“Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” [Anon, 2016]
Saturday 4 August 2018
Friday 3 August 2018
Supermarket giant Coles’ “bagflip’’ did not go down well and the company was stopped in its tracks
This was typical of the response to the Coles Supermarkets Australia Pty Ltd end of July 2018 announcement that is was indefinitely suspending a full ban on the use of free plastic shopping bags in its stores.
The Daily Examiner, 2 August 2018, p.13:
Supermarket giant Coles’
“bagflip’’ in continuing to hand out free reusable plastic bags is a perplexing
move.
After spending the past
month getting its customers used to the idea there would be no more single-use
bags, Coles management has caved in to the tantrums of some customers unable to
get their head around the notion of doing something to help the environment or
pay up.
Not surprisingly the
environmentalists are outraged.
For a start the
so-called reusable plastic bags are just a step up from the tissue-thin,
single-use bags clogging landfill and choking marine wildlife.
The smart thing about
the proposed bag ban was that the supermarket was using a price signal to
reinforce the change, a language its bargain-hunting customers were sure to
understand.
No longer.
The customer has come
first, ahead of the environment, good planning and common sense.
Without a price tag,
customers are going to treat the reusable bags just like the old ones, which
will add a splash of colour to the litter.
It has the same logic as
trying to improve a child’s behaviour by giving in to its demand.
The “child” in this case
does spend millions of dollars in your store, but with Woolworths continuing to
charge the 15 cents for resuable bags, shoppers didn‘t have many options.
By midday on 2 August 2018 Coles reversed its backflip and set a new deadline for stores - 29 August 2018 is now the deadline for handouts of free reusable plastic shopping bags.
Hopefully by the beginning of 2019 even reuseable plastic bags will no longer be available for purchase.
NSW Roads & Maritime Services bungling and corrupt in 2018?
NSW Minister for Roads Maritime and Freight has a policy of sending IT jobs offshore?
With the
national unemployment rate running at 5.4 per cent nationally in June 2018 and
the New South Wales rate sitting at 4.8 per cent or 192,000 people, is the Minister for Roads Maritime and Freight & Nationals MP for Oxley Melinda Pavey secretly closing off employment opportunities for Australian information technology workers as a departmental cost-cutting measure?
These are not exactly the highest paying jobs in this country, averaging $46,000-$100,000 pa and, with the IT worker pool standing at est. 600,000+ nationally it is not as though there is an obvious scarcity of skilled workers available for hire.
So at first it was not easy to explain this......
The Daily Telegraph, 20 July 2018. P.2:
Leaked details of a
meeting between Roads and Maritime Services and seven companies bidding for a
$100 million IT contract contradict state government denials that it mandated
a 30 per cent quota of cut-price overseas workers.
The February 13 meeting,
convened by chief information officer Rob Putter, came six days after the RMS
called for tenders to provide IT services, on the condition that a “minimum” of
20 per cent of jobs would be sent overseas in the first year
and 30 per cent in the second year.
Three Indian firms, Tata
Consultancy Services, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra, attended the meeting along with
Fujitsu, Datacom, Accenture and Wollongong company itree, with 25 people in the
room and 18 dialling in.
A source who attended the
meeting said Mr Putter showed a PowerPoint slide titled RMS Pricing Principles
which stated the RMS was “seeking to achieve the lowest possible cost” to
provide the IT service.
The slide stated RMS’s
“target offshore resource utilisation” required 20 per cent of jobs offshore
in year one, 30 per cent in year two and a “measured ongoing approach
to increase offshore efforts” over the rest of the seven-year contract.
Photocopies of the slide
were provided to attendees, who “discussed at length ... the need to offshore
resources (jobs)”, the source said.
“The RMS personnel
stated that it was mandated by the (Roads) Minister that to achieve the lowest
price they need to seek offshore resources,” the source said.
“This clearly
makes a joke of the Minister’s denial that this tender mandated offshoring.” As
The Daily Telegraph revealed last week, the RMS had called for companies to
provide “development, testing, maintenance and service management for
transport-related software applications and in-the-field hardware”.…..
The RMS announced Mr
Putter’s resignation last week.
Despite NSW Government denials, the fact remains that it is highly likely that jobs were to be sourced overseas as the RMS IT operational budget blowout had reached $80 million in the 12 months to June 2018, following a $40 million blowout in the operational budget in the previous financial year.
It appears that Roads and Maritime Services has bungled its $1 billion IT systems upgrade with more bad news expected.
Dollars for mates?
Dollars for mates?
Crikey.com.au, 2 August 2018:
is under fire after six government
contracts, none of which went to public tender, were awarded to the company after
it hired former state roads minister
Duncan Gay.
The Daily Telegraph ($)
reports that the firm has been awarded contracts from the Roads
and Maritime Services agency worth over $4.46 million after hiring the former
department head as an “executive adviser” just weeks after Gay left parliament
in late 2017. The firm has reportedly hired at least 11 former Roads and
Maritime Services staff members, including two as directors, however Gay says
he has “not been involved in any RMS contracts that MU have won”.
Thursday 2 August 2018
NSW Roads & Maritime Services finally come clean: We don't give a damn about any of the concerns Woombah & Iluka residents have about our asphalt plant, it's only Pacific Complete's bottom line that matters
ROADS and Martime
Services has revealed it will build at least two asphalt batching plants near
the Pacific Highway, most likely between Tyndale and the Iluka turnoff, next
year.
Pacific Highway general
manager Bob Higgins said the RMS has pressed the pause button on construction
of one plant at Woombah, but the need to supply the Glenugie to Iluka Rd
turnoff section with 170,000 tonnes of asphalt would require two plants.
He said the RMS would
review the supply strategy for the manufacture and delivery of asphalt on the
stretch of highway upgrade after protests from the Woombah community.
But Mr Higgins said if push came to shove when the RMS
review decided on locations, residents’ objections would take second place to
the technical needs of the project. [my yellow highlighting]
What a travesty Pacific Highway Upgrade community consultations are cannot get much clearer than this.
I'm sure local residents will not be pleased to have their fears confirmed.
I'm sure local residents will not be pleased to have their fears confirmed.
Whether he meant to or not, Bob Higgins
has probably just cemented the proposed Woombah asphalt batching site as a March 2019 NSW
state election issue in the Clarence electorate for both the NSW National
Party and the Berejiklian Coalition Government.
No-one likes to be told their valid concerns - about environmental impact, road safety, air quality and potential reduction in tourism numbers which underpin the local economy - don't matter to the state government down in Sydney.
BACKGROUND
No-one likes to be told their valid concerns - about environmental impact, road safety, air quality and potential reduction in tourism numbers which underpin the local economy - don't matter to the state government down in Sydney.
BACKGROUND
Just how lazy is US President Donald J Trump?
On 30 July
2018 US President Donald J. Trump
decided to share with the world at a prodigious rate.
Ten ranting tweets in
two and a half hours about people, newspapers and law enforcemnt agencies on his personal enimies list.
When the media - driven
insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome - reveals internal deliberations of
our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk!
Very unpatriotic! Freedom of the press also comes with a responsibility to
report the news...
...accurately. 90% of
media coverage of my Administration is negative, despite the tremendously positive
results we are achieving, it’s no surprise that confidence in the media is at
an all time low! I will not allow our great country to be sold out by
anti-Trump haters in the...
...dying newspaper
industry. No matter how much they try to distract and cover it up, our country is
making great progress under my leadership and I will never stop fighting for
the American people! As an example, the failing New York Times...
...dying newspaper
industry. No matter how much they try to distract and cover it up, our country is
making great progress under my leadership and I will never stop fighting for
the American people! As an example, the failing New York Times...
...dying newspaper
industry. No matter how much they try to distract and cover it up, our country is
making great progress under my leadership and I will never stop fighting for
the American people! As an example, the failing New York Times...
...dying newspaper
industry. No matter how much they try to distract and cover it up, our country is
making great progress under my leadership and I will never stop fighting for
the American people! As an example, the failing New York Times...
...and the Amazon
Washington Post do nothing but write bad stories even on very positive
achievements - and they will never change!
There is No Collusion!
The Robert Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt, headed now by 17 (increased from 13,
including an Obama White House lawyer) Angry Democrats, was started by a
fraudulent Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC. Therefore, the
Witch Hunt is an illegal Scam!
Is Robert Mueller ever
going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump,
including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business
relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as
S.C.) & Comey is his close friend..
....Also, why is Mueller
only appointing Angry Dems, some of whom have worked for Crooked Hillary,
others, including himself, have worked for Obama....And why isn’t Mueller
looking at all of the criminal activity & real Russian Collusion on the
Democrats side-Podesta, Dossier?
This is a man who has been on Twitter for almost the entire 559 days of his presidency, on the golf course for about 24 per cent of those days and has also attended approximately 21 self-promotional rallies since his inauguration.
Where is he finding time to do the job he was elected to do?
On an average day he reportedly doesn't start his working day until 11am, takes an hour of private time before sitting down to an hour long lunch hour and is back in his residence by 6pm - that's just five hours a day at his desk on days he is not golfing or attending rallies.
Wednesday 1 August 2018
Turnbull Government prepares an end run around the Australian electorate?
In 1986 the Federal
Government couldn’t get the national electorate to accept the Australia
Card, a national identity card to be carried by all citizens.
Likewise in 2007 the wider electorate rejected the proposed Access Card, a national identity card with a unique personal identification number, which was to be linked to a centralised database expected to contain an unprecedented amount of personal and other information.
Federal Government also failed to have everyone embrace the idea of MyGov, a data sharing, one-stop digital portal for access to government services created in 2013. To date only 11.5 million people out of a population of over 24.9 million hold an account with MyGov.
Likewise in 2007 the wider electorate rejected the proposed Access Card, a national identity card with a unique personal identification number, which was to be linked to a centralised database expected to contain an unprecedented amount of personal and other information.
Federal Government also failed to have everyone embrace the idea of MyGov, a data sharing, one-stop digital portal for access to government services created in 2013. To date only 11.5 million people out of a population of over 24.9 million hold an account with MyGov.
When after three and a half years the
populace did not register in sufficient numbers for the so-called Personally Controlled Electronic Health
Record (PCEHR), an intrusive opt-in data retention system, government
changed tack.
It relabelled
PCEHR as My Health Record (MHR) in 2016 and broadened the number of agencies
which could access an individual’s personal/health information. Decreeing it would become
a mandatory data collection system applied to the entire Australian population,
with only a short an opt-out period prior to full program implementation1.
However, it
seems that the Turnbull Federal Government expects around 1.9 million people to
opt-out of or cancel their My Heath
Record in the next two months. Possibly with more cancellations to occur in
the future, as privacy and personal safety become issues due to the inevitable
continuation of MHR data breaches and the occurrence of unanticipated software vulnerabilities/failures.
So Turnbull
and his Liberal and Nationals cronies have a backup in place in 2018 called the Data
Sharing and Release Bill, which Introduces legislation to improve the
use and reuse of public sector data within government and with private
corporations outside of government, as well as granting access to and the
sharing of data on individuals and businesses that is currently otherwise prohibited.
The bill
also allows for the sharing of transaction, usage and product data
with service competitors and comparison services. An as yet unrealised provision which is currently being wrapped up in a pretty bow and called a consumer right - but one that is likely to be abused by the banking, finance, insurance, electricity/gas industry sectors.
The bill appears to override the federal privacy act where provisions are incompatible.
The bill appears to override the federal privacy act where provisions are incompatible.
This is a
bill voters have yet to see, because the Turnbull Government has not seen fit
to publish the bill’s full text. Only an
issues paper is available at present.
Notes:
1. Federal Government may have succeeded in retaining the personal details of every person who filled in the 2016 Census by permanently retaining these details and linking this information to their future Census information in order to track people overtime for the rest of their lives, but this win for government as Big Brother was reliant on stealth in implementation and was limited in what it could achieve at the time.
Because not everyone ended up with a genuine unique identification key as an unknown number of individual citizens and permanent residents (possibly well in excess of half a million souls) as acts of civil disobedience deliberately filled in the national survey forms with falsified information or managed to evade filling in a form altogether.
About water and belonging
 |
| Clarence River, New South Wales Far North Coast. Image at visitnsw.com |
Virginia Marshall, February 2017, Overturning Aqua Nullius: securing Aboriginal water rights, excerpt:
Water
landscapes hold meaning and purpose under Aboriginal laws. After thousands of
years, the spiritual relationship of being part of Country remains integral,
and despite the significant political and social change heaved upon the lives
of Aboriginal communities the sacredness of water shapes the identity and
values of Aboriginal peoples.
The
creation story that opens this chapter recognises the relationship of Nyikina
peoples to the river system, the land and the liyan (spirit) in its peoples and
all things on Nyikina Country. Nyikina peoples have a name for the river,
mardoowarra (the Fitzroy River), and yimardoowarra means Nyikina peoples
‘belong’ to the lower part of the mardoowarra. Underground water, which travels
through neighbouring Aboriginal land, creates a joint responsibility.
Aboriginal
water management, as discussed in a Northern Territory study of water values
and interests in the Katherine Region, represents a complex web
of relationships:
Every aspect of water as a phenomena
and physical resource as well as the hydro morphological features it creates is
represented and expressed in the languages of local Aboriginal cultures: mist,
clouds, rain, hail, seasonal patterns of precipitation, floods and floodwater,
river flows, rivers, creeks, waterholes, billabongs, springs, soaks,
groundwater and aquifers, and the oceans (saltwater).
The
inherent relationships of Aboriginal peoples with land and water are regulated
by traditional knowledge. For generations Aboriginal peoples have developed
significant water knowledge for resource use. Aboriginal water knowledge,
traditional sharing practices, climate and seasonal weather knowledge underpin
water use knowledge. Aboriginal customary water use cannot be decoupled from
the relationship with the environment and water resources because Aboriginal
water concepts are central to community and kinship relationships. Unlike
Western legal concepts, water cannot be separated from the land because
Aboriginal creation stories have laid the foundations for Aboriginal water
values.
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