Wednesday 9 January 2019
The bad news for NSW North Coast regional communities just never ends
According to
the Berejiklian Coalition Government’s Transport
for NSW website: The
Community Transport Program (CTP) assists individuals who are transport
disadvantaged owing to physical, social, cultural and / or geographic
factors. Individuals who do not qualify for other support programs may be
eligible for community transport. CTP is funded by the NSW
Government and aims to address transport disadvantage at the local level via
community transport organisations.
In the
Clarence Valley medical specialist services are rather thin on the ground and
residents are frequently referred to medical practices and hospital clinics
hundreds of miles away.
For
communities in the Lower Clarence where a high percentage of the population are
elderly people on low incomes this can frequently present a transport problem,
as often there is no family member living close by to assist or the person’s peer
friendship group doesn’t include anyone capable of driving long distances.
Community
transport has been the only option for a good many people.
Until now…..
The Daily Examiner, 8 January 2019, p.3:
The thought of paying
$200 for a trip to see her specialist about her medical condition made Yamba
pensioner Gloria George glad she was sitting down when she made the call.
The 80-year-old said
when she contacted Clarence Community Transport and was told the price to be
taken by car to the Gold Coast for a Wednesday appointment, it could have
brought on a heart attack.
Mrs George said CCT told
her there was a bus service to the Gold Coast that ran on Monday, Wednesday and
Friday for $70.
“My appointment was on
Tuesday and the clinic I was booked into was not available on the other days,”
she said.
“They said they had made
cutbacks and the price to be driven to the appointment was $200.
“I’ve got a bad heart
problem and I nearly fell over when they told me.
“Who can afford $200 to
go to an appointment?”
Mrs George said she
still has a licence, but would not feel safe driving to her appointment.
“I think I’ll be able to
get a friend to drive me there and take me home again. I hope so,” she said.
The manager of CCT,
Warwick Foster, said the price rise for services had come in when the government
cut $250,000 from CCT’s funding when the NDIS came in last year.
“We could no longer
afford to operate the bus five days a week,” he said. “And we can’t afford to
drive people to appointments for the same fee we charge for the bus service.”
Mr Foster said the
government subsidy for transport of $31 a trip created a juggling act for CCT
to afford its services.
“Each trip, no matter
the distance, is subsidised at $31,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter if
the trip is across town or to Brisbane, the subsidy is the same....
Adani caught red handed breaking the rules - again
In 2017 the foreign multinational, the Adani Group, was found to have released heavily polluted water into coastal wetlands and the ocean around the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area - then lied about it.
Last Sunday it was reported to again be ignoring mining and environmental regulations and very predictably appears to be lying about its actions.
ABC
News, 30
December 2018:
Mining firm Adani has
unwittingly provided "persuasive" evidence for a Queensland
Government investigation into allegedly illegal works on its Carmichael mine
site, environmental lawyers say.
The evidence includes
specifications of groundwater bores registered by Adani on a government
website, which Queensland's Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) said could
only be used for prohibited dewatering operations, and not for monitoring as
Adani has claimed.
Adani has also confirmed
it cleared 5.8 hectares of land when correcting an "administrative
error" in its reporting to government, an action the EDO branded unlawful.
A spokeswoman for Adani
insisted the company had acted in accordance with its environmental approvals,
had not been dewatering for mining operations, and had "cooperated with
both relevant State and Commonwealth departments regarding these
allegations".
Satellite and drone
evidence of drilling was presented to DES by the EDO on behalf of its client,
environmental group Coast and Country.
Coast and Country
spokesman Derec Davies said the evidence had resulted in an official
investigation by the Queensland Government.
"Adani have been
caught red handed breaking the law, and then lying about it within official
documents," he said.
Dewatering bores are
used by miners to prepare for open cut and underground operations.
Conservationists have
repeatedly warned that Adani's dewatering plans could threaten the nationally
important Doongmabulla Springs.
An Adani spokeswoman
said the company had drilled the bores "to take geological samples and
monitor underground water levels", which she said was permitted as a stage
one activity under its licence.
However, an expert has
told the ABC the registrations for five of the bores that appear on a
Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy website bear the hallmarks of
dewatering bores, not monitoring bores.
They show the bores are
constructed with steel rather than plastic casing, were considerably thicker
than Adani's registered groundwater monitoring bores and ran deeper at 135 to
273 metres.
The bore reports did not
include the baseline underground water level or the elevation of each bore,
information considered critical for monitoring.
The five registered
bores are also ascribed the abbreviation "DWB", commonly used for
dewatering bores, instead of "GMB", commonly used for groundwater
monitoring bores.
Labels:
Adani Group,
coal,
environmental vandalism,
Great Barrier Reef,
mining
Tuesday 8 January 2019
Aboriginal Australia discovered the variability of a bright red supergiant star in the shoulder of Orion millennia before Western science did
Journal of Astronomical History and
Heritage, 21(1), 7‒12 (2018),
Bradley E. Schaefer Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State
University, “YES,
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS CAN AND DID DISCOVER THE VARIABILITY OF BETELGEUSE”:
Abstract:
Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal
Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern
Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and
Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions
about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether
such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long
periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad
experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy
for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its
range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from
season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon
to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the
Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is
inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over
during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a
cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful
transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal
Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing Betelgeuse
in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely. Given that the
discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is that the
Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do indeed vary
in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century ago from many
Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal Australians could
and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Antares.
Keywords:
Aboriginal astronomy, variable stars: Betelgeuse, Antares, Aldebaran
Read
the full paper at https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1808/1808.01862.pdf.
Original
paper by Duane W. Hamacher, Monash
Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University,
“Observations of red–giant variable stars by Aboriginal Australians”
at http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Variable_Stars.pdf?fbclid=IwAR11OnhyKIcvaxcFEJ1n5c0me9_FZtTi6mlNUfSKpa1r2wjgZ-WhMAqHU1s
Both
papers are well worth a read by everyone who has ever looked up at the night
skies in wonder.
Labels:
astronomy,
indigenous culture,
science
Why proposed offshore mining in the Great Australian Bight matters to all of Australia
The Advertiser, 18 January 2015 |
BP p.l.c. is a British multinational oil and
gas company headquartered in London, UK.
It operates
in this country as BP Australia and Chevron.
On 11 October
2016 this multinational corporation announced it was not proceeding with its
exploration drilling programme in the Great
Australian Bight (GAB), offshore South Australia, in the foreseeable future.
It still owns
two oil/gas exploration leases in the GAB.
The Norwegian
multinational Equinor formerly Statoil Petroleum also holds two leases
in the same area and intends to drill an exploratory well in one of them by
October this year.
Last year in
October the Morrison Coalition Government
offered a new GAB acreage S18-1
for lease, with bids closing on 21 March 2019.
So it is well
to remember how Big Oil views Australia…….
Coastal towns would
benefit from an oil spill in the pristine Great Australian Bight because the
clean up would boost their economies, energy giant BP has claimed as part of
its controversial bid to drill in the sensitive marine zone.
BP, which has since withdrawn
the drilling plan, also told a federal government agency that a diesel spill
would be considered “socially acceptable”.
BP made the statements
in an environment plan submitted to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and
Environmental Management Authority in March 2016.
The company had been
seeking to drill two wells off the South Australian coast, raising fears of an
environmental disaster akin to BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico.
Documents obtained under
Freedom of Information laws, first
published by London-based website Climate Home News, showed the
government authority had identified serious shortcomings with BPs environment
plan.
In a letter to BP, the
authority said a number of statements should be removed or supported by
analysis. They included BP's claim that “in most instances, the increased
activity associated with cleanup operations will be a welcome boost to local
economies”.
BP also claimed it had
not identified any social impacts arising from the event of a diesel spill and
“since there are no unresolved stakeholder concerns ... BP interprets this
event to be socially acceptable”.
In 2016, BP released
modelling showing a spill could hit land as far away as New South
Wales. The letters revealed that BP’s “worst case shoreline oiling scenario
predicts oiling of 650km coastline at 125 days after the spill, increasing to
750km after 300 days”. Nopsema had raised concerns over BP’s ability to
mobilise the people and equipment needed to clean up such a vast expanse of
coast.
BACKGROUND
Greenpeace, Crude Intentions: Exposing the risks of drilling and spilling in the Great Australian Bight [48 page PDF]
ABC
News, 14
November 2018:
If an oil spill happened
in the Great Australian Bight, it could reach as far east as Port Macquarie's
beaches, two thirds of the way up the New South Wales coast, according to a
leaked draft environment plan obtained by the ABC.
Under a "worst
credible case discharge" scenario, more than 10 grams of oil per square
metre could wash up on some of Australia's coasts, according to the document
authored by Norwegian oil company Equinor.
Maps show coastal areas
that could potentially be impacted, from above Sydney to Albany in Western
Australia.
Environmental group
Greenpeace, which obtained the leaked draft Oil Pollution Emergency Plan, said
it was the first time modelling had shown an oil spill could reach so far....
BACKGROUND
Greenpeace, Crude Intentions: Exposing the risks of drilling and spilling in the Great Australian Bight [48 page PDF]
Monday 7 January 2019
Why has Australian Treasurer & Liberal MP for Kooyong Josh Frydenberg morphed into a frenzied Trump?
“Ultimately, a dollar of tax avoided by high income Australians is an extra dollar of tax paid by all other Australians.” [Australian
Labor Party (ALP) policy document Positive
plan to help housing affordability]
The
Australian Labor Party has put forward a number of policies which limit the
degree to which affluent groups in our society can manipulate the tax system.
These tax reform policies will:
* limit negative gearing to investment properties
already negatively geared and newly built residential housing. However net income
losses on existing negatively geared properties will not be able to be used to
offset salary & wage income;
* cease cash
refunds for excess dividend imputation credits on which the investor personally paid
no tax originally and who has no current tax liability to offset with these
credits;
* reduce the discount on capital
gains tax from 50 per cent to 25 per cent after the deduction for any capital losses. Some assets
and events are exempt from capital gains tax. These include selling your
principle home, personal car, personal use assets or selling an asset acquired before capital
gains tax was introduced on 20 September 1985.
According to the Australian Taxation Office if you are an individual rather than a corporation then the Capital Gains Tax Rate is the same as your Income Tax Rate in the applicable year.
According to the Australian Taxation Office if you are an individual rather than a corporation then the Capital Gains Tax Rate is the same as your Income Tax Rate in the applicable year.
These same policies have caused former Deutsche Bank director, current Australian Treasurer and Liberal MP for Kooyong Josh Frydenberg (left) to morph into a frenzied
Trump. Pumping out slogans, misrepresentations and sometimes downright political lies on
every media platform he can access.
The
Australian, 5
December 2018, p.2:
Josh Frydenberg has
launched a pre-election assault on Labor’s plan to halve the capital gains tax
discount, warning that hundreds of thousands of Australians will be taxed at
the “highest rates” in the Western world.
Shifting his focus from
Bill Shorten’s proposal to limit negative gearing to new dwellings and the
“retiree tax”, the Treasurer yesterday cited government analysis that showed
Australians would be taxed up to 36.75 per cent on their capital gains under Labor’s
policy, up from 23.5 per cent now….1
Labor’s 50% increase to capital gains tax will cost jobs, punish those who work hard and save, and give Australia a CGT rate much higher than other advanced economies. pic.twitter.com/W4c3pgcgCt— Josh Frydenberg (@JoshFrydenberg) January 4, 2019
.@JoshFrydenberg on Labor’s negative gearing: Everybody who owns equity in their home will be worse off under Labor’s policy.— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) November 6, 2018
This is a major tax grab by the Labor Party.
MORE: https://t.co/9fyClHfMTo #FirstEdition pic.twitter.com/H0H0WTtFV5
So why is
Frydenberg screaming misrepresentations at the top of his lungs, urged on by the Housing Industry Association?2
Could it be
because 56.2 per cent of the tax benefits from Negative Gearing go to individuals whose incomes are in the top 20
per cent of Australian incomes and only 5.2 per cent of the tax benefits go to individuals
in the lowest 20 per cent of incomes?
Or because est.
75 per cent of tax savings from Capital
GainsTax discounts go to the top 10 per cent of high income families?
Perhaps it’s
because Self-Managed Super Funds are a major beneficiary of cash refunds for excess dividend imputation
credits, with 50 per cent of the benefit to SMSFs accruing to the top 10 per
cent of SMSF balances and some funds receiving cash refunds of more than $2.5
million a year?
Likely he’s
screaming because all three instances represent how successfully the affluent have gamed
the tax system to date and he like most right-wing politicians see such tax
manipulation as a right belonging to them and their mates and, therefore have no
interest in supporting a fairer distribution of the tax burden.
He also
appears to be ignoring the fact that Treasury modelling of these Labor policies shows an increase in federal government revenue by $2 billion over time and, that these same policies have the potential to put downward pressure on property prices in the
short-term so that genuine first home buyers might get a foot in the door with
more affordable residential housing.
Bottom line
is that Labor’s tax reform policies are primarily targeted at investors with a marginal tax rate (including Medicare Levy) of over 45 per
cent - which roughly equates with the top 20 per cent of Australian residents
with private wealth.
That is, the 'professional' investors/tax avoiders amongst the 1.16 million Australians who according to Credit Suisse in 2017 are millionaires, some many, many times over.
Footnotes
1. KPMG, Demark- Taxation of investment income and capital gains: “Interest and rental income are taxable as investment (or capital) income with a marginal tax of 42 percent (2018).” Denmark's Capital Gains Tax Rate is higher than the worse case scenario of up to 36.75 per cent under Labor which Frydenberg postulates in Para 5 of this post. Therefore Labor would not be imposing "the highest" rates in the Western world'.
1. KPMG, Demark- Taxation of investment income and capital gains: “Interest and rental income are taxable as investment (or capital) income with a marginal tax of 42 percent (2018).” Denmark's Capital Gains Tax Rate is higher than the worse case scenario of up to 36.75 per cent under Labor which Frydenberg postulates in Para 5 of this post. Therefore Labor would not be imposing "the highest" rates in the Western world'.
Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen, A
FAIRER TAX SYSTEM: DIVIDEND IMPUTATION REFORM, 13
March 2018.
Australian
Taxation Office, Individual
Income Tax Rates 2018-2019 and CGT
assets and exemptions
National Australia Bank, Calculating and Paying Capital Gains Tax,
Domain.com.au, The ‘little known’ tax strategy some millennials use to amass large property portfolios, 23 May 2016.
National Australia Bank, Calculating and Paying Capital Gains Tax,
Domain.com.au, The ‘little known’ tax strategy some millennials use to amass large property portfolios, 23 May 2016.
* Photograph of Josh Frydenberg from msn.com
Australia In Decline: hearing nature's death rattle
The
Guardian, 26
December 2018:
More than 50 Australian
plant species are under threat of extinction within the next decade, according
to a major study of the country’s threatened flora.
Just 12 of the most
at-risk species were found to be listed as critically endangered under national
environment laws – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act
– and 13 had no national threatened listing at all.
The scientists behind
the research, published in the Australian Journal of Botany this month, say the
results point to a need for re-evaluation of Australia’s national lists for
threatened plants.
It is the first major
assessment of the status of Australia’s threatened flora in more than two
decades.
Plants account for
about 70% of Australia’s national threatened species list, with 1,318 varieties
listed as either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable.
Among those
on the list are acacia pharangites (wongan gully wattle), banksia
vincentia, caladenia amoena (charming spider-orchid), caladenia
busselliana (Bussell’s spider orchid), calochilus richiae (bald-tip
beard orchid) and eremophila pinnatifida (dalwallinu eremophila).
The research team
assessed species that met criteria for either a critical or endangered listing
at national or state levels to track their rate of decline.
They did this by
reviewing all available literature on the plants – including recovery plans,
conservation advice and peer-reviewed research – and conducting interviews with
125 botanists, ecologists and land managers with expertise on particular
geographic regions or species.
The study examined 1,135
species, including 81 that were unearthed through the interview process as
being eligible for a critically endangered or endangered listing but did not
have one.
It found 418 plants had
continued declines in their population and a further 265 species had
insufficient monitoring information available to determine their status.
The scientists concluded
that 55 species were at high risk of extinction within the next 10 years, with
fewer than 250 individual plants or only a single population remaining. They
found just 12 of the most imperilled species were listed under the EPBC Act as
critically endangered and 13 had no listing at all.
They said there were
also 56 species of plants currently on the critically endangered list that they
assessed as having no documented declines or that were stable or even
increasing.
“This points to a clear
need for re-evaluation and standardisation of current lists, and consistent
application of IUCN listing guidelines,” the study states.
“There is also a need to
collect systematic, repeatable field data for most of [the] species, to back up
suspected and projected declines and provide a stronger basis for investment in
recovery actions.”…..
Labels:
environment
Sunday 6 January 2019
USA 2019: crazy continues to be the order of the day
SPIN, 2 January 2019:
CREDIT: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images |
President Trump delivered
a harsh post-holiday awakening at his first cabinet meeting of 2019,
holding forth for a nearly two-hour freestyle press conference in the
presence of reporters.
In what amounted to
a barely coherent filibuster, Trump dragged his former secretary of defense, chalked recent
stock market turbulence up to a
“glitch,”gave a
shoutout to Kanye West, and mused that he might have made a good general himself. Most of the
time, he sounded like a guy at a bus station arguing with
pigeons. Behind him, ex-Fox News exec turned head of the White House press shop Bill
Shine shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
In spite of his best
efforts, Trump was nearly upstaged by a parody poster of
himself as a Game of Thrones character with the
text “Sanctions are coming.” The president initially shared the
parody image on his Twitter feed in November, apparently signaling
his intention to impose sanctions on Iran. On Wednesday afternoon, an
actual, physical, movie-theater-sized version of the poster was laid out on the
table in front of the president facing the press pool.
When the image first
appeared in November, HBO issued a statement that they would “prefer our
trademark not be misappropriated for political purposes.” An HBO rep told
Spin the network has no additional comment.
Trump didn’t address why
the poster was so prominently positioned, but he did extol the virtues of a
Southern border wall while posing with appropriated imagery from a dragon soap
opera that vehemently undermines that premise. “Walls work,” he told
reporters. Trump is currently holding out for wall funding amid an ongoing
government shutdown, leaving some 800,000 federal employees currently without pay.
TRUMP: "I had a meeting at the Pentagon with lots of generals. They were like from a movie. Better looking than Tom Cruise, & stronger. And I had more generals than I've ever seen, & we were at the bottom of this incredible room. I said, 'this is greatest room I've ever seen.'" pic.twitter.com/fTpgDXVso8— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2019
Labels:
Donald Trump,
US politics,
USA
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