Gawd 'elp us all if we grow old, frail and alone in the Land Downunder

This is part of the Gillard Government response to Australia's aged care needs:

"To make it easier for older Australians to stay in their home while they receive care, we will:
Increase the number of Home Care Packages- from 59,876 to almost 100,000 (99,669).

Provide tailored care packages to people receiving home care, and new funding for dementia care.

Cap costs, so that full pensioners pay no more than the basic fee." and

“care recipients with higher than average care needs, an indexed annual cap of $5,000 for single people on income less than $43,000”
A positive policy move. Except Maud Up The Street tells me you need at least six hours care in the home per week and a family member coming in, or living in, to pick up the rest of the care hours to take the pressure of the lack of available dementia-dedicated nursing home beds on the NSW North Coast.

Not every older person has the luxury of children and grandchildren or of having them live close by if they do. In fact, in some areas around 30% of the 50 years plus population is probably childless if ABS stats are any sort of guide.
The Prime Minister and Health Minister speak a lot about "older Australians and their families" - without recognizing that the norm is changing more than they realise and this welcome move which will allow more people to stay in their home as they receive aged care may accidentally exclude the elderly without families.
Even the announced extra aged care beds may not always materialise in regional areas such as the NSW North Coast, because nursing homes sometimes display a reluctance to take up available residential bed quotas.

Prime Minister and Health Minister Media Release 20^th April 2012

Dodgy $20 notes doing the rounds in Lismore area

NSW Police Force media release 22^nd  April 2012

“Detectives on the state’s north coast are conducting inquiries after a number of fake $20 notes were found in circulation in the Lismore area.

A number of business owners contacted local police on Friday (20 April 2012) after the counterfeit notes were used to pay for good and services.

The phony cash was detected by staff at a Lismore kebab shop, pub, convenience store and fast food restaurant, and by two taxi drivers.

Detectives have launched an investigation in a bid to identify who’s responsible for producing them.

The counterfeit notes, totalling $240, have also been seized for forensic examination.

Richmond LAC Duty Officer, Inspector Robert Cairnduff, warned local residents and business owners to be on the lookout for the notes.

“I would encourage everyone to be extra vigilant when handling their money and if you do notice something odd or that doesn’t look quite right, please contact us immediately,” Insp Cairnduff said.

“The counterfeit notes that we have seized are not of great quality; however, in poor light or to the unsuspecting eye they could quite possibly be passed off as the real thing,” he said.

Inquiries by local detectives are ongoing.

Anyone with information that might assist investigators is urged to contact Lismore Police Station or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.”

Oh, Carole, I am such a fool or Click send and lose your job

One can’t help feeling that this particular LNP staffer is no loss to both the Queensland and Federal political systems. Senator Ian MacDonald must have cringed when Crikey published this on 17 April 2012:

Dear Carole,
I have just read your pathetic piece in the Courier-Mail. While I generally ignore the bleatings of sourpusses like you, your piece was so depressing and negative that I was moved to find your email address and simply say: Get a life.
The world would be a better place if people like you stood for political preselection and learned the hard way that ability is not measured by chromosomes.
Question: Why don’t you have a go? Answer: Like most women, you probably don’t possess the necessary drive, determination and decisiveness that men innately possess. It’s not a personal criticism; it’s a fact of biology. Where, for example, are the great female explorers, mountaineers, warriors, inventors, chefs? Blokes dominate most areas of human endeavour because Nature equipped them with something called testosterone. That was part of Nature’s grand design to enable men to be stronger, more fearless and more determined than their sisters. Sorry, Carole, fact not fiction.
Women occupy a special but different place in the world to that of men. I’ve been married to a wonderful woman - a proud mother of four successful adult children, not a nuclear physicist - for nearly 40 years. For yeras [sic] I’ve heard women like you ask my wife at cocktail parties, functions and dinner parties: And what do you do? The clear inference in the pregnant silence that follows my wife’s answer that she is a proud home-maker makes my skin crawl. Women like my wife are the life-givers, the embodiment of sacrificial love (the purest form of love), the primary keepers of the flame of civilisation that separates us from the animal world, and yet the Sisterhood frowns on them for not joining the anti-male club that you so typefy [sic].
The anti-male world of conspiracy theories in which you and the Sisterhood inhabit is the complete antithesis of the world in which positive women thrive. Women who can’t cut it in - what did you call it?, the boys’ club - can easily cover their inadequacies by claiming bias, sexism, misogyny, chauvinism etc. etc. ad infinitum. It’s so tiring to read such twaddle.
Face reality, my dear. Smell the coffee. Try to turn your sour, negative, anti-male view of the world into something more positive and productive. Demonising men may be your life’s quest but fewer and fewer people are listening.
I repeat: GET A LIFE.
Kind regards,
Max
Max Tomlinson

Article which raised Max's ire here.

Wot I didz wiv me down time at the taxpayer's expense

It will almost be a relief when Phelps gets back to doing those nothings recorded by Hansard on 1^st May  - these tweets are getting weird.

                                                 

Peter Phelps‏@PeterPhelpsMLC

Spent the last hour standing on a vacant, wind-swept, overcast beach doing nothing #mylifeisavirginiawoolfnovel

And this man wants to be the first Australian Pope.................

In the ABC Q and A debate on Monday 9 April 2012 between Cardinal George Pell and Richard Dawkins this exchange occurred:

GEORGE PELL: Well, science and religion are two different activities and in the Catholic Church you can believe, to some extent, what you like about evolution. I think Darwin made a great contribution. I remember talking with Julius Kornberg, a very distinguished biologist, and he's worked with ants for years and he said, you know, he's managed to change them by changing the conditions but there are a number of things that evolution doesn't explain. Darwin realised that. Darwin was a theist because he said he couldn’t believe that the immense cosmos and all the beautiful things in the world came about either by chance or out of necessity. He said, “I have to be ranked as a theist.” [my bolding]

RICHARD DAWKINS: That just not true.

GEORGE PELL: Excuse me it’s...

RICHARD DAWKINS: It’s just plain not true.

GEORGE PELL: It’s on page 92 of his auto biography. Go and have a look.

The brazen Dr. Pell was knowingly being a highly selective and dishonest debater in this instance, because The Complete Works Of Charles Darwin Online show that this is what Darwin stated between pages 90 through to 94 of his autobiography to flesh out his position on ‘God’:

At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favour of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddists of no God. There are also many barbarian tribes who cannot be said with any truth to believe in what we call God: they believe indeed in spirits or ghosts, and it can be explained, as Tyler and Herbert Spencer have shown, how such a belief would be likely to arise.
Formerly I was led by feelings such as those just referred to, (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, 'it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.' I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind, and the universal belief by men of the existence of redness makes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence. This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sense, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music.
With respect to immortality,¹ nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life.—Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

This conclusion¹ was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.²
I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. [my bolding]

Music as art

Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra) - official video

http://youtu.be/8UVNT4wvIGY

Daily Examiner goes all coy on name of Maclean Chamber of Commerce 'spokesperson' who actually said this......

The Daily Examiner on 17^th April 2011:

“The chamber will argue the Fisheries must be relocated to a more appropriate location with the levee wall in the central business district also moved and replaced with open gates so as to not impede the views.”

Yep, screw with a reliable levee. Just the thing to bring regular visitors into town – the threat of a flood easily breaching CBD defences.

And I’m sure locals in low-lying houses will be thrilled at the thought of the extra risk and maybe less time to evacuate to higher ground.

What did the study named by the journo actually warn about?

Ah, yes; “The integrity of the levee wall must be maintained to ensure flood mitigation measures are achieved for the town.”