climate 200.
Semi-retired teacher John Lettoof, 65, has lived in Avalon for 30 years and said he voted Greens one and Dr Scamps second due to concerns over climate change.
“You can just see it (climate change),” said Mr Lettoof, a keen surfer and fisherman.
“You know I could point behind me right now to the shellfish that are missing off the rocks – the pool is denuded, it‘s not full of life as it normally is.”
Dr Scamps’ campaign was also more youth-friendly, including a free concert on May 1 – called Election Beats – in Avalon’s Dunbar Park headlined by local artists Angus and Julia Stone, Lime Cordiale and comedian Dan Ilic. The event attracted about 1500 people. At the same time, Mr Falinski treated about 250 supporters to sausage rolls and beers at Cromer Golf Club.
The first-world problems of Avalon residents were satirised in 2015 in the film Avalon Now, which later became a web series, depicting a couple torn between pairing pinot gris or pinot grigio with barramundi for dinner.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Monday, May 30, 2022
The least conservative Liberal (and National) government in Australia’s history lost last weekend
There was no enthusiastic move to Labor. In fact, both major parties scored woefully low first preference counts. In any country with a first-past-the-post voting system both big parties would be reeling. There’s a reason why only Australia and one small South Pacific nation uses preferential voting; it’s because it works as a protection racket for the two big parties.
The only way to show your displeasure with your own side of politics – because you can’t even stay home when there’s also compulsory voting – is to preference the other side. I did that this past Saturday, practising what I preached.
Clearly, more than a few others did too.
Now, you will not see this on the ABC or hear it from any of the Liberal ‘moderates’, but it was a very good thing having all those Teals take out the inner core of the lefty-Lib gang – Zimmerman ‘I forgot about freedom once I was elected’ Wilson, Sharma, Falinski, and yes, even Josh Frydenberg (who I’m guessing was the driving force behind pushing Scott Morrison to sign up to Net Zero and to pay the ABC all that money just before the election).
These seats were always going to leave the column for any remotely conservative party. Many may not like that fact, but it’s already happened in Canada, Britain, and America. Our voting system merely slowed it down here. The truth is that the well-off rich (and I generalise of course) now vote solidly Left – maybe because they can afford to and like to virtue-signal? They vote more like Canberra public servants than anything else.
So in a losing election, it was good to lose these seats. Frankly, I don’t see them coming back for a long time.
Here’s an irony. If Morrison had refused to sign up to Net Zero and made rising energy prices and inflation an election issue, together with mining jobs, I think he would have won the election – this being the formula of Liberal wins since Tony Abbott took over as Opposition Leader. Instead, the Liberal Prime Minister, who seemingly had no core convictions and no strong commitment to freedom or to the presumption of innocence, let himself be pushed by the party wets into reneging on a promise made to Coalition voters at the last election in 2019.
By signing up to Net Zero, Morrison was snookered.
What happens when you purport to believe that there is an earth-endangering climate crisis (and former Obama Energy Department Undersecretary, Professor Steven Koonin, takes this apart in his new book Unsettled) and that Australia’s emissions make any difference at all, when the truth is that we could go back to the Stone Age tomorrow and China would pump out our emissions in a little over a fortnight? If you go down that road it’s not surprising that voters will vote for the real thing (in the shape of the Greens and Teals) rather than a half-hearted bunch of Liberal ‘moderates’. So the irony is that even for the so-called ‘moderates’, they would have had a better chance to win if the Liberals had stood up against the ABC worldview and not signed up to Net Zero. The appeasement strategy was never going to work, especially for them.
That said, I’m glad the Matt Kean-type faction of the Liberal Party has been decimated. Their one redeeming feature was supposed to be their commitment to freedom concerns (as the self-professed inheritors of the John Stuart Mill tradition), but the pandemic showed that to be a hollow lie. These moderates were at least as pro-lockdown and ‘we defer to the public health caste’ as the Liberal Party room’s conservatives. Make that more pro-despotism. And more big spending, big taxing, ‘let’s succumb to Modern Monetary Theory idiocies’. So good riddance to them all.
Yet the renewal of the Liberal Party was always a two-stage game.
First off, all of us conservatives were forced into needing our side to lose because it had accomplished basically nothing since Tony Abbott stopped the boats – nothing other than drifting ever further left every year. But there is a second stage. We now need to see the Liberal Party rediscover at least some of its conservative roots.
This is no sure thing.
If you look at the state level the Liberal Party is a mess. In Western Australia, in Victoria, in Queensland, even in New South Wales it has opted to become the ‘we’ll be Labor but just a bit slower’ party, even to the point of embracing woke orthodoxies. Victoria’s incarnation is particularly risible. If you can’t beat the heavy-handed, despotic Dan Andrews – or barely manage even to criticise him on any freedom-related grounds – you are pathetic. And the Victorian Liberals are.
So this ‘let’s move left to try to win’ option is clearly one that is possible and that the ABC/Fairfax/‘moderate wing’ will be pushing. But it would be an awful mistake.
What we need now is for the Liberals to move a good ways to the right and to do so openly. Recant on the Climate Change genuflecting, admitting it was a mistake while pointing out the huge energy cost rises coming. Go back to arguing for sane budgets with surpluses (which will mean disavowing the Frydenberg uber-Keynesian, defer-to-Treasury approach). Openly commit to some sort of belief in freedom, one that will involve walking-the-walk not just talking-the-talk until you get elected into Parliament. And be tough against Woke shibboleths a la Mark Latham.
Down that path – and it will be labelled as Right-Wing Populism or as ‘the Trump Party’ by lefty journalists – lies victory.
We know this from seeing Boris Johnson’s voting coalition in 2019 and from seeing the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections. (And check out who won the married women’s votes in all three of those elections so you are armed against the bogus cry that ‘women won’t vote for this’.) Sure, the ABC will be brutal to the Peter Dutton-led Liberal Opposition. So will Fairfax. Who cares? We know you can win elections with virtually all the press against you. (See above re Boris and The Don.) You just have to believe in something and articulate it to the voters. The rich end of town now votes Left remember, as does the journalistic caste. (Hilary Clinton won the 100 wealthiest counties by-the-by, and Boris gets pummelled in upmarket London boroughs.) Ignore them.
The Libs are going to have to stay committed for a year or so as the Jacinda Ardern type honeymoon kicks in. But it won’t last long. Massive inflation and hard Left populist policies will see to that. It’s not going to be pretty. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a renewed conservative Liberal party win in 2025. That’s assuming, of course, that they opt to go down the conservative renewal path and not the ‘let’s be Labor and the Greens but just a bit slower’ one. Losing all those lefty moderates last Saturday makes my hope a lot more likely.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-rich-vote-left/ ?
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Lawless corruption watchdog
In Perrottet-land “upholding integrity” must mean protecting a rogue agency that engaged in conduct that had no basis in law and inflicted damage on innocent people without lawful cause. That is what this government has decided to do in relation to its Independent Commission Against Corruption.
In the real world integrity does not mean protecting powerful wrongdoers from the law. It means nobody is above the law — a principle that is particularly important for agencies that are supposed to fight wrongdoing.
The parliamentary committee that oversees the commission unanimously recommended in November that its corruption declarations against four men should be assessed in court without the benefit of retrospective legislation that was rushed through parliament in 2015 to “validate” actions by the commission that would otherwise have been unlawful.
Just before that legislation was enacted, ICAC had agreed in the Court of Appeal that it had no basis in law for declaring those four men corrupt. A draft declaration confirming ICAC’s defeat had been prepared and circulated by Margaret Beazley, who was then president of the Court of Appeal.
But before the court could officially strike down ICAC’s unlawful findings, the government, then led by Mike Baird, was lobbied by ICAC, which was then led by Megan Latham. What followed is a one of the worst examples of the misuse of the legislative process.
The first problem is that parliament was never told that its Validation Act would have the effect of changing the outcome of legal proceedings in which ICAC had already admitted liability to the four men. Parliament, acting in ignorance, interfered with the judicial process.
The second problem is just as serious. The Validation Act retrospectively stripped those four men of legal rights. It retrospectively imposed a detriment.
The injustice of this affair was not lost on all members of the parliamentary committee that oversees ICAC – including three cabinet ministers and three parliamentary secretaries.
These members of the government – the principled six – have expressed a view that is now at odds with government policy. They have strongly backed the need to provide a remedy — not for everyone affected by the Validation Act, just the four who had extracted admissions in court from ICAC.
They should take heart. They are on the right side of history.
With the honourable exception of the principled six, Perrottet’s government seems intent on alienating those who expect it to be the guardian of the rule of law, not its enemy.
Its official response to wrongdoing by ICAC amounts to this: cover it up, change the law, pretend it never happened. But reality has a way of making its presence felt.
The men who were denied their legal rights know that ICAC conceded in 2015 that they had been wrongly declared to be corrupt because the commission had exceeded its jurisdiction. They also know that those findings would have been struck down by the Court of Appeal but for the Validation Act.
ICAC fell into error by misreading the limits on its jurisdiction. Its mistake was pointed out by the NSW Court of Appeal and the High Court.
This injustice has been dragging on for so long that one of the four, mining entrepreneur Travers Duncan, died recently while waiting for this government to restore his legal rights. The remaining three deserve a remedy and the oversight committee agrees. Some would argue that the entire Validation Act should be repealed. But the oversight committee does not go that far.
It simply wants an amendment that would allow the remaining three to hold ICAC to account under the normal law – without the distortion of any retrospective validation of ICAC’s unlawful conduct.
In the seven years since the Validation Act came into force, the real justice system has had plenty of time to examine their conduct. The result: they have been convicted of nothing.
One of them, businessman John McGuigan, says the government’s decision ignores what is right and can only be explained by political expediency.
“For the Attorney-General to state that the ability of NSW citizens to rely on the law, as determined by the High Court, constitutes reliance on a ‘loophole’ is both disgraceful and legally incorrect.
“The NSW government’s ‘do what it takes’ attitude to expropriate both assets and rights and thereby preclude its citizens from an ability to rely on their legal rights is contrary to the fundamental principles of the rule of law.
“Essentially it constitutes a parallel system of justice devoid of legal principle based simply on achieving political objectives,” McGuigan says.
All wrongdoers need to be held to account. But this is particularly important when the wrongdoing takes place in an agency that is supposed to be the enemy of misconduct.
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Bec Judd says she feels ‘unsafe’ in mansion in spray over crime in Melbourne
Bec Judd has revealed she feels “unsafe” in her own home after a spate of “rapes, bashings and home invasions” in the Bayside area of Melbourne.
The businesswoman and mum of four took to social media to accuse the Victorian state government of not caring about residents.
“So sick of the rapes, bashings and home invasions at the hands of gangs in Bayside,’’ she wrote in an Instagram story on Thursday.
“The state government don’t seem to care. We feel unsafe.
“I personally know 2 women who have experienced home invasions in Brighton in the last few weeks while they were at home.”
In response to a 7News story about the escalating situation, Judd also commented on the Instagram page of Liberal state MP James Newbury.
“Have these teens been charged yet or just another slap on the wrist?” she wrote.
Judd and her AFL star husband Chris Judd bought their mansion in Brighton for $7.3m four years ago and documented its Spanish-style renovation on social media, the Herald Sun reports.
Mr Newbury said residents and particularly women were increasingly scared and some are even starting to take matters into their own hands.
“I can tell you absolutely (Judd’s) sentiment is the same sentiment that I am getting from women across the electorate today,’’ he said.
“I am getting inundated with people who are living in streets where these crimes have occurred. “They’re coming across these gangs and being forced to barricade themselves in their bedrooms.
“I am now aware of a number of people who are hiring private security.
“I also know of people now leaving keys next to the front door so that if they are home invaded they’re not fought.”
Mr Newbury said closing the Brighton police station several years ago had also instilled fear. “We’ve got basically a front desk in Sandringham and if there’s a crime they have to come from Moorabbin,’’ he said.
“I went to a street where a recently widowed woman who just lost her husband had been home invaded. “Can you imagine how that would feel and how scarred people are?
“The scary thing is Labor is only ever doing something when it’s on TV. “It’s never proper fixes.”
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The huge headwinds set to stop Labor’s honeymoon
There are mighty headwinds, economic and political, heading the world’s way and Australia cannot expect to go untouched. A global food shortage driven by a terrible confluence of events: the collapse of supply routes arising in the pandemic, crop failures driven by extreme weather events and conflict in Ukraine upsetting one of the world’s largest food bowls is upon us.
The crisis is exacerbated by a chronic scarcity of nitrogenous and phosphorus fertilisers. The source of much of the world’s supply lies in Russia and Ukraine.
The global wheat price has surged to record levels due to crop failures in 2021 in Russia and Ukraine prior to the invasion, the number one and four global exporters respectively.
This week Ukraine reported that 80 per cent of its agricultural land was under cultivation, a remarkable achievement given the state of Russian aggression within its borders but a clear sign of diminished output. Crop yields can expect to be at all time lows.
There is already talk of Russia weaponising its food exports. For now, we can merely conclude that Putin’s Russia has stopped exports of wheat driven by strong demand and reduced output.
Rice futures were trading above the $USD17-per-hundredweight mark, a level not seen since the world was plunged into the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic in mid-2020. The shortage of chemical fertilisers has already reduced rice yields by as much as ten per cent throughout south Asia.
If there is one thing that keeps Xi Jinping and the leadership of the CCP awake at night, it is the prospect of famine.
With a heightened sense of foreboding, Egypt, no stranger to bread riots, now seeks to control the country’s supply of wheat. It is now a criminal offence in Egypt to buy or sell wheat without the permission of the government. In Iran, a country driven to the brink by economic sanctions, the Raisi government cut subsidies on the price of wheat leading to civil unrest which will only get worse.
If we needed a portent of what is coming it lies in Sri Lanka where riots are reported as everyday affairs, the genesis of which lies largely unreported by Australian media. Sri Lanka’s problems are directly attributable to political ineptitude and a ban on the import of chemical fertilisers, reducing the country’s ability to feed itself within the space of six months. Sri Lanka has less than a million dollars in foreign cash reserves. Two tankers lie in the harbour of Columbo, full of fuel but the government can’t pay for it. The island nation is bankrupt and every day more of its 22 million people lurch into poverty. The cause of the riots isn’t political partisanship. Hungry people are angry people.
In the developing world, governments will fall, people will become displaced. Refugees will surge into relative safe havens like Australia.
In the western world, the immediate impact will be on the price of staples. In Australia, we are already battling the forces of extreme weather events. In Queensland’s Lockyer Valley, one of the nation’s food bowls especially in fresh vegetables, farmers planted one crop and saw it destroyed by flood. They planted again only to have that one smashed by the second deluge.
In the coming months it is not so much a matter of how much a head of lettuce or a bunch of broccoli will cost. They will simply be unavailable. The price of staples like bread, pasta and rice already high and with supply constrained by the effects of the receding pandemic, will skyrocket.
People in poverty in Australia will feel the pinch hardest, as they always do. The Albanese government must find a way to keep these two million or more heads above water.
Inflation will surge and with it the prospect of global stagflation – a counterintuitive economic condition where growth slows, demand falters and unemployment rises while inflation continues ever skyward. The world experienced it in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the effects of it accounted for more than a fair share of elected governments being consigned to the dustbin.
This is just one foreseeable crisis facing the newly elected Albanese government but the scale of it is almost unfathomable. It will test Labor’s untried management abilities amid a commonwealth budget deficit that is burgeoning out of control, leaving it with a diminished fiscal response.
Welcome to the big league, Albo. The party’s over.
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A high school has come under fire for showing students a video that discussed pornography in such graphic detail that some students walked out
Wadalba Community School on the Central Coast in NSW was conducting the monthly year 10 assembly on Monday when without warning, students were shown a TEDx Talk on video by sexual health expert Ran Gavrieli entitled 'Why I stopped watching porn'.
The video sees Gavrieli discuss different types of online pornography online to try and understand the question, 'What would porn deem as sexual?'
In the talk Mr Gavrieli claimed it was 'whatever men find arousing'.
'If men find it arousing to choke a woman, to have brutal sex without one touch, hug, kiss, tender caress? Well, then it is sexual,' Mr Gavrieli said in the video.
'It arouses men to see a woman or a child cry? It is sexual. It arouses men to rape a woman? Well, then it is sexual.'
In attempting to explain the aim of cameras in pornography, Mr Gavrieli added 'porn cameras have no interest in capturing any normal sensual activities such as petting, caressing, making out, touching, hugging, kissing – no, what porn cameras are into is the penetration.'
This video - reportedly shown without warning or context - caught a number of students aged between 14 and 15 off guard and even left some students in tears as a result, reported the Daily Telegraph.
One 14-year-old student claimed that she had been a victim of rape at a party earlier this year and that the graphic detailed descriptions of porn, in particular rape, had been were 'triggering'.
'I went to the bathroom straight after because I was throwing up,' she said. 'They could have at least separated the girls and boys or given a trigger warning especially while talking about rape.'
Another eight girls are understood to have walked out.
The school's principal Melinda Brown has subsequently written to parents to 'unreservedly apologise' for the incident and admitted the lesson breached Department of Education guidelines.
'I apologise unreservedly for this lesson going ahead without first informing you and providing you with the option to remove your child from this lesson,' Ms Brown wrote.
'I want to assure you the incident does not reflect the high standards and care of students that Wadalba Community School upholds at all other times.
A spokesperson for the department stated that 'the school did not follow Department policy and the incident does not reflect the high standards required by the Department.'
'The matter has been referred to the Department's Professional and Ethical Standards Directorate for investigation.'
'The Department apologises unreservedly for any distress caused and counselling is being offered to the students involved.'
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Sunday, May 29, 2022
Greens win third seat in Brisbane
This is remarkable. It means that Brisbane is by far the greenest capital city. Against that we have that the National party retained all its seats and that nearly half of the remaining conservative seats are in Queensland.
What it says is clear: Brisbane and the regions are at odds. There are two Queenslands, North and South. It is not an entirely new division. People in the North have always been suspicious of the South.
So what has caused the South to swing so far? It probably stems from life in Brisbane being much easier than life in the regions. The typical Brisbaneite is an office worker, far removed from the wealth creation that characterizes the regions. They can afford to act as if money grows on trees. And the conservatives recently did nothing to dispel that thinking
The Greens have won the seat of Brisbane, with incoming MP Stephen Bates saying the party has a mandate to go further on climate change.
Mr Bates will become the fourth Greens MP in the 47th parliament, after the party also won the seats of Griffith and Ryan, and retained the seat of Melbourne.
Absent votes counted today firmed up the 29-year-old retail worker's lead over Labor candidate Madonna Jarrett.
It is the third seat won by the Greens in the Queensland capital, and the victory means Labor is still one seat short of forming a majority government.
Mr Bates said voters were sick of the "status quo" and felt like politicians didn't make policies that actually benefited them.
"They told us they wanted to get 100 per cent publicly owned renewable energy, the wanted dental and mental health services into Medicare, and the wanted action on the housing crisis," he said. "And it's turned into a victory for us. "It's very surreal.
"The mood has been people are angry, people are fed up with the status quo, and fed up with the complete inaction on climate change."
Mr Bates hoped the party would be in a position to achieve emissions targets proposed by the Greens, given the number of seats won.
"That is a mandate that people don't want politicians bought by the fossil fuel industry," he said.
"They want politicians who are accountable to the people and accountable for the science and the science tells us that the emission targets that we're proposing is what's necessary.
"We have been very frank before — this is a mandate for us for the Greens to work with the Labor government to go further on climate, to go further on housing, restore faith in our democracy again.
"Albanese has to deal with the parliament that has given to him. He doesn't get a say in that. "Even if Labor does form a majority in the House, we will still be in the balance of power in the Senate."
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was this afternoon asked to comment on the Green win, but declined to give his opinion.
The Greens now have four House of Representatives seats with the party still in the race for the Melbourne seat of Macnamara, although Labor is currently ahead in that electorate.
The electorates of Brisbane and Ryan were taken from the Liberal National Party, and Griffith from Labor.
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Tamil asylum seeker family given temporary bridging visas
This is a clearcut case of boat people arriving in Australia amid dubious asylum seeker claims. They claimed to fear perseution by Sri Lanka after the military defeat of the Communist Tamil Tigers.
But the Sri Lankan government launched no reprisals against ordinary Tamils who were not part of the Tiger uprising and Tamils as a whole lived on peaceably in their own areas in Northern Sri Lanka. If they had genuinely been in fear, India's Tamil Nadu was just a short boat ride across the Palk strait and was prepared to accept them. So claims of needing asylum were rightly rejected and the family were due to be repatriated to Sri Lanka. Many other Tamil chancers were returned with no troubles visited upon them
Complications arose however because the family had produced two children while in Australia waiting for their claims to be processed by Australia's elephantine immigration bureaucracy. So could the Australian-born children be deported? That was the issue that tied up the matter in the courts. But as far as I can see, what was good enough for the parents should have been good enough for their children. The matter is still unresolved
The Tamil asylum seeker family removed from Biloela in 2018 are set to return to the central Queensland town within weeks, allowing their five-year-old daughter to celebrate her first birthday outside of detention.
Nades, Priya and their daughters, Kopika and Tharunicaa, are expected to arrive back in their adopted home town by early June, according to supporters who have campaigned for their return for more than four years.
Friend and advocate, Angela Fredericks, said the Nadesalingam family, also known as the Murugappans, have already begun packing but certain legalities needed to be finalised before they could leave Perth, where they've been living in community detention since June 2021.
"They now have permission that they can actually pack their bags and they can book those flights and be on their way," Ms Fredericks said.
The family were removed from Biloela by Australian Border Force (ABF) officers in March 2018 and have been held in detention – including on Christmas Island – for the four years since.
"This is the first time in four years that Priya and Nades get to decide their travel arrangements… the first time they get to choose when they get to move," Ms Fredericks said.
Ms Fredericks said the flexibility allowed the "girls to say goodbye to their school friends" in Perth and for Priya and Nades to finish their jobs.
"We'll have them home in Biloela before her [Tharincaa's] fifth birthday, which is in mid-June and we can't wait to celebrate that birthday with her – her first birthday not in detention," she said.
The Nadesalingam family were yesterday granted temporary bridging visas but not permanent residency – meaning their fight to remain in Australia will continue.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese today skirted the question as to whether he would push for permanent protections or residency.
"Those issues will be worked through," he said.
"Once that [bridging] visa is granted, then other issues can be worked through in terms of their security.
"We'll continue to treat this family with the respect that they deserve.
"The way I was brought up, you don't treat people like that [removing them from Biloela]. We're better than that, we've intervened."
Ms Fredericks said the family and their supporters were "reassured" and confident that "this family are going to be able to be here permanently".
"This bridging visa is the start of this journey," she said.
Asylum Seeker Resource Centre founder Kon Karapanagiotidis said in a video posted online that the bridging visas afforded Priya and Nades work rights and allowed Kopika and Tharnicaa to go to school.
"In this scenario they'll be given Medicare… but it's a temporary visa," he said.
Legal challenges to the family's rights to residency remain before the courts.
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Labor faces a minefield in defining its central IR policy
The only issue is compulsion. The unions want all workers to be in unions regardless of what the workers themselves want. And the Albanian government is set to introduce a variety of compulsions in pursuit of that
The new government is facing an industrial relations minefield after it promised to make job security an object of the Fair Work Act, industrial relations experts say, since a Labor-led inquiry this year found there was no single definition of insecure work.
Labor made secure work the standpoint for a range of policy reforms during the election, despite it being a variable term, and experts say the government must now navigate competing interests to properly enshrine it in legislation.
A former longstanding Fair Work Commission deputy president, Reg Hamilton, who retired from the commission earlier this year, said introducing and reworking provisions would be “an extremely difficult, technical job for everybody”.
“It’s a minefield, but with goodwill, employers and unions can perhaps reach some accommodation on it,” Hamilton said.
Labor’s overhaul of workplace laws will make job security underpin the decision-making of the commission, Australia’s industrial umpire, and become the ethos behind fortifying casual work, protecting gig workers and boosting labour-hire pay.
When asked about a definition during the election campaign, Labor’s industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke – who is expected to become the minister – said in a statement, “as with all legislation, precise drafting will be informed by consultation and departmental advice”.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics, which compiles labour-market data, has no definition of secure work and says there is no international definition. A parliamentary committee on job security stated in a February report “there is no single definition of ‘insecure and precarious work’” .
Labor senator Tony Sheldon, who chaired the committee, said it ranged from “aged and disability care jobs being replaced by gig work” to “academics and teachers locked into casual jobs for 20-plus years”.
“The rise of insecure work is about transferring risk from employers to workers ... [it] damages you financially, it impacts your physical and mental health, it’s shrinking the middle class, and it’s bad for the economy,” Sheldon said.
The Australian Council of Trade Union’s president Michele O’Neil said, “a secure job means working people have all the basic entitlements that they should be able to rely on, like paid sick and annual leave, and the confidence to plan their lives and their future”.
Herbert Smith Freehills partner Rohan Doyle said Labor’s objective was to encourage direct or part-time employment over labour-hire, casual, and fixed-term arrangements, however, it would be difficult to define “in one sentence” to prevent harming sectors of the labour market.
“There is some subjectivity around what that means, and it will mean different things to different people. There are various work types that are seen to be insecure but are nevertheless required for legitimate purposes,” Doyle said.
RMIT industrial relations expert Anthony Forsyth said changing an objective of the Fair Work Act was on “huge, symbolic importance”, however, acknowledged the difficulty in encapsulating the meaning of secure work.
“You could define it by reference to what it isn’t: long-term casuals, long-term labour hire, sham contractors,” Forsyth said.
Innes Willox, head of employer body Australian Industry Group, said the workforce’s preferences for flexibility needed to be respected, adding it was ironic that just as employers were adapting to this trend “they are now being confronted with the prospect of new regulatory obstacles”.
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Labor has been elected to government with the lowest primary vote since 1910. Clearly there is more to the story than watching Anthony Albanese roll around in confetti while people smugglers send excited text messages to the Indonesian fishing community.
To see the primary vote collapse on both sides of the fence confirms that Australia’s political landscape is a mess. While it is obvious that the intellectual laziness of the Turnbull-Morrison government bleached the blue from the Liberals, Labor’s catastrophic social engineering error did not manifest until polls closed.
In attempting to raise a generation of young Labor voters, the Left embedded themselves in the education system and began a curriculum of hardcore socialism disguised as virtuous environmentalism and social justice. The idea was to use the robust and well-baited hook of Climate Change to ensure young adults, fearing the apocalypse, would vote Labor at their first election. No need for rich, suburban kids to sympathise with hundreds of years of unionism or outdated Labor Party nostalgia…
The first part of the plan worked. Instead of teaching children maths, English, science, and critical thinking – Australian kids became shouty activists, sticking themselves to random surfaces in service of the climate (death) cult.
No question, it was the Liberal Party who dropped the ball by allowing this to happen (and they paid the price in Teal female quotas), but Labor finds itself faced with the strongest Green and Teal vote in history. Like gangrene, it has spread from the tips of Labor’s fingers and now the infection has a grip on Albanese’s throat. The Liberals remain free to fight against Eco-fascism if they elect a half-decent leader, Labor cannot.
Greens and Teals do not have to hold the balance of power to direct government when they can shout into their well-funded microphones and send school children onto the street in tears every time one of the climate barons wants a hundred-million-dollar grant.
Will voting Teal shift the thermostat a single decimal place? No. But that teal-coloured corflute in the rosebushes makes certain that the neighbours know you’re a good person.
This is what Liberals like the heir apparent Josh Frydenberg missed.
The Teals did not run a political campaign. Voting Teal wasn’t about electing someone to government. It wasn’t about policy. It wasn’t even about Sugar Daddy Simon. The rich voted Teal to ‘save the world’ and prove that despite over-indulging in the (carbon-saturated) luxury lifestyles, they have ‘done their bit’ by putting another rich and privileged person in power.
Remember, the architects of Climate Change have spent decades terrifying children and guilt-tripping their wealthy parents. Those that questioned the dogma were demeaned as ‘science deniers’ or – infinitely worse if you’re an Upper North Shore luvvie – stupid. All the Greens and Teals had to do was sit them in front of a polling booth and offer salvation with a vote – like dropping loose change in the collection plate. One vote – guaranteed saviour status.
Albanese isn’t going to change the climate any more than the Teals. Australia will still have bushfires. Floods. Storms. It’ll get cold. It’ll be hot. The weather has no interest in who sleeps at the Lodge.
When the apocalypse fails to manifest and all the sacred relics and priests are defrocked, a different sort of blue sea will rise. If the Liberals are smart, they’ll be captain of that ship.
There will be no conservative rescue under a ‘moderate’ Liberal leader. Scott Morrison got exactly what he helped to create – directionless chaos. By the time he lost government, Morrison had run the Liberal Party so far to the Left it was in danger of crashing into Greta Thunberg’s yacht. He had to lose.
Australia is in the middle of an ideological conflict and the Liberals were led by a man who refused to fight, seeing no value in the discussions of our social fabric.
‘If people expect me to be a culture warrior in this job, that’s not my job,’ said the former Prime Minister.
Morrison failed to recognise that the Left have used Marxist rhetoric to create a culture of dependent weaklings – worsened by the Covid welfare state. Everyone wants to be a victim these days. Race, gender, sexuality, or – failing all of those identity boxes – climate. That’s the victim category for the privileged class.
The Liberal Party lost on the weekend because they made no attempt to tear the lies of Marxism to shreds. It is easy enough to expose this type of activism as fraud, but Morrison and his moderates foolishly thought they could skim off the victim vote for themselves by pandering to the activist fringe.
In the end, the big losers of the female-dominated election – were women. Although the Teals cling to power around the foreshore of Sydney’s harbourside electorates like algae, they will be used in the House of Reps as masks worn by their wealthy benefactors. These women have been paraded as a colourful show to dress-up toxic ideology for the benefit of big business. Don’t expect to see wind turbines in Warringah or the streets of Wentworth ripped up to get rid of wicked cars. Meanwhile, women and girls in the real world are set to watch their sports careers trashed by men and their safety sacrificed in the name of ‘tolerance’.
What of the true-believers? This is the biggest election win in history for the Greens, but odds are the average person has no idea what their policies are. How many would have cast their vote for Adam Bandt if they’d read his rambling pledge to ‘de-carbonise the military’, close our foreign bases, and dramatically wind back our defence capabilities on the eve of the most dangerous global conflict this nation has seen in a century?
The Liberals made ‘Net Zero’ effort to eviscerate the collective insanity of the Greens and one is left to wonder if Morrison was so busy trying to save seats like Chisholm that he didn’t want to go anywhere near a conversation about national security. His cowardice was for nothing – Labor won there anyway.
Did we learn anything?
Aside from Biden-esque footage emerging of Simon Birmingham being unable to use doors, the discarded moderates took to the press to insist that they lost because the Liberal Party hasn’t gone ‘far enough to the left’. Dave Sharma said upon his defeat: ‘We’ve lost sense of what it is to be a broad church and I think we need to rediscover that middle ground. We’re going to have to do a pretty dramatic post-mortem after this.’
With MPs like him cleaned out of the ranks, a proper conservative leader such as Peter Dutton might have the chance to breathe clean air and make a fresh start.
The Liberal Party will win again, but only if they remember who they are and what it takes to be a free, fair, and prosperous nation.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/decarbonising-the-liberal-moderates/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Friday, May 27, 2022
Israel Folau set for international rugby union return with Tonga, three years after being sacked by Australian team
He is not allowed to play for Australia because of his Christian beliefs. But Christianity is widely followed in his native Tonga so he is acceptable there
Former Wallaby Israel Folau is set to return to international rugby union for the first time since 2018, after being named in Tonga's squad for July's Pacific Nations Cup and World Cup qualifying.
"He's going to bring a lot of experience to the table," Tonga coach Toutai Kefu told ABC Radio Australia. "His presence is going to be one of the most exciting factors we're looking forward to."
Folau played 73 Tests for the Wallabies before Rugby Australia terminated his contract in May 2019 for breaching its code of conduct.
However, he's now able to represent his parents' homeland, Tonga, due to changes to World Rugby's eligibility laws.
"It would have been at least a couple of years ago that we started having conversations about him possibly representing Ikale Tahi," said Kefu.
"It was quite informal back then — it was just an informal chat — and then, as his three-year stand-down approached, when that was going to finish there was a possibility of him playing Sevens to qualify for us and he was open to that.
"But then, fortunately, they changed that rule in November and he didn't need to go through that route anymore. All he had to do was stand those three years down and he would qualify straight away."
Folau is currently playing club rugby for the Shining Arcs in Japan under former Waratahs coach Rob Penney.
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Australians desperate to get onto the property ladder could LOSE money if they buy a home under Labor's 40 per cent ownership plan
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's plan for the government to buy a 40 per cent stake in first-home buyers' properties could backfire, real estate experts fear.
Labor's Help to Buy Scheme assists individuals earning up to $90,000 and couples on a combined income of $120,000.
From July 2022, property newcomers can apply for one of 10,000 places.
This would see the government buy 40 per cent of a new home and 30 per cent of an existing home if a first-home buyer has a deposit of at least two per cent.
But CoreLogic research director Tim Lawless said the scheme was risky with the big banks forecasting a slide in house prices thanks to rising interest rates.
'With the housing market probably heading into a downturn over the coming year or years, some buyers may find their home is worth less than the debt held against it,' he said.
'It's important to know if the government will share in the downside risk if the property is sold while in a negative equity situation.'
The Reserve Bank of Australia in April admitted an increase in the cash rate to two per cent was likely to cause a 15 per cent drop in property prices, before raising rates in early May less than three weeks before the election.
Westpac, Australia's second biggest bank, is expecting Sydney property prices to fall by 14 per cent and Melbourne values drop by 15 per cent during the next two years.
In a bid to curb rising inflation, the RBA on May 3 raised the cash rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 0.35 per cent, ending the record-low era of 0.1 per cent.
The experts are expecting another increase in June with Westpac chief economist Bill Evans forecasting a 0.4 percentage point rise next month followed by six more increases by May 2023 - taking the cash rate to 2.25 per cent for the first time in eight years.
Inflation in the year to March soared to 5.1 per cent, the fastest pace in 21 years and at a level well above the RBA's 2 to 3 per cent target.
Talk of an interest rate rise saw property prices in Sydney and Melbourne in April suffer the first quarterly drop since mid to late 2020 before the RBA slashed the cash rate to a record low.
The new Labor government's scheme is capped at $950,000 in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, with CoreLogic calculating it would help buyers in 26.8 per cent of suburbs.
That means a first-home buyer would qualify for typical house at Cabramatta West, where the median price is $900,658 - a level well below greater Sydney's median of $1.417million.
A cap of $850,000 applies in Melbourne and Geelong, which CoreLogic calculated would benefit first-home buyers in 31.3 per cent of suburbs.
This would help someone looking for a house in Altona Meadows in Melbourne's west where $799,751 is the median price - a level more affordable than greater Melbourne's $1.001million mid-point.
A limit of $650,000 applies in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, with the program expected to help buyers in 21 per cent of suburbs.
Strathpine in Brisbane's north has a median house price of $607,138 - a level well below the city's $880,332 mid-point.
A $550,000 limit applies in Perth, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin, along with regional Victoria and the Northern Territory.
Canberra has a $600,000 limit which CoreLogic expected would help buyers in just 1.2 per cent of suburbs in a city with a median house price of $1.070million.
Labor also went to the election with the Regional First Home Buyer Support Scheme which also has 10,000 spots but from January 2023 for those with a five per cent deposit.
It has more generous income thresholds of $125,000 for singles and $200,000 for couples, even though houses are more affordable in regional areas.
Applicants need to have lived in a regional area for at least a year.
Labor opposed former Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison's plan for first home buyers to be able to withdraw up to $50,000 or 40 per cent of their superannuation.
But it backed the Coalition's Home Guarantee Scheme where first-home buyers would be allowed to get into the property market with a five per cent deposit, with taxpayers underwriting the rest of the usual 20 per cent deposit.
The old First Home Loan Deposit Scheme under the previous Coalition government had zero defaults and Mr Lawless said that risk was likely to be low under Labor's program.
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Education bureaucrats made to work in Western Australia
More than 500 staff from the Education Department have been pulled out of its head office in East Perth and redeployed to teach in schools as COVID-19 decimates the ranks of teachers.
Schools have long been one of the hardest-hit settings and staffing shortages continue to be a major problem, with relief teachers in unprecedented demand.
Education Minister Sue Ellery insisted the system was managing well, considering the challenges.
"Look, it is tight, staffing is tight, as it is in every workplace across Western Australia right now," she said. "We asked everybody who is working in head office and the kind of satellite Department of Education sites, who was registered to teach, to make themselves available to leave central office and teach. "And people are doing that. As at last Friday, we had 516 out of central office and other sites assisting in schools."
Independent Schools Association of WA chair and Scotch College principal Alec O'Connell said schools were coping, but each morning presented a challenge to find relief staff. "One school I spoke to recently had 11 relief teachers in on any given day," Dr O'Connell said.
"Most colleagues I talk to are finding relief very challenging at the moment, and that doesn't matter what size school you are, but I imagine for regional schools and smaller schools it would be even more challenging.
"A lot of schools do have their regular relief teachers, which is really important, but I think schools have found it's really hard to even access those, with some of their regular relief teachers also off with COVID."
Dr O'Connell said schools were regularly amalgamating classes and having other staff, including principals, step in to teach. But he said teachers had become well-practised at leaving detailed lesson plans and, after periods working from home, students were experienced at adapting.
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The Teals: loud, entitled and rich
They reflect the feel-good values of the affluent areas they represent
For the first time in our history a candidate representing the left has won the federal seat of Kooyong. This result does not surprise me. At the 2018 Victorian state election three of the four electorates within Kooyong were lost by the Liberals to Labor. I held Kew, where Bob Menzies lived, because the locals, many of whom don’t like me, knew what I stood for. Until my forced retirement from state politics this November, I will be the only lower house Liberal MP representing a part of the seat of Kooyong. The Liberals or its predecessor parties have held the seat of Kew for 95 years, Kooyong for 121 years, and I suspect before this year is out, based on last Saturday’s results, the Liberals will have no lower house representation at all where the party was founded.
The causes of the defeat in Kooyong to the ‘teals’ can be applied across Australia, indeed it’s a global phenomenon that wealthy inner-urban elites are voting for the Left.
The Liberal campaign in Kooyong had no message, aside from ‘Keep Josh’, but most importantly it said nothing about what the Liberal party stands for that will improve the lives of the people of Kooyong or anywhere else in the years ahead. Nothing about repaying the enormous debt our country now owes, reducing the cost of doing business, improving the standard of teaching or the national curriculum. The good idea of allowing first-homebuyers to access their superannuation for a deposit was too little too late.
This was the Liberal party’s problem for the last seven years of this government. Essentially Morrison argued he could manage the federal government better than Labor. In 2019 the government successfully argued that it had a point of economic policy difference with Bill Shorten and unfortunately they assumed it could be repeated in 2022. Albanese didn’t make the same mistakes as Shorten, and because the government failed to provide a vision and an economic narrative for why they deserved a rare fourth term, they lost, and the Treasurer lost his seat.
The government failed to land a glove on Albanese, despite his gaffes, because Scott Morrison did not provide a vision for the future of Australia. Further, Morrison had been mortally wounded during the pandemic by elevating state Labor premiers to positions of national leadership by the madness of the national cabinet experiment. Take for example the vaccine rollout, delivered on time, the largest peacetime logistical exercise ever undertaken by the Commonwealth government, yet the Labor state governments tore it to shreds.
The Liberals leave office with literally the largest debt the nation has ever had. Why? Because the federal government funded state governments, mainly Labor, whose only response to the pandemic was to shut down businesses, lock people in their homes and force children to attempt to learn from home. Victorians either felt attacked by the prime minister from Sydney as Melbourne endured the world’s longest lockdown or abandoned by him, particularly when he ended up backing Daniel Andrews’ incessant lockdowns.
In an electorate as highly educated as Kooyong, not a single attempt was made to point out the irresponsibility of what Dr Ryan, the new MP for Kooyong, was promising; a 60 per cent reduction to emissions by 2030. Labor is promising 43 per cent. The impact on our energy supply, reliability and electricity prices would be extreme at 60 per cent, yet the Liberals never challenged this, nor did they ever raise the alternative base-load energy policy solution of nuclear power. The Liberals in Kooyong were completely out-campaigned by an affluent political amateur because as much as I disagree with her, she stood for something, and it was unclear what her opponent stood for. The Liberals didn’t begin to attempt to hold her to account until it was too late. The last nine years of Coalition government will be regarded similarly to the Fraser years; no economic reform, no real legacy aside from aspects of the pandemic response and the Aukus nuclear-powered submarine agreement.
Tony Abbott will be forever regarded as a legend for tearing apart the most dysfunctional Labor government since Whitlam. But he was undermined from the outset and torn down by Malcolm Turnbull, who then squandered Abbott’s landslide, and almost lost the 2016 election. But it is the government that was led by Howard, Costello and Downer that younger Liberals must aspire to replicate when we win again.
It is now time for the Liberal party to reset, stop obsessing with the woke causes of inner-urban elites, and focus on the true forgotten people in the middle and outer suburbs as well as rural and regional Australia. Swings at this election against Labor in their working class heartland prove this is where the Liberal party must focus. These are the Australians who will bear the brunt of what the ‘teals’ are demanding in terms of emissions reductions by 2030. The people of Kooyong, Wentworth, Goldstein, North Sydney and Mackellar aren’t forgotten or quiet. They are loud, entitled, and privileged. The future of the great party that Menzies founded was never about the top end of town. It was and will always be the party of John Howard’s battlers. When Menzies founded the party, the eastern part of Kooyong was still orchards. As late as the 1990s, suburbs like North Balwyn, that I represent, were resolutely quiet and middle-class.
The Tories worked this shift out in 2019. Boris Johnson broke the ‘red wall’ by winning dozens of seats in working-class northern England. Tony Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield is held by the Conservatives but at the 2017 election the Tories lost the extremely wealthy inner-London seat of Kensington which includes Belgravia and Knightsbridge. The Tories now hold it by a mere 150 votes. In London, Labour holds 49 of 73 seats. Inner-city elites are the embodiment of post-material politics and they are voting left. The Liberals must accept this, and understand that only when inevitably the economy crashes under a federal Labor government can they be retaken.
Given generations of school students have been indoctrinated into the new religion of climate change extremism and identity politics, and the new national curriculum reinforces this, is it any wonder the Liberal party finds itself in the position it does?
The Liberal party in Victoria requires more fighters, more true believers and fewer careerists and cowards. Labor’s national vote dropped at this election, as did the Liberals’. This was not a great endorsement of Anthony Albanese, this was a loss by the Coalition. Australia needs a strong Liberal party led by men and women that will be warriors for the quiet Australians as Menzies said almost 80 years ago to the day; ‘…the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament – salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on. These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unself-conscious…They are taken for granted by each political party in turn…. And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation’.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-teals-loud-entitled-and-rich/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Thursday, May 26, 2022
Australia is already at Net Zero
Prof. Ian Plimer
Australia has a landmass of 7,692,024 square kilometres with a sparse inland population, greenhouse gas-emitting livestock, and heavy industry.
Combined with the transport of livestock, food, and mined products over long distances to cities and ports and the export of ores, coal, metals, and food for 80 million people, there is a high per capita emission of carbon dioxide. If for some perverse perceived moral reason we reduce our emissions of plant food, then we let millions in Asia starve. Our food exports contribute to increasing the standard of living, longevity, and health of billions of people in Asia.
The forestry, mining, and smelting industries have been under constant attack by green activists who are happy to put hundreds of thousands out of work and destroy the economy. They train their sights on the cheapest and most reliable form of electricity and want to replace it with unreliable subsidised wind and solar power simply because the burning of fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide which they fraudulently deem is a dangerous pollutant. The next target will be food-producing farmers. They, like the forestry and mining industries, have nowhere to go if destroyed by green activists. Australia cannot import food if there is no export revenue generated to pay for imports.
With inflation and debt on the rise, Australia has far greater economic priorities than to shift the whole economy into uncharted waters, increase energy costs, destroy a successful efficient primary industry, decrease employment, and decrease international competitiveness because its emission of the plant food carbon dioxide is deemed sinful. It is a very long bow to argue that Australia’s emission of one molecule of plant food in 6.6 million other atmospheric molecules has any measurable effect whatsoever on global climate.
Ice core shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide rises follow natural temperature rises and, in past times when atmospheric carbon dioxide was up to 100 times higher than now, there were ice ages and no runaway global warmings. Furthermore, it has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. Why even bother about the minuscule Australian carbon dioxide emissions when the big emitters don’t?
Annual Australian per capita carbon dioxide emissions are in the order of 20 tonnes per person. There are 30 hectares of forest and 74 hectares of grassland for every Australian and each hectare annually sequesters about one tonne of carbon dioxide by photosynthesis. Australia has 4 per cent of the world’s global forest estate, the world’s sixth largest forested area, and the fourth largest area of forest in nature conservation reserves. On the continental landmass, grasslands and forests remove by natural sequestration more than three times the amount of Australia’s domestic and industrial carbon dioxide emissions. The expansion of woody weeds, crops, reduction in regular burning, and vegetation clearing restrictions further increases natural sequestration.
Australian forests adsorb 940 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum compared to our domestic and industrial emissions of 417 million tonnes. Add to that the absorption of carbon dioxide in continental Australia to the carbon dioxide adsorption of 2,500,000 square kilometres of continental shelf waters and Australia sequesters some five times as much carbon dioxide as it emits. Australia does more than its share of the heavy lifting for global sequestration of carbon dioxide.
Australia’s net contribution to global atmospheric carbon dioxide is negative. We are already at Net Zero. This is validated by the net carbon dioxide flux estimates from the IBUKI satellite carbon dioxide data set.
None of these calculations involve the fixing of biological carbon compounds and atmospheric carbon dioxide into soils. Soils contain two or three times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere, soil carbon increases fertility and water retention and reduces farming costs. Natural sequestration in Australia locks away carbon dioxide and to lock it away carbon dioxide by industrial sequestration in deep drill holes is a foolish fashionable way of wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money.
Using the thinking of the IPCC, UN, and activist green groups, Australia should be very generously financially rewarded with money from poor, populous, desert, and landlocked countries for removing its own emissions from the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide emissions from many other nations. By this method, wealthy Australia can take money from poor countries.
Net Zero has nothing to the environment and climate change and is all about power and the transfer of hard-earned wealth.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/australia-is-already-at-net-zero
**********************************************Now steak and sausages are off the menu! Australians told to give up MEAT as part of woke academics' plan to save the world from climate change
This is an old song. It is never likely to get large-scale support
Australians will need to give up their weekly steaks and turn 'flexitarian' to meet climate change targets and hit net zero by 2050, according to academics.
Aussie meat-eaters are blamed for accelerating the crisis in a new book by Sydney University's Dr Diana Bogueva and Professor Dora Marinova of Curtin University.
They say one calorie of beef takes a staggering 38 calories to create, causing one-third of all greenhouse gases and wiping out wildlife through land clearing.
The claims have been dismissed by the cattle farmers as out-dated nonsense.
But the academics insist the meat industry needs to be overhauled if the world is to survive - and current farming methods are unsustainable.
'Rather than growing the grain or the food we need for human consumption we are growing the grain for the animals - and then eating them.' Prof Marinvoa told the ABC.
''That's a very inefficient and irrational way of feeding the population.'
She said Aussies were 'addicted to meat', but needed to slash their intake by 80-90 per cent and turn flexitarian by becoming mainly vegetarian with occasional meat.
The academics' book 'Food in a Planetary Emergency' says Aussies need to switch to a diet based on vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts and fruits.
Prof Marinova admits older Aussies may find it hard to make the transition but she said the younger Gen Z population - born after 1995 - are more open to the idea.
But even they draw the line at switching to even more environmentally-conscious insect protein burgers and meat substitutes.
'They are quite keen to increase their consumption of traditional plant-based food such as fruit and vegetables, legumes, tubers,' she said.
'But they are more hesitant to go to alternative proteins despite this industry essentially booming.'
However the wider population has yet to get the message.
The book's authors carried out an earlier study which found meat consumption has gone up dramatically this century
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Coles: Caring for some but not for others
Coles sacked the last of its unvaccinated staff at the beginning of this year, long after state mandates fell and other industries began allowing the so-called mavericks of the workforce back into the office. The move, along with other supermarket giants, saw thousands of Australians unceremoniously dumped, many of them single mothers or from struggling households.
‘Shop safe at Coles’ is something that looks good printed in big letters across double-page ads to those still suffering from anxiety hangovers. Just don’t ask too many questions about the health logic, given unvaccinated people can shop in the store, but not stand behind the counter.
Speaking of corporate virtue signalling.
The same company turned around this week and announced it would be offering its trans and gender-diverse employees ten extra days of paid leave for the purpose of ‘gender affirmation’. ‘Affirmation’ is a hazy term that Coles describes as ‘any process’ that relates to the act of gender affirmation including surgical, social, legal, or medical action. Leave could be granted for anything from an appointment with a lawyer through to full surgery.
Gender Affirmation Leave was timed to coincide with the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism, and Transphobia – one of the dozens of days and months dedicated to a sexual preference or pronouns.
Coles Chief Legal and Safety Officer, David Brewster, (who also serves as the Chair of the Pride Steering Committee), released a statement.
‘We know that we have at least 900 team members who identify as transgender or gender diverse. We need to have proper policy and education in this area so there is clear guidance around taking leave for this important transition in their life.’
Coles attached a long and bizarre ‘gender affirming’ statement that seems a little over the top for employment that largely involves stacking shelves and pushing trolleys. Its headings include ‘encouraging you to be your authentic self’ and ‘developing our Pride Team member network’ – which doesn’t sound like something employers should concern themselves with.
This move, described as ‘way ahead of politicians’ (add to that logic, reason, and fairness) is meant to be an action against ‘trans hate’. 2022 has transitioned into a world where an employer who is not constantly, publicly, and (preferably financially) ‘affirming’ an employee they must, by default, hate them. For most of human history, workers preferred their employers to keep their noses out of any private medical business.
‘You’ll be supported as the gender with which you identify, wear the clothes or uniform of your affirmed gender, use the toilets and change rooms of your affirmed gender and be referred to by the name of your affirmed gender too,’ read a statement, issued by Coles.
The statement leans heavily toward sentiments of anti-discrimination and equity – which is fine, one is simply left to wonder where this emotionally sensitive Coles hurt-feelings committee was when it was ruthlessly sacking unvaccinated staff who simply wanted to keep their jobs and their body autonomy at the same time. Coles went one step further, attempting to impose its vaccination policies on unrelated suppliers, contractors, partners, and anyone working onsite.
And no. If you’re an employee with a non-gender related medical or emotional issue, you’ll have to plan ahead and sacrifice some of your holiday leave when you run out of the standard state-sanctioned medical allotment. No one is going to give you a Woke Virtue point for a hip replacement.
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Tony Abbott warns Liberals against giving into political correctness amid election loss
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has warned the Liberals against panicking in the wake of its devastating election loss, saying the party should not give into political correctness.
In an opinion column published in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Abbott said the Coalition didn’t deserve to be bundled out of office, based on its record, and former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who had navigated the country so well through the pandemic, should never have lost his seat.
“Defeat always prompts anxieties that our party might somehow be out-of-step with popular feeling on climate change, for instance, or on identity issues,” Mr Abbott wrote.
“And in the seats we lost on the weekend, perhaps we were.
“Yet between the Coalition and the ALP, this wasn’t actually a climate change election. Those that were – in 2010, 2013 and 2019 – had a very different outcome.
“The question is: do we win so-called teal seats back by trying to be even more zealous on climate or by finding other issues on which to appeal?”
Mr Abbott, who supported controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves during the campaign in his old seat of Warringah, which he lost to Independent Zali Steggall in 2019, said the loss of once blue-ribbon Liberal seats was just a “dramatic illustration of the long-term trend of better-off people to vote left”.
But also noted the declining margins for Labor in “struggle street”.
“Before leaping to the conclusion that the Libs should move further left, it’s also worth noting that the National Party held all its seats and that the Coalition did best in Queensland and Tasmania, where the state party has tended to be least ‘woke’,” he wrote.
“My instinct is that the teal seats will return to the Liberal fold when a Labor government is seriously mismanaging the economy, not when the Liberal Party goes green.”
Mr Abbott said the focus should be on the new Albanese government, which will inevitably make plenty of mistakes.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Wednesday, May 25, 2022
A note of caution
Below is one part of the post-mortem that the Liberal party is understandably having at the moment. I am inclined to think that the outcome will not matter much. It is often said that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And the ALP is constitutionally incapable of dealing with the economic disaster that is already unfolding so will make any alternative welcome. And the Liberals are the only party with a claim to economic rectitude so will romp in next time
History is instructive. What hope is there that the ALP will tame inflation? None that I can see. Their policies will expand it. In an earlier era Gough Whitlam (ALP) pumped inflation up to 19%. That gave Malcolm Fraser (LCP) such a big victory that he even took the Senate with him
James Allan’s take on the worst night on the Liberal Party’s history is, by and large, right.
The leafy suburbs of Sydney have for years not been Liberal heartland in fact, and now they are not in name. People who are loaded and don’t have to worry about the cost of keeping the lights on, and can afford to indulge in their climate warrior fantasies and champagne socialism, vote Left as part of their virtue signalling. Allan is right: preferential voting delayed the transformation, but it’s now happened.
Allan’s long-time thesis, repeated many times here, is that the Liberals’ recent time in government tossed aside its social and economic liberal roots, and that a spell in the opposition paddock will soon set things right. Well, he’s got his wish.
But he is also confident that this period of agistment will be brief. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a renewed conservative Liberal Party win in 2025,’ he wrote on Monday. Provided, of course, that the Liberals follow the prescription and ‘opt to go down the conservative renewal path’.
The truth is, Jim, that the appropriate response is what The Castle’s Daryl Kerrigan used to say about classified ads in the Trading Post: you’re dreamin’.
Renewing the Liberal Party will take more than one term. It will take years beyond that. What happened on Saturday is so much an existential danger that long and extremely hard looks need to be taken by the party not just to consider what went wrong, but to determine exactly what its values and principles should be in an age where voters don’t much seem to care as long as they get free stuff, and parties believe they can substitute the character assassination of opponents for the hard work of policy-making and shaping a programme for government.
That means it’s too early to say, as some already are, that the traditional heartland-turned-Teal should be abandoned for the outer suburbs and regions. It’s too early to say that going hard to ‘dump Dan’ or ‘maul Mark’ is a key to renewed Liberal electoral success at state level. In fact, it’s too early to say anything. Just trying to make sense of Saturday’s every which way slaughter of the Liberal parliamentary party does my head in.
We in the Liberal party need to return to our centre-right conservative roots, but are they the roots of Menzies in the 1940s, or of a new plant more attuned to the realities of the 2020s? Is it simply standing firm against the climate warriors and social engineers, or is it something more innate? Is it going full libertarian or accepting, like Burke, that the state and community have a respected place in our lives?
As for the politics of the Liberals returning to government, truly this was a good election to lose. The social, economic, and security headwinds Mr 32 per cent Anthony Albanese, his Left-leaning government and even further Left-leaning upper and lower house crossbenches, will try the competence of a far more talented and balanced ministry than Albanese’s will be. But an invigorated Labor also will continue to outplay the Coalition on politics, and drive wedges into the new Opposition to exploit existing divisions and create new ones – do you really think that Albanese committed to implementing the Ayers Rock Statement from the Heart ‘in full’ entirely out of altruism?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/jim-allan-youre-dreamin/
************************************************Green True Believers now rule
It’s much worse than we thought. The ALP will govern in its own right, but will be forced into extreme positions by a Green-left Senate.
The first thing to recognise is that the result demonstrates a new consensus.
There are some differences between the ALP, the Coalition, the Teals, and the Greens. To placate its funders within the union movement the ALP will seek to abolish the ‘gig’ economy and promote a 5 per cent wage rise, something the Greens would also support. But that apart, the consensus represents a goal of abandoning the fossil fuel burning energy industry and coal and gas exports; differences are essentially confined to the pace at which this happens.
Replacing the socialist-free enterprise divide that conditioned political dualities during the 20th century, we now have the belief in global warming as the key delineator.
The vast majority of politically actives within society are undeterred by or unaware that there has been no significant warming over the past 30 years or that warmings and coolings were a feature of planet earth long before fossil fuels were burned. They are convinced that Armageddon is upon Australia with fires, floods, and rising sea levels resulting from human-induced global warming. These, the new True Believers, further believe that if Australia (with one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions) ceases to burn fossil fuels we will restore some imagined ecological nirvana. And, unchastened or unaware of this year’s five-fold increase in wholesale gas and electricity prices, they believe this will come at a trivial cost.
The Teal candidates, (described by Peta Credlin as, ‘Greens with nice clothes and designer handbags’) represent the left of the Coalition and have captured six Liberal blue-ribbon seats in major cities to add to their two incumbents.
Such success would not have been possible without the $12 million spent by Simon Holmes à Court and his affluent supporters (many of whom have vested interests in an outcome that promises more subsidies for renewables).
But Clive Palmer spent $70 million, which yielded very little.
The difference was that the Teals had the support of an army of devotees, many of them the result of the long march through the institutions that has indoctrinated a generation and a half of schoolchildren into accepting the green illusion.
Some National MPs representing coal districts and a handful of Coalition Senators like Gerrard Renwick, Matt Canavan, and Alex Antic depart from the delusionary climate consensus and recognise the importance of coal and gas for power generation as well as exports. There may be others, like Peter Dutton the presumed new leader, who were previously muted.
The Teals’ success may bring a split in the Coalition. Such an outcome was foreshadowed by Liberal leftist Senator, Simon Birmingham, though he saw this as a formal rupture between the Liberals and the Nationals, when the central Climate Change issue divides both parties (some more successful Nationals MPs, like Darren Chester in Gippsland, are pro-climate action). Simon Birmingham would take the federal Coalition along the path adopted in Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia, a path that would leave it in permanent opposition to the ALP/Greens.
If the Coalition parties split, the conservative elements would develop policies covering a range of matters beyond energy and climate change to include freedom of speech, regulation reform, and spending cuts.
But forging such a new party would be a formidable challenge. The Freedom Friendly parties which include One Nation and Liberal Democrats and, incongruously, Palmer United, failed to exploit any presumed gap from the Coalition adopting green policies. Taking the Senate vote, compared to the Coalition (at 33 per cent) and the ALP (at 30 per cent), these parties (plus the shooters, fishers, farmers) got 11.3 per cent. The Greens and their close allies got 14.6 per cent.
The freedom parties’ vote has hardly grown. Senate, swings to the freedom parties, as illustrated below, were much lower than those to the greens and their allies – they were even lower than the 1.95 per cent swing achieved by Legalise Cannabis Australia!
The fact that fewer than 12 per cent of people unambiguously voted against green mysticism suggests that, in terms of political tactics, the Coalition could have done worse than prosecute the campaign on a me-too climate change platform. But this is, in part, because for six years they failed to explain the importance of reliable energy to the economy both for supplying domestic power and for its share of the export revenues (half and growing). Nor did they make a dent in unwinding the institutional forces feeding the climate change agenda.
The policies the electorate has endorsed are profoundly against the nation’s economic interests and must lead to an economic collapse. For a poor country, like Sri Lanka, going the Full Green Monty quickly unravelled the economy. Australia, though, has fabulous natural wealth and a desperate government may be able to avert disaster by cashing-in much of that, since, even after the excessive spending of the Turnbull/Morrison/Frydenberg era, debt remains at only 54 per cent of GDP, half that of many European countries, America, and Canada.
World recession and rising interest rates may however expedite an unravelling of the economy. In any event, we need political leadership which explains the operations of the economy with the hope that the people through a democratic process will recognise where their true interests lie.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/this-is-worse-than-we-thought/
****************************************Tony Abbott sees hope in suburbs and regions
In the USA, the Republicans have become the party of the worker Australia's conservatives could have a similar future
Tony Abbott’s advice to the Liberal Party not to focus too much on regaining the lost blue-ribbon heartland of Australia’s richest real estate but to look to less well-off outer suburbs for renewal and revival is spot-on.
Abbott believes too many former and current Liberal MPs have provided knee-jerk reactions to the drastic loss of affluent inner-city seats to the so-called teal Climate 200 group, declaring there needs to be a move to the “right or left”, particularly on climate change policy, as a solution without recognising the problem.
A swath of moderate, progressive Liberal MPs has been wiped out by teals running on just two policies – an integrity commission and more cuts to greenhouse gas emissions – in a parasitical political campaign that cost Scott Morrison any chance. In an election that mostly concentrated on cost-of-living pressures, the seats of Wentworth, Kooyong, North Sydney, McKellar, Goldstein and Curtin were not clamouring for income support.
But instead of conservatives or the remaining moderates fighting a new climate war over the undoubtedly difficult policy of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 they need to stand back strategically, and recognise the changed landscape and the entrenched nature of the affluent independent vote.
They also have to identify where to garner new support and build on existing strengths.
Abbott helped the Liberals where he could during the campaign and, unlike the man who knocked him off, Malcolm Turnbull, did not criticise or undermine the Coalition. As well, he has now spoken without recrimination or ideological bent to simply identify a potential advantage in a slough of despondency.
Women were ‘forgotten people’ by the Liberals this election
Former Liberal candidate for Warringah Katherine Deves says women were “the forgotten people” by the Liberal… Party this election. “Women like me who are told we can have it all – we got educated, we’re looking after kids, ageing parents, keeping our relationships together. We’re tired,” she told us.
As one of only four Liberal leaders to win government from opposition, as a successful opposition leader who reduced Labor to a minority government after just one term and who then won the next election with a 16-seat majority, Abbott’s view on a strategy on how to win deserves attention. He has recognised the likelihood of entrenched elitist, inner-city MPs holding traditional Liberal seats, just as Greens will hold traditional Labor seats, and the need and potential for Liberals to extend support in the outer suburbs and link with the regional and rural support of fringe Liberals and Nationals.
Former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson says the forgotten Australians need to be remembered in regaining… Liberal voters. “I think it’s incredibly important that the Coalition work together to ensure that they do not miss the concerns and aspirations of the so-called forgotten people,” he told Sky News
The demographics and election results speak for themselves of the potential for Liberal appeals to small business, family, migrants, tradespeople and contractors in the less affluent suburbs. In Sydney’s western, formerly Labor seat of Fowler, the only true independent success of 2022, Dai Le, who defeated former NSW Labor premier, Kristina Keneally, who was parachuted in from Sydney’s uber-exclusive Scotland Island, did so as a migrant and small businesswoman, with a family and grassroots support.
Obviously the Liberal Party has to repair its broken state organisations but it also has to do the reshaping without falling back on the stupid ideological and factional battles and look to a longer-term goal.
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increased subsidies for electric cars coming
Anthony Albanese will introduce policies to boost the take-up of electric vehicles but will stop short of imposing a ban on petrol or diesel cars as part of his plan to tackle climate change.
The Labor Party will introduce tax benefits to reduce the price of electric cars and plug-in hybrids, forecasting that 89 per cent of new car sales will be electric by 2030.
The new government will also make it easier to charge electric cars by setting up hundreds of new charging stations so drivers can easily travel long distances.
Although the cost of buying an electric car puts many potential buyers off, they are much cheaper to run than petrol cars and will save drivers money over the long term.
By making electric cars cheaper and more convenient, Mr Albanese hopes there will be 3.8 million on the road by 2030.
Labor will also invest in boosting the electricity grid so it can cope with a big increase in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
Former Energy Minister Angus Taylor claimed the plan would push up power prices by $560 a year, an outlandish claim that was quickly de-bunked by experts - but there could be some smaller short-term price rises.
It remains to be seen whether the Greens will pursue their ambitious policies - such as banning petrol cars - in the senate where they can use their balance of power position as leverage on Labor.
Electric cars will be exempt from a five per cent import tariff that would reduce the cost of a $40,000 vehicle by $2,000.
They will also be exempt from fringe benefits tax which will encourage workplaces to give their employees electric cars.
The move would result in savings of up to $8,700 for a $50,000 vehicle.
The tax cuts will be introduced on July 1 this year and will be reviewed in three years.
Electric cars will be exempt from a five per cent import tariff . They will also be exempt from fringe benefits tax
Labor will also invest $39.3 million, matched by the NRMA, to deliver 117 fast charging stations on highways across Australia.
This will provide charging stations at an average interval of 150km on major roads, allowing Aussies to drive from Adelaide to Perth or Darwin to Broome with an electric car.
The result of these policies is that electric vehicles will make up 89 per cent of new car sales by 2030, with 15 per cent of all cars on the road by then being zero-emission.
According to this forecast, 3.8million vehicles on the road will be electric by 2030.
There is no electric vehicle sales target but Labor will overhaul the Commonwealth fleet to make it electric.
Labor dropped former leader Bill Shorten's plans to introduce average emissions standards for new vehicles.
In Australia just 1.5 per cent of cars sold are electric and plug-in hybrid. This compares to 17 per cent in the United Kingdom and 85 per cent in Norway.
Mr Albanese predicts some 5,960 jobs will be created in the electric car industry.
Electric Vehicle Council of Australia CEO Behyad Jafari has welcomed Mr Albanese's plans.
He said: 'It's refreshing to hear a federal political party recognise the massive potential electric vehicles provide for Australia and start to outline a plan to realise those benefits.
'There are some very positive and welcome steps already outlined. But key among them is to work with industry to develop a well overdue National Electric Vehicle Strategy.
'A great sign of things to come.'
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
