Showing posts with label #MorrisonGovernmentFAIL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #MorrisonGovernmentFAIL. Show all posts
Monday 18 March 2019
Even as it devours itself the Morrison Coalition Government is determined to impose its warped 1950s ideology on women and girls
On 8 March
2019 the United Nations Human Rights
Council of which Australia is a member began its general debate on the promotion and
protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural
rights, including the right to development.
On that day
the Australian Human Rights Law Centre said that the [UN] High
Commissioner highlighted the importance of the right to social security and of
recognising the value of unpaid care work in addressing women’s
inequality. Yet the Australian Government was steadily undermining its
social security system and making life harder for many women. Currently
it was imposing its punitive ParentsNext programme on single mothers accessing
social security.
And Mexico
and Finland, speaking on behalf of a group of countries, stated
that human rights bodies’ remedies must fulfil the rights of victims, and
include adequate, effective and prompt reparation. Women and girls in
humanitarian settings were particularly vulnerable to human rights violations
such as sexual and gender based violence, human trafficking and forced abortions.
After a motion
was put forward in relation to Mexico and Finland’s concerns 57 countries including the United Kingdom signed the subsequent statement.
According to SBS News on 11 March 2019 the motion broadly called for greater
accountability for human rights violations against women and girls and the
statement proposed greater implementation
of 'policies and legislation that respect women and girls' right to bodily
autonomy'. This included guaranteed
universal protection of women's sexual and reproductive health, comprehensive
sexuality education and access to safe abortion.
Australia
refused to be a signatory to this official UN statement.
BuzzFeed was given to understand by a
departmental spokesperson that the Australian delegation, coordinated by
the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, did not join the statement because
it called for access to safe abortion without referencing that this access
should be consistent with the law.
Why was
reference to existing law so important to Australia?
The
highlighted section in the Human Rights Law Centre news release below gives
the answer.
The Morrison
Government - dominated as it is by middle-aged far-right men - refuses to open the door to debate on decriminalising abortion in
the last three states which still retain a prohibition of abortion in their
criminal codes.
Apparently
Scott Morrison is averse to any debate on this issue, as in his own high-handed, paternalistic words “I don’t think it is good for our
country”.
Human Rights Law Centre, Morrison Government missing in action
at UN on International Women's Day, 9 March 2019:
The Morrison Government
has failed to sign on to an International Women’s Day statement at the United
Nations calling for access to safe abortions, comprehensive sexuality education
and sexual reproductive health.
As recently as last
week, in a speech to the UN Human Rights
Council,
the Australian Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, said the number one guiding
principle for the Government's time on the Council was "gender
equality". Yet when 57 countries came together on International Women's
Day to support a motion proposed by Finland and Mexico, the Morrison Government
chose not to back it.
Edwina MacDonald, a
Legal Director at the Human Rights Law Centre, who is attending the session in
Geneva, said it was extremely disappointing to see the Australian
Government once again fail to live up to its promises at the UN.
“Being able to make
choices about our own bodies and access reproductive health are absolutely
essential to achieving gender equality. No government can truly support gender
equality and human rights without supporting access to safe abortions and
reproductive rights," said Ms MacDonald.
In Australia, abortion is still in the criminal statute
books in New
South Wales, South
Australia and Western Australia. This is a recognised form of sex
discrimination in international human rights law. The criminalisation of
abortion harms women by making it harder to access safe and compassionate
reproductive healthcare.
"The Morrison
Government holds a really important role on the Human Rights
Council, it should be using its voice at the UN to stand up for the rights of
women all around the world. Instead we get hollow words here in Geneva and a
failure to lift its game back home. It's so disappointing," said Ms
MacDonald.
Friday 8 March 2019
Something to think about - Part One
September 2015 to January 2019 |
8501.0 - Retail Trade, Australia, Jan 2019 |
* All images from Twitter.
Twenty-eight climate scientists, academics & former heads of energy companies tell the world that Morrison and Co are lying to the Australian people
“Proud to be a signatory to this statement from @climatecouncil. Between us, we have devoted 600 years to this issue. Last week's announcements are not enough to get us to meet our lousy Paris Target. That target, by the way, isn't even nearly enough to ensure a safe climate.” [Tim Baxter, Twitter, 4 March 2019]
Climate Council, 4 March 2019:
Dozens of the country’s
leading climate and energy experts – including climate scientists, academics
and former heads of energy companies – have signed a joint statement stressing
that without further action Australia
will not meet its 2030 pollution reduction target.
Wednesday 6 March 2019
What one woman from Australia intends to tell the United Nations about the Morrison Government's war on low income women with young children
“We know that
poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy
harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness, but don't expect us
to do anything about it. We are sorry
for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we
will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that
you are much safer as you are.” [George Orwell, 1933, “Down and Out inParis and London”]
If ever Australia’s
captains of industry and, those elected members of the two conservative political
parties they support. ever knew a period of poverty it is now so long ago that an
abundance of personal income has driven all thought of it from their memories.
Thus it takes
a lone woman to bring to the notice of the United Nations some of the economic and human rights injustices
perpetrated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison & Co on single mothers with young children.
The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 March 2019:
Imagine having to get
someone else to provide proof you aren’t shagging anyone on a regular basis and
that even if you are, you aren't getting financial support. Your own word isn't
good enough any more.
That’s what happens to
single mothers in Australia if they want to be eligible for welfare.
There’s a lot that goes
wrong for single mums in Australia. They already have difficult lives, managing
kids, jobs and life on their own. And on top of all that, there are a whole
range of compliance tasks in order to get benefits, from signing endless forms
to applying for a ridiculous number of jobs, a huge task all on its own.
It's a miserable life
for a single mother on welfare in Australia, so hard that one woman, Juanita
McLaren, has decided to take her complaint all the way to the United Nations.
She says the way Australia treats single mums breaches human rights and now,
the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, will
be hearing from her directly at a UN Women’s conference in New York next week.
In fact, he will be
presenting by her side. Huge honour and some of us might have put that on our
credit cards. She had to crowdfund to get there.
McLaren, who has also
had to get proof she’s not in a financially-bound relationship in order to be
eligible for Newstart, worked full-time when her kids were little. Then her
husband, who was the primary carer, left the family and now lives overseas.
“I just hit a wall and
headed into casual work because there was always something happening with the
kids.”
She had to ditch her
part-time studies because she couldn’t manage financially on Newstart even
though her studies were a pathway to getting better work.
Benefits were erratic
and in one case, took eight weeks to arrive – finally some money arrived on
Christmas Eve. She entered the wrong year on a form (who else has mixed up
their birth year with the current year?) and was told it couldn’t be corrected
over the phone.
It was all the little
things on top of the poverty that motivated her to make a complaint.
In some respects,
McLaren is fortunate. She’s had steady part-time work for a couple of years
now, which is slightly seasonal. She remains registered for Newstart because of
the off-season.
But it’s the constant
battle with Centrelink, with managing her family and money, with being forced
to apply for hopeless work she doesn’t want, that forced McLaren to turn to the
UN. So far, it’s the Australian government and the UN in a deadlock about
what’s harmful to single mothers.
For years now, Terese
Edwards, the CEO of the National Council for Single Mothers, has campaigned for
better financial support for her members. Edwards helped McLaren write her
complaint, which was the first individual complaint using the optional protocol
of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women; and will
be at her side when she speaks at the conference…..
Cassandra Goldie, the
CEO of the Australian Council of Social Services, says single mothers are easy
to target and easy to vilify.
She says it’s not just
impoverishment that has been relentless, it is the way in which both autonomy
and agency have been removed from single mothers in direct contrast to what’s
happening in the aged care sector. And she’s not just talking about the
ridiculous requirement to get someone else to guarantee your relationship
status.
Here’s some shocking
news: One in three sole parents and their children are living in poverty
according to the latest ACOSS-UNSW Poverty report. In just two years, the rate
of poverty amongst unemployed single parents rose from 35 per cent to 59 per
cent.
“I don’t know how you do
it!” we say to them, and in the next breath: “Here, let me make it harder for
you.”
This attitude is
stitched into the heart of a welfare program called ParentsNext, which can
require some single parents on the parenting payment to report to the state
that they have taken their children to improving activities, such as swimming
lessons or story time at the local library.
If they don’t comply,
they can have their payments cut off, often with no notice, and no clear line
of appeal. The arbiter of complaints is also the provider, the company
privately contracted by the government to administer the program.
Some mothers have
reported being asked to provide photographs as proof they have attended the
child-focused activities. Others report the provider phoning the library, or
the local pool, to verify their attendance.
Librarians as monitors,
swimming instructors as social police: it’s a level of surveillance and control
that would make Orwell twitch.
The program has faced a
barrage of criticism from welfare groups, and was the subject of a Senate
inquiry last week.
Peter Davidson, senior
adviser to the Australian Council of Social Service, says the program
was previously "less heavy handed”.
I spoke to one single
mother-of-three this week, 32-year-old Sarah, who had a positive experience of
the program in its previous incarnation. She had a good case worker who helped
her into a small business course, assisting her to set up her own
florist’s business. Now she is earning some income and intends to get off the
parenting payment as soon as possible.
But in July 2018, the
Coalition government (then led by Malcolm Turnbull) extended the program from a
smaller pilot to about 70,000 single parents, 95 per cent of them women. In its
expanded form, the “targeted compliance framework”, which applies to other
payments such as Newstart, was imposed on ParentsNext. It is language that
would make Orwell’s fingers itch.
Davidson says about a
fifth of single parents on the program have had their payments suspended.
Parents are put on
participation plans, ranging from vocational training to taking their children
to a playgroup or "story time". This muddies the waters between the
practical objective of helping women back into work after the child-rearing and
the insidious policing of their parenting.
The result is
bureaucrats invigilating parents from a moral, child-welfare stance, making
payments dependent on proof that parenting is being done correctly.
This is a qualitative
difference from other “mutual obligation” welfare requirements, because it is
not about getting people off taxpayer money. It is predicated on the assumption
that parents (read: mothers) on welfare must not be as “good” as other parents.
These measures assume
that the poor have different social standards than the middle class, who know
the correct way to nurture children, with story time and swimming classes.
They are also cruelly
detached from the chaotic reality of raising small children, where leaving the
house with everyone fed and clothed is itself an achievement, but one that
almost never runs to time. Some days, the bad days, it doesn’t happen at all.
This kind of
compliance-and-penalty system stems from the belief that the poor are not just
unlucky, but they are fundamentally different from other people; that they lack
the correct values, and the rectitude to pull themselves up. This is not
so far from the Victorian-era belief that Orwell upturned with his memoir: that
poverty is a moral failing.
This attitude can exist
only when you wilfully ignore the fact that the majority of Australians will
rely on government support at some stage in their lives, with millions of us
slipping in and out of the safety net as our circumstances change.....
Australian Parliament, Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Inquiry into ParentsNext, including its trial and subsequent broader rollout, public hearing, Melbourne, 27 February 2019, excerpts:
Australian Parliament, Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Inquiry into ParentsNext, including its trial and subsequent broader rollout, public hearing, Melbourne, 27 February 2019, excerpts:
Ms
Edwards [Chief
Executive Officer, National Council of Single Mothers and their Children]: It
is unfettered power. It is shown up in a lot of ways, even as to participants'
knowledge about signing a participation plan. The participation plan is like
the blueprint for the engagement. You have your goals on your participation
plan and then, from that, you have the flow of your activities that are meant
to support those participation goals. In theory, you're allowed 10 thinking
days after meeting and developing your participation plan. What we discovered
in our survey which supported what women were telling us was that they would
sign it in that meeting, and they would sign it because they were so compliant
because the person they were sitting in front of had the power to affect their
life, in terms of their payment but also in terms of their commitments. What is
not well known by participants is: there is no minimum weekly activity
requirement, like mutual obligations. But, because women are so aware of those
mutual obligations, they start thinking that they have a similar sort of level
that they must do, and they won't upset the provider because the provider can
determine the activities; they can breach them—and, as Jenny said, in the blink
of an eye they can breach. If the participant disagrees with the breach, the
person who umpires that is the provider—they decide whether they have operated
appropriately or not. There is not one independent body that manages or
oversees that process. So that is why women are compliant—they're in this, and
it's like they've gone down this slippery slope into hell and the only way they
can come out is if they sign and do what's required. They won't upset a
provider.
Ms
Davidson: They don't even know about that 10-day period. With the lack of
information that people are provided, they don't know about the 10-day thinking
period.
Senator
WATT: The way the system is supposed to work is that people are supposed to
have 10 days to have a think about the proposed plan before they commit to it.
Ms
Edwards: Which implies that it's two people having a mutually equal
conversation about: 'What would actually help you get to where you need to go?'
Senator
WATT: Yes, but, in fact, many people feel pressured to sign there and then?
Ms Edwards: Yes, and then what else is
happening, which is where the providers are working outside of their
guidelines, is that they will unilaterally change activities and times.
Senator
WATT: The providers will?
Ms
Edwards: Yes. And they will do that in writing, they will do that in phone
calls and they will do that in texts......
Ms
Buckland [Private
capacity]: I'll give you an example, and it's a complicated one, because there
are many issues with it, but I was contacted by a woman who had a newborn
baby—she'd had it the day before. She should be exempt from ParentsNext—
CHAIR:
It's supposed to apply at the very most when the baby's six months.
Ms
Buckland: Yes. So it's from 34 weeks pregnant to the child being six months
that there's an exemption. She wasn't able to speak to anyone about her
exemption. She was still expected to mark her attendance at an activity; she
was expected to attend an appointment one-week post birth. I think that there
are obviously inherent issues with that kind of system. Her payments were
suspended.
CHAIR:
With a newborn?
Ms
Buckland: With a newborn baby......
Prof. Croucher [President, Australian Human Rights
Commission]:….
The
commission's submission identifies five key problems with the compliance
framework of ParentsNext. I will briefly remark on two of these problems. First,
the detrimental effect of punitive compliance can be unjustifiably harsh. Many
of Australia's most valuable parents and children rely on the parenting payment
to afford basic day-to-day essentials. This includes single mothers living on
or below the poverty line. Yet, under ParentsNext, these struggling families
face automatic payment suspensions. This can happen for a single instance of
noncompliance with a program requirement, despite having a reasonable excuse
like a sick child. In the worst cases, their parenting payment can be reduced
or cancelled.
Without
money to provide adequate food, clothing and shelter for your family, how can
human rights be realised? How can there be human dignity? Poverty erodes the
enjoyment of many human rights, such as access to education, health care and
participation in public life. The current operation of ParentsNext risks
further entrenching poverty and inequality in Australia. It already risks
reducing a parent's resilience to the complex challenges they already face,
including homelessness, domestic violence and mental illness.
The
commission is also concerned that there are insufficient safeguards to prevent
inappropriate compliance action. For example, some punitive financial measures
are automatic. Others can be made by private commercial service providers
rather than by public officials.
Secondly,
the claimed success of ParentsNext is not appropriately evidence based. On the
basis of the evaluation of the program to date, it is not possible to conclude
that the program is achieving its aims or that it has had a positive effect
which outweighs the detriment of undermining the right to social security. For
example, the department's evaluation of the trial program relied heavily on a
survey of participants, but it didn't disclose how many people participated in
the relevant survey, and it's unclear whether the sample size was statistically
significant. The design and methodology of the survey were not disclosed. The
department's evaluation also draws many positive conclusions about the efficacy
of the program—for example, that it increases chances of employment. However,
many of these conclusions are based on the opinions of survey participants
rather than on objective data.
Lastly,
the commission is seriously concerned about the discriminatory impacts of the
program. ParentsNext is only applied to a small and targeted proportion of
people receiving the parenting payment. Women and Indigenous Australians are
disproportionately affected, with women comprising approximately 96 per cent of
the 68,000 participants and Aboriginal and Torres Islander people approximately
19 per cent.
The
human right to social security should be enjoyed equally by all, regardless of
sex, race or age. Australia's domestic legislation, such as the Racial
Discrimination Act 1975 at the Commonwealth level, also protects the right to
equality and nondiscrimination. It is unfair that the parents who are required
to participate in ParentsNext are at risk of losing essential support, while
the majority of parenting payment recipients can access their social security
without meeting the additional onerous obligations of ParentsNext.....
Tuesday 5 March 2019
The graphs that expose Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's climate change policy propaganda
Australia has a monumental problem.
Since September 2013 the Australian Government, first under Liberal prime ministers Abbott and Turnbull and then under current Australian Prime Minster and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison, has failed to implement effective national climate change mitigation measures.
This has left the nation with an est. 695 million tonnes (or 2.9 billion tonnes) of greenhouse gas emissions it has to reduce/abate by 2021-2030 in order to meet its international obligations.
Ever since he successfully ousted the last Liberal prime minister in a 'palace coup' Morrison has been telling the world that this country will meet its Paris Agreement targets "at a canter" and that national greenhouse gas annual emissions are falling.
Both he and his ministers talk of greenhouse gas emission levels falling per capita or per head of population. All that means is that the Australian population is growing at a slightly faster rate than national emission levels are rising. It doesn't mean greenhouse gas emissions are falling.
On 25 February 2019 Morrison announced his Climate Solutions Package - mostly a rehash of old Liberal-Nationals climate policies and as yet unrealised infrastructure projects - which he rather misleadingly states will "reduce greenhouse gases across the economy".
After this 'solutions' initiatives announcement the Minister for Energy and Liberal MP for Hume Angus Taylor went on national television claiming Australia's national greenhouse gas emissions had fallen by "over 1 per cent" - omitting to point out that this quarter to quarter seasonally adjusted weather normalised change did not result in an overall decrease in total greenhouse gas emissions for the year to September 2018.
In August 2015 the then Abbott Government, in which Scott Morrison was a cabinet minister, also misspoke when it told the United Nations that its "direct action" plan was successful and that:
The target is a significant progression beyond Australia’s 2020 commitment to cut emissions by five per cent below 2000 levels (equivalent to 13 per cent below 2005 levels). The target approximately doubles Australia’s rate of emissions reductions, and significantly reduces emissions per capita and per unit of GDP, when compared to the 2020 target. Across a range of metrics, Australia’s target is comparable to the targets of other advanced economies. Against 2005 levels, Australia’s target represents projected cuts of 50 to 52 per cent in emissions per capita by 2030 and 64 to 65 per cent per unit of GDP by 2030. [my yellow highlighting]
For this to be a genuine reduction which will help alleviate the effects of climate change it means this 695 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions that are in the earth's atmosphere right now have to be removed by abatement action on Australia's part between 2019 and 2030.
At the United Nations 2018 Climate Action Summit (COP24) it was pointed out to all member countries that attempting to use old credits from the Kyoto Protocol as carryovers when accounting for ongoing emission rates will not actually bring down current global emissions levels.
However, the Morrison Government is using old carryover credits from the Labor Government years 2008-2012 to reduce Australia's own abatement commitment by est. 368 million tonnes - bringing it down to only a 328 million tonnes reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030. Less than half of what the Australian Government actually committed to under the Paris Agreement.
The federal Dept of Environment and Energy's own data gives a more honest picture of where Australia stands on bringing down greenhouse gas emissions since 2013 than does Morrison's dodgy accounting tricks.
4. Trend
emissions levels are inclusive of all sectors of the economy, including Land
Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF). Removing LULUCF from caluclations will result in higher trend levels.
|
Only three of the eight sectors in this graph show any real improvement since 1990 and even these become somewhat static after 2013.
|
When it comes to the year 2018 from 1 January to 30 September, the Financial
Review reported on 28 February 2019 that:
Increases in greenhouse
gas emissions from growing liquefied natural gas exports, although offset by
lower emissions from electricity, pushed Australia's overall carbon pollution
up by nearly 1 per cent in the year to September….
Greenhouse gas emissions
were up by 4.6 millon tonnes, or 0.9 per cent, in the year to September last
year to 536 million tonnes, according to the quarterly update of Australia's
National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.
The gains from big
declines in emissions from the electricity sector (3.2 per cent) and
agriculture (3 per cent) were negated by the 5.8 per cent increase in mining
and manufacturing, especially LNG exports (up 19.7 per cent), steel production
(up 10 per cent) and aluminium production (up 5.5 per cent).
"Growth in LNG also
strongly impacted fugitive emissions due to the flaring and venting of methane
and carbon dioxide. An increase in 10 per cent in steel production in
particular affected industrial process emissions," the report said…..
The bottom line is that in September 2013 Australia's greenhouse gas emissions stood at 515.1 Mt of CO2-e, having fallen from a high of 617.5 Mt of CO2-e in March 2007.
However, emissions have steadily risen in the years following 2013 until in September 2016 they had reached 527.2 Mt of CO2-e, by September 2017 533.3 Mt of CO2-e, by March 2018 535.8 Mt of CO2-e and by September 2018 our national emissions were 536 Mt CO2-e.
No matter how many ways Morrison Government spokespersons attempt to present the figures, the fact remains that Australia's national greenhouse gas emissions began to fall steadily between 2007 and 2013 but once the Abbott Government removed the price on carbon and altered other Labor climate change policies they began to rise again and they are still rising.
To date the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government has marched this country backwards towards national greenhouse gas emission levels not found since the end of 2012.
How much further will they send us back in time if they govern for another three years? Will the national emissions total in 2022 be in excess of 545 million tonnes? A higher national total than that of the year the Abbott Government promised the United Nations it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: September 2018 Incorporating emissions from the NEM up to December 2018 can be found here.
However, emissions have steadily risen in the years following 2013 until in September 2016 they had reached 527.2 Mt of CO2-e, by September 2017 533.3 Mt of CO2-e, by March 2018 535.8 Mt of CO2-e and by September 2018 our national emissions were 536 Mt CO2-e.
No matter how many ways Morrison Government spokespersons attempt to present the figures, the fact remains that Australia's national greenhouse gas emissions began to fall steadily between 2007 and 2013 but once the Abbott Government removed the price on carbon and altered other Labor climate change policies they began to rise again and they are still rising.
To date the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government has marched this country backwards towards national greenhouse gas emission levels not found since the end of 2012.
How much further will they send us back in time if they govern for another three years? Will the national emissions total in 2022 be in excess of 545 million tonnes? A higher national total than that of the year the Abbott Government promised the United Nations it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The Quarterly Update of Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory: September 2018 Incorporating emissions from the NEM up to December 2018 can be found here.
Monday 25 February 2019
Happy 49th to our local member, Nationals MP for Page Kevin Hogan
Happy 49th Newspoll, Kevin John Hogan.
That's forty-nine published Newspoll surveys in a row in which the Coaltion has failed to pull ahead of Labor on a Two-Party Preferred (TPP) basis.
The last time the federal government - of which you have been a member since September 2013 under prime ministers Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison - has been ahead of Labor was on 27 June 2016.
That lasted a full thirty-five five days because by 30 August the gloss had worn off that July federal election win and you could only reach TPP 50 points in the August 2016 Newspoll.
In late September of that year the Coalition lost even that small comfort as Labor began to out poll the Turnbull Government and then the Morrison Government.
If you are wondering why this is happening the answer is easy to find. Turn a few pages of Hansard.
Every government backbencher, yourself included, votes on the floor of Parliament not in the interests of their electorate or that of the nation but in support of the hard-right ideology which dominates the Coalition Cabinet to the exclusion of even basic commonsense.
You have nobody to blame but yourselves.
So enjoy your 49th Kevin because your 50th is likely to be close on its heels.
*Image from Greeting Card Universe
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Newspoll survey of 1,582 respondents on
21-24 February 2019 was released on Monday 25 February:
Primary Vote – Labor 39 percent (unchanged) to Liberal-Nationals
37 per cent (unchanged), The Greens 9 per cent, One Nation 5 per cent.
Two Party Preferred (TPP) - Labor 53 per cent (unchanged) to Liberal-Nationals
Coalition 47 per cent (unchanged)
Voter Net Satisfaction With Leaders’
Performance – Prime Minister
Scott Morrison -6 points and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten -18 points.
If a federal election had been held on 24 February 2019 based of the preference flow in July 2016 then Labor would have won government with a majority 82 seats to the Coalition's 63 seats in the House of Representatives.
Is the Great Barrier Reef not dying quickly enough for the Morrison Government and Australian Environment Minister Melissa Price? Are they trying to hasten its death?
Australia's Great Barrier Reef has been under threat from increased human activity for generations.
Sediment runoff due to land clearing and agrigultual activity, pollutants from commercial shipping, unlawful discharge of waste water from mining operations and coral bleaching due to climate change.
North Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation is a port authority responsible for facilities at Weipa, Abbot Point, Mackay and Hay Point trading ports, and the non-trading port of Maryborough.
Three of these ports are in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. One of these, Hay Point is reportedly among the largest coal export points in the world.
This is what the Morrison Government's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has given this corporation permission to do.............
The Guardian, 20 February 2019:
The Great Barrier
Reef Marine Park Authority has approved the dumping of more than 1m tonnes
of dredge spoil near the reef, using a loophole in federal laws that were
supposed to protect the marine park.
The Greens senator Larissa
Waters has called for the permit – which allows maintenance dredging to be
carried out over 10 years at Mackay’s Hay Point port and the sludge to be
dumped within the marine park’s boundaries – to be revoked.
“The last thing the reef
needs is more sludge dumped on it, after being slammed by the floods recently,”
Waters said. “One million tonnes of dumping dredged sludge into world heritage
waters treats our reef like a rubbish tip.”
Acting on concerns from
environmentalists, the federal government banned the disposal of dredge spoil
near the reef in 2015. But the ban applied only to capital dredging.
Maintenance work at ports – designed to remove sediment from shipping lanes as
it accumulates – is not subject to it.
On 29 January the marine
park authority granted conditional approval for North Queensland Bulk Ports to
continue to dump maintenance dredge spoil within the park’s boundaries. The
permit was issued just days before extensive
flooding hit north and central Queensland, spilling large amounts of
sediment into the marine environment.
Waters said the
distinction between capital and maintenance dredging made little difference to
the reef…..
North Queensland Bulk
Ports, in a statement posted online shortly after the permit was issued, said
it had to meet conditions to protect the marine environment. The ports
authority said its dumping plan was peer-reviewed and considered best practice.
“Just like roads,
shipping channels require maintenance to keep ports operating effectively,” the
ports authority said. “Maintenance dredging involves relocating sediment which
travels along the coast and accumulates over the years where our shipping
operation occurs.
“Importantly, our
assessment reports have found the risks to protected areas including the Great
Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and
sensitive habitats are predominantly low with some temporary, short-term
impacts to (bottom-dwelling) habitat possible.
“The permits allow for
the long-term, sustainable management of maintenance dredging at the Port and
will safeguard the efficient operations of one of Australia’s most critical
trading ports.”
Maintenance dredging
will begin in late March. Initial dredging will take about 40 days.
BBC, 22 February 2019:
Australia plans to dump
one million tonnes of sludge in the Great Barrier Reef.
Despite strict laws on
dumping waste, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) gave the
go-ahead.
A loophole was found -
the laws don't apply to materials generated from port maintenance work.
It comes one week after
flood water from Queensland spread into the reef, which scientists say will
"smother" the coral.
The industrial residue
is dredged from the bottom of the sea floor near Hay Point Port - one of the
world's largest coal exports and a substantial economic source for the country....
It's just "another
nail in the coffin" for the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier
Reef, which
is already under stress due to climate change, according to Dr Simon Boxall
from the National Oceanography Centre Southampton.
"If they are
dumping it over the coral reef itself, it will have quite a devastating effect.
The sludge is basically blanketing over the coral.
"The coral relies
on the algae, that's what give them their colour and what helps them feed -
without this partnership the coral will suffer dramatically."
Dr Boxall says his
worries about sludge-dumping are short-term - with the current Australian
summer a time for "rapid algae growth".....
Dr Boxall says the
impact will be lessened if the sludge is taken far enough offshore, but that it
will still contain high amounts of harmful materials such as trace metals.
"If it's put into
shallow water it will smother sea life," he says.
"It's important
they get it right.
"It'll cost more
money but that's not the environment's problem - that's the port authorities'
problem."
Last year,
Australia pledged
A$500 million (£275m) to protect the Great Barrier Reef - which has
lost 30% of its coral due to bleaching linked to rising sea temperatures and
damage from crown-of-thorns starfish.
Monday 11 February 2019
Morrison & Co off to the Australian High Court to defend the indefensible - Centrelink's robo-debt
The
Guardian, 6
February 2019:
Centrelink has
now wiped, reduced or written off 70,000 “robo-debts”, new figures show, as the
government’s automated welfare compliance system scheme faces a landmark court
challenge.
Victoria Legal Aid on
Wednesday announced a challenge to the way Centrelink evaluates whether a
person owes a welfare debt under the $3.7bn system. It will argue the “crude
calculations” created using tax office information are insufficient to assess a
person’s earnings and, therefore, are unlawful….
Victoria Legal Aid’s
court challenge was also welcomed by the Australian Council of Social Service
chief executive Cassandra Goldie, who said the scheme was a “devastating abuse
of government power…..
Alternative Law Journal. Emeritus Professor of Law (Syd Uni)
Terry Carney, Robo-debt
illegality: The seven veils of failed guarantees of the rule of law?, 17
December 2018:
The
government's on-line-compliance (robo-debt) initiative unlawfully and
unethically seeks to place an onus on supposed debtors to ‘disprove’ a
data-match debt or face the prospects of the amount being placed in the hands
of debt collectors. It is unlawful because Centrelink, not the supposed debtor,
bears the legal onus of ‘proving’ the existence and size of any debt not
accepted by the supposed debtor. And it
is unethical because the alleged debts are either very greatly inflated or even
non-existent (as found by the Ombudsman), and
because the might of government is used to frighten people
into paying up – a practice rightly characterised as a form of extortion. How
could government, accountability avenues, and civil society have enabled such a
state of illegality to go publicly unidentified for almost 18 months and still
be unremedied at the date of writing?
This
article suggests the answer to that question lies in serious structural
deficiencies and oversights in the design and operation of accountability and
remedial avenues at seven different levels:
1. In a lack of standards to prevent
rushed government design and introduction of machine learning (‘smart’) systems
of decision-making;
2. In a lack of diligence by
accountability agencies such as the Ombudsman or Audit Office;
3. In a lack of ethical standards of
administration or compliance by Centrelink with model litigant protocols;
4. In a lack of transparency of the
first of two possible tiers of Administrative Appeals Tribunal review (AAT1),
resulting in a lack of protections against gaming of review by way of agency
non-acquiescence or strategic non-contestation;
5. In a lack of guarantees of
independence and funding security to enable first line Legal Aid or community
legal centre/welfare rights bodies (CLC/WRC) to test or call out illegality in
the face of thwarting of challenges by Centrelink settling of potential test
cases;
6. In a lack of sufficient pro-bono
professional or civil society capacity to mount ‘second line’ test case
litigation or other systemic advocacy; and
7. In tolerance, especially in some
media quarters, of a ‘culture’ of political and public devaluing of the
significance of breaches of the rule of law and rights of vulnerable welfare
clients.
It
is argued that a multifaceted set of initiatives are required if such breaches
of legal and ethical standards are to be avoided in the future.
Why
is it clear that robo-debt is unlawful?
The
pivot for this article is not so much that Centrelink lacks legal authority for
raising virtually all debts based on a robo-debt ‘reverse onus’ methodology
rather than use its own information gathering powers – for this remains
essentially uncontested. Rather
it is extraordinary that this went unpublicised and uncorrected for over two
years. So first a few words about the illegality as it affects working age
payments such as Newstart (NSA) and Youth allowance (YA).
Robo-debt
is unlawful because Centrelink is always responsible for ‘establishing’ the
existence and size of supposed social security debts. This is because the
legislation provides that a debt arises only if another section creates
a debt, such
as one based on the difference between the amount paid and the amount to which
a person is entitled. And
because Centrelink bears a ‘practical onus’ to establish this. If Centrelink
cannot prove up a debt from its own enquiries or information supplied to it,
the status quo (no debt/lawful receipt of payments) applies. This
has been the law since 1984 when the full Federal Court decided McDonald. Unless
the alleged debtor is one of the rare employees who had only a single job paid
at a constant fortnightly pay rate, Centrelink fails to discharge this onus
when its robo-debt software generates a debt by apportioning total
earnings reported to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) from particular jobs to
calculate average earnings. Robo-debt treats fluctuating earnings as if
that income was earned evenly at the same rate in each and every fortnight.
Mathematically this is wrong because an average for a fluctuating
variable never speaks to its constituent parts. And it is
the actual income for constituent fortnights that as a matter of law
is crucial for calculating the rate of a working age payment such as NSA or YA.
Read the full
article here.
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