Scott Morrison is on the radio. pic.twitter.com/b1s1aOdxKI— The Cathy Wilcox (@cathywilcox1) February 5, 2018
Saturday 10 February 2018
Tweet of the Week
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#auspol,
Liberal Party of Australia
Friday 9 February 2018
Falling biodiversity, degradation of productive rural land, intensification of coastal & city development, and the threat of climate change require Australia to produce blueprint for a new generation of environment laws
“The next
generation of environmental laws will need to recognise explicitly the role of
humanity as a trustee of the environment and its common resources, requiring
both care and engagement on behalf of future generations.” [APEEL,
Blueprint for the Next Generation of Environmental Law,
August 2017]
The Guardian, 6 February 2018:
Environmental lawyers and academics have called for a comprehensive rethink on how Australia's natural landscapes are protected, warning that short-term politics is infecting decision-making and suggesting that the public be given a greater say on development plans.
The Australian Panel of Experts on Environmental Law has launched a blueprint for a new generation of environment laws and the creation of independent agencies with the power and authority to ensure they are enforced. The panel of 14 senior legal figures says this is motivated by the need to systematically address ecological challenges including falling biodiversity, the degradation of productive rural land, the intensification of coastal and city development and the threat of climate change.
Murray Wilcox QC, a former federal court judge, said the blueprint was a serious attempt to improve a system that was shutting the public out of the decision-making process and failing to properly assess the impact of large-scale development proposals.
"We found the standard of management of the environment is poor because everything is made into a political issue," Wilcox said. "Nothing happens until it becomes desperate.
"We need a non-political body of significant prestige to report on what is happening and have the discretion to act."
The legal review, developed over several years and quietly released in 2017, resulted in 57 recommendations. It was suggested by the Places You Love alliance, a collection of about 40 environmental groups that was created to counter a failed bid to set up a "one-stop shop" for environmental approvals by leaving it to the states. The panel undertook the work on the understanding it would be independent and not a piece of activism.
Review report can be found here.
One of the reasons why local government, traditional owners and communities in the Clarence Valley should be very wary of home-grown and foreign lobbyists, investment consortiums and land developers – Part Two
Awabakal Local Aboriginal Land Council still attempting to resolve legal issues flowing from failed development proposals.
Newcastle
Herald, 3
February 2018:
Companies belonging to
Sydney-based businessman Tony Zong have agreed to discontinue legal action
against the Awabakal Local Aboriginal Land Council, over a failed deal to buy
$12.6 million worth of Aboriginal land across the city.
However the complicated
legal saga over the land at Warners Bay and Braye Park – that has
entangled several parties and involves disgraced
former assistant tax commissioner Nick Petroulias – has distance left to run.
A
cross-claim launched by the land council against the other parties
involved – including a Sydney law firm and a mysterious company known
as Gows Heat – remains unresolved.
In the Supreme Court on
Friday, Justice Rowan Darke sent the cross-claim to mediation.
He was also forced
to strike “scandalous” material from the court’s file, contained in
two affidavits of the solicitor acting for Gows Heat.
The land council’s
barrister, Jeremy Kirk SC, complained about “truly scandalous” material in at
least one of the affidavits, and allegations targeting himself and his
instructing solicitor.
“Yes, we’re all big
boys, but it’s not the sort of material that should find its way into
solicitor’s correspondence or affidavits,” Justice Darke replied.
One of the targets of
the cross-claim is Despina Bakis, a solicitor with Knightsbridge North
Lawyers, who has been accused of negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
The barrister acting on
her behalf, Jeffrey Rose, argued there should not be mediation until the land
council produced expert evidence demonstrating how his client had behaved
negligently……..
Justice Darke agreed to
mediation, but warned that if the land council did not rely on expert
evidence, it would need to explain its case with “clarity and
force”.
A separate lawsuit
against the land council, which has seen a caveat placed over the post office,
was also sent to mediation on Friday.
The
plaintiffs – Knightsbridge North Lawyers and Advantage Property
Experts Syndications – claim
they are together owed a sum of more than $326,700 for their involvement
in Awabakal land redevelopment.
BACKGROUND
One
of the reasons why local government, traditional owners and communities in the
Clarence Valley should be very wary of home-grown and foreign lobbyists,
investment consortiums and land developers – Part One, 20 December 2017
Labels:
coastal development
Thursday 8 February 2018
The Liberal Party of Australia's inability to avoid adding more rigthwing hardliners to its ranks is disturbing
“Plus ça change,
plus c'est la même
chose”
Having failed to be elected at the last federal election he came to the Senate after the High Court of Australia ruled Susan Nash was ineligible to continue sitting in the Senate due to holding dual citizenship.
The senator from Royalla near Queanbeyan NSW has created a new
Facebook page now he has been
sworn-in, however the original
page still exists. As does his Twitter account where he has a tendency to retweet praise of himself.
A right-wing warrior with an imperfect understanding of human rights, a controversial war record and an apparent antipathy to est. 2.6 per cent of the Australian population is now a member of the Turnbull Coalition Government.
This is how the mainstream media saw him on the day........
This is how the mainstream media saw him on the day........
ABC News, 5 February 2018:
Newly-elected Liberal senator and retired senior Army officer Jim Molan is defending his decision to share anti-Muslim videos posted by far-right UK group Britain First on Facebook.
In March last year Mr Molan, who was sworn in as a senator this morning, shared posts from the group on his personal, public Facebook page.
One of the Britain First videos purports to show Muslim men attacking a police car in France, while the other purports to show Muslim men harassing and assaulting young women in France and the Netherlands.
The second video has been discredited by online fact-checkers.
Today Senator Molan said he did not remember sharing the videos, but upon watching them again, was shocked by the violence within them.
He said the videos were not inflammatory, and not racist.
"I have no apologies, I have no regrets," he said.
Senator Molan said he rejected any suggestion he was racist……..
Britain First shot to global attention when US President Donald Trump shared anti-Muslim videos from the group in November last year.
It prompted outrage in Britain, and he was criticised by UK Prime Minister Theresa May.
Last week Mr Trump apologised for re-tweeting the posts, saying he knew nothing about the group.
Senator Molan has also shared posts made by far-right figure Milo Yiannopolous and controversial cartoonist Larry Pickering.
Those posts were not anti-Muslim in nature.
A spokesman for Senator Molan said the senator shared content online to provoke debate, and was not endorsing anything.
"The senator often posts material in order to generate debate," he said.
"The sharing of any post does not indicate endorsement."
Senator Molan has not posted commentary with the more controversial posts, and does not regularly respond to comments made on the posts.
But he did respond to a comment on one Britain First post, which read: "Charming. And we're meant to be tolerant, accepting and welcoming of this 'breed' in our country."
Senator Molan replied "Unbelievable".
Environmental disaster in NSW a herald of things to come given impacts of climate change are being felt in coastal communities and coastal waters
The Newscastle Herald, 1 February 2018:
THERE are fears thousands of “ravenous” kingfish that escaped a state-government jointly run fish farm off Port Stephens will devastate the marine park's wild fish population.
Up to 17,000 predatory yellowtail kingfish, used to being fed automatically, are now hunting in the marine park waters after 20,000 escaped last week from a fish-farm sea cage, described as a "fortress pen", that was destroyed in rough seas. About 3000 fish have been recaptured.
The future of the controversial joint NSW government and Tasmania-based Huon Aquaculture project, which is 18 months into a five-year research trial, is under a cloud following the loss of almost half its stock with a retail value of more than $2 million.
Conservation groups and local tourism operators described the multi-million dollar project as a “disaster” threatening the pristine marine park's delicate ecosystem.
Marine Parks’ Association chairman and whale watching tour operator Frank Future said fisheries staff “repeatedly assured” the community the pens could handle waves up to 15 metres.
According to Huon, the “fortress pens” were designed to withstand “high energy, exposed sites, frequently receiving storms swells and gale force winds”.
“The pen that had the release was mangled and now we have thousands of mature kingfish released into the wild, nothing will be safe from them,” Mr Future said.
“They are voracious feeders and from what I understand they are ravenous. Once they realise they won't get any food in the form of pellets they'll be eating anything they can find. I don't want to think about the impact on wild species.”
The commercial-scale kingfish trial at Providence Bay - the result of an existing offshore research lease being boosted to 62 hectares - includes five pens, each about 60 metres across, two that were stocked with 20,000 fish each. There is capacity for 12 sea pens in the trial......
Wednesday 7 February 2018
CENTRELINK ROBO-DEBT: the nightmare continues
Given that the Turnbull Government continues to
apply a faulty algorithm to Centrelink
debt collection in 2018, private debt collectors remain financially incentivised
to aggressively chase debts which may not actually exist, former welfare
recipients may still receive debt recovery fee demands and government intends
to expand collection to other groups/forms of declared income, while Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge
is yet to fix the problems with ‘phone wait times, perhaps a reminder of what
the title Online Compliance Intervention actually
hides and what the alternative term robo-debt describes……..
Cory Doctorow writing in Boing
Boing, 1 February 2018:
In
a textbook example of the use of big data to create a digital poorhouse, as
described in Virginia Eubanks's excellent new book Automating
Inequality, the Australian government created an algorithmic,
semi-privatised system to mine the financial records of people receiving
means-tested benefits and accuse them of fraud on the basis of its findings,
bringing in private contractors to build and maintain the system and collect
the penalties it ascribed, paying them a commission on the basis of how much
money they extracted from poor Australians.
The
result was a predictable kafkaesque nightmare in which an unaccountable black
box accused poor people, students, pensioners, disabled people and others
receiving benefits of owing huge sums, sending abusive, threatening debt
collectors after them, and placing all information about the accusations of
fraud at the other end of a bureaucratic nightmare system of overseas phone-bank
operators with insane wait-times.
GillianTerzis writing in Logic,
a magazine about technology, 2017:
Automation
is dehumanizing in a literal sense: it removes human experience from the
equation. In the case of the robo-debt scandal, automation also stripped humans
of their narrative power. The algorithm that generated these debt notices
presented welfare recipients with contrasting stories: the recipients claimed
they’d followed the rules, but the computer said otherwise.
There
were few official ways to explain one’s circumstances: twenty-nine million
calls to Centrelink went unanswered in 2016, and Centrelink’s Twitter account
seems explicitly designed to discourage conversational exchange. One source of
narrative resistance is notmydebt.com.au, a website run entirely by volunteers
that gathers false debt stories from ordinary Australians so that the “scandal
can't be plausibly minimised or denied.”
Over
time it was revealed that many of these debts were miscalculated or, in some
cases, non-existent. One man I’d read about was on a government pension and
saddled with a $4,500 bill, which was revised down months later to $65. Another
recipient, who was on disability as a result of mental illness, had a debt
notice of $80,000 that was later recalled. A small proportion of recipients
were exclusively in contact with private debt collectors and received no
official notice from Centrelink at all.
Soon
it emerged that social services were a lucrative avenue for corporate
interests: this year’s Senate inquiry revealed that some private agencies
tasked with recouping debts were working on a commission basis, pocketing a
percentage of the debts they had recovered for the government regardless of
their validity. (All debt notices issued by private agencies were eventually
rescinded after government review in February 2017.)
The
methodology of the algorithm itself was riddled with flaws. It calculates the
average of an individual’s annual income reported to the Australian Tax Office …..and
compares it with the fortnightly earnings reported to Centrelink by the welfare
recipient. All welfare recipients are required to declare their gross earnings
(income accrued before tax and other deductions) within this fourteen-day
period. Any discrepancy between the two figures is interpreted by the algorithm
as proof of undeclared or underreported income, from which a notice of debt is
automatically generated.
Previously,
these inconsistencies would be handled by Centrelink staff, who would call up
your employer, confirm the amount you received in fortnightly payments, and
cross-index that figure with the one calculated in the system. But the
automation of the debt recovery process has outsourced authority from humans to
the algorithm itself.
It’s
certainly efficient: it takes the algorithm one week to generate 20,000 debt
notices, a process that would take up to a year if done manually. But it’s not
a reliable method of fraud detection. It’s blunt, unwieldy, and error-prone. It
assumes that variations in the data sets are deliberate, and that recipients
have received more than what they are entitled to. What’s more, the onus is on
the welfare recipient to prove their income has been reported correctly and
that the entitlements they have received are commensurate within twenty-one
days.
Yet,
as many critics have noted, this income-averaging method is porous. It fails to
accurately account for the fluctuating fortunes of casual or contract workers,
which often results in variations between the two figures. There’s also no way
for the algorithm to correct for basic errors in the system’s database. It
cannot yet discern whether an employer’s legal name has been used instead of
its various business names—it treats them as separate entities, and therefore
separate sources of income—or whether conflicting reports are caused by basic
mistakes, such as spelling errors or typos. These seemingly small distinctions
are ones that only a human could make. It’s no wonder, then, that conservative
estimates of its error rate hover at 20 percent……
Yet
the irony of stigmatizing welfare recipients is that better-off Australians are
major beneficiaries of social spending. The Australian writer Tim Winton notes
that the country’s middle class has “an increasing sense of entitlement to
welfare,” which is “duly disbursed largely at the expense of the poor, the
sick, and the unemployed.” These include tax concessions on contributions to
“superannuation,” which are funds designed to help Australians save for their
retirement. Such concessions are distortionary: they’re levied at a flat rate
of 15 percent, rather than at a progressive rate according to one’s income,
which means their benefits are reaped overwhelmingly by the rich.
The
Australian Bureau of Statistics calculates that nearly one third of these concessions
are claimed by the top 10 percent of income earners in Australia. Then there
are policies like negative gearing, a tax concession that allows you to claim a
deduction against your wage income for losses generated by any rental
properties you own. (Australia and New Zealand are the only countries in the
world to hold such a policy.) In addition, Australian homeowners are entitled
to a capital gains tax discount of 50 percent once the property is sold.
Critics
have argued that the combination of these two policies only serves to fuel
investor speculation, entrench housing unaffordability, and lock first-time
home buyers out of the market. But it’s easier to attack the poor than to tax
the rich.
Commonwealth Ombudsman, Centrelink’s
Automated Debt Raising And Recovery System: A Report About The Department Of Human
Services’ Online Compliance Intervention System For Debt Raising And Recovery, April 2017:
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
In
July 2016 the Department of Human Services (DHS) - Centrelink launched a new
online compliance intervention (OCI) system for raising and recovering debts.
The OCI matches the earnings recorded on a customer’s Centrelink record with
historical employer-reported income data from the Australian Taxation Office
(ATO). Parts of the debt raising process previously done manually by compliance
officers within DHS are now done using this automated process. Customers are
asked to confirm or update their income using the online system. If the
customer does not engage with DHS either online or in person, or if there are
gaps in the information provided by the customer, the system will fill the gaps
with a fortnightly income figure derived from the ATO income data for the
relevant employment period (‘averaged’ data).
Since the initial rollout of the
OCI, the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s office has received many complaints from
people who have incurred debts under the OCI. This report examines our concerns
with the implementation of the OCI, using complaints we investigated as case
study examples.
We acknowledge the changes DHS has made to the OCI since its
initial rollout. The changes have been positive and have improved the usability
and accessibility of the system. However, we consider there are several areas
where further improvements could be made, particularly before use of the OCI is
expanded. We have made several recommendations to address these areas......
Planning
and risk management
In
our view, many of the OCI’s implementation problems could have been mitigated
through better project planning and risk management at the outset. This includes
more rigorous user testing with customers and service delivery staff, a more
incremental rollout, and better communication to staff and stakeholders. DHS’
project planning did not ensure all relevant external stakeholders were
consulted during key planning stages and after the full rollout of the OCI.
This is evidenced by the extent of confusion and inaccuracy in public
statements made by key non-government stakeholders, journalists and
individuals.
A
key lesson for agencies and policy makers when proposing to rollout large scale
measures which require people to engage in a new way with new digital channels,
is for agencies to engage with stakeholders and provide resources for adequate
manual support during transition periods. We have recommended DHS undertake a
comprehensive evaluation of the OCI in its current form before it is
implemented further and any future rollout should be done incrementally.
Centrelink website, 5 February 2018:
If you don’t pay your
debt by the due date, we may ask the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to send
us your tax refund. If we do we’ll send you a Recovery of your Centrelink debt
letter.
If you aren’t repaying
your debt over time or if we haven’t agreed to extend the payment time, we may
also:
* add an interest charge
to your debt
* refer your debt to an
external collection agency
* reduce your income
support payments to help pay the amount owing
* recover the amount
from your wages, other income and assets, including money you may hold in a
bank account
* refer your case to our
solicitors for legal action
* issue a Departure
Prohibition Order to stop you from travelling overseas....
The rate of interest we apply to your
debt is consistent with the current rate applied by the ATO to tax debts.
As a new member of the UN Human Rights Council is Australia continuing to act the hypocrite?
For the
second time in three months the UN Special
Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights has written to the Turnbull Coalition Government
concerning its welfare policies.
Australian-born Professor
Alston has been Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights since
June 2014.
The Commonwealth of Australia was elected on
16 October 2017 as a member of the UN Human Rights Council 2018-2020.
So the
following news item is more than a little embarrassing with what it reveals about government policies.
ABC Radio RN
Breakfast, 1
February 2018:
A top UN official has
delivered a scathing assessment of Australia's welfare policies describing them
as 'punitive' and harmful to women.
Australian Philip Alston
is the UN's Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty. He accuses the government of
pursuing policies that 'stigmatise' and 'marginalise' poorer sections of
society.
In a letter sent to the
government this week, Philip raised concerns about the planned expansion of
cashless welfare cards, and their impact on indigenous communities.
The
first letter
dated 17 October 2017 addressed the Social Services Legislation Amendment
Act 2017 (Cth) (No. 33 of 2017) and concerns that it may have a negative impact
on the human rights of persons living in poverty, particularly single parents
and their children, as well as expressing concerns about proposed
drug testing of young people on unemployment benefits.
It would appear
that the Turnbull Government’s welfare reforms make nonsense of Australia’s
voluntary undertakings lodged with the United Nations on 14 July 2014
as part of its candidature for a vacancy on the UN Human Rights
Council.
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