The unprecedented attack on the independent Australian Human Rights Commission by Prime Minister Abbott provoked a response from the Australian Bar Association and the Law Council of Australia

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission in November 2014; Australia currently holds about 800 children in mandatory closed immigration detention for indefinite periods, with no pathway to protection or settlement. This includes 186 children detained on Nauru. Children and their families have been held on the mainland and on Christmas Island for, on average, one year and two months. Over 167 babies have been born in detention within the last 24 months.

In November 2014 it completed its The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention report which it states; provides compelling first-hand evidence of the negative impact that prolonged immigration detention is having on their mental and physical health. The evidence given by the children and their families is fully supported by psychiatrists, paediatricians and academic research. The evidence shows that immigration detention is a dangerous place for children. Data from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection describes numerous incidents of assault, sexual assault and self-harm in detention environments. 

The evidence presented within this report spans the period 1 January 2013 to 30 September 2014, during which time there was both the former Labor and current Liberal-Nationals federal governments directing the detention of asylum seekers.

The Abbott Government did not make this report public until 11 February 2015. Prior to tabling this report, the Attorney-General unsuccessfully sought the voluntary resignation of the Commission’s president, Professor Gillian Triggs.

On 12 February 2015 the Prime Minister rose to his feet in the House of Representatives and uttered these words:

It would be a lot easier to respect the Human Rights Commission if it did not engage in what are transparent stitch-ups like the one that was released the other day. I say to the Human Rights Commission: if you are concerned about real human rights, real human decency, real compassion for people, you should be writing congratulatory letters to the former Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, who has stopped the boats, who has saved lives and who has got children out of detention.

In an earlier pre-recorded interview with Neil Mitchell of Radio 3AW he had also said this:

"Where was the Human Rights Commission during the life of the former government when hundreds of people were drowning at sea?"

"This is a blatantly partisan politicised exercise.

"The Human Rights Commission should be ashamed of itself."

Finally, the legal community reached the limit of its tolerance:

From @GCobber99

The real Tony Abbott is never far from the surface.....

The Australian 12 February 2015:

On Sunday, May 25, last year Queensland backbencher Wyatt Roy was part of a group of about 30 marginal seat-holders invited to dine privately with the Prime Minister in the cabinet anteroom. Abbott’s practice at these dinners is to go around the room, asking each member to say their piece.

Roy, trying to be helpful, stood at the table to tell the Prime Minister that broken promises were the fundamental cause of the government’s problems. It might be a good idea, Roy suggested, to apologise to people a la Peter Beattie and move on.

Abbott was furious. He rounded on Roy, yelled at him, then directed his remarks to all of them that there were no effing broken promises and no one should concede there had been. The incident stuck in the mind of MPs, first because of Roy’s bravery in broaching it, then because of the Prime Minister’s use of the F-bomb.

Many months later Abbott was forced to concede the bleeding obvious, but only after accusations of lying about lying trashed his credibility. If he had taken the advice of his youngest MP last May, he would have spared himself considerable pain.

Is Clarence Valley Council's general manager trying to inoculate himself against any regime change at the 10 September 2016 local government election?

Clarence Valley Council’s 17 February Ordinary Monthly Meeting Business Paper contains these interesting items:

Now it is my understanding that a general manager can ask for an early renewal of a contract. 

It is further my understanding that the General Manager’s existing $240,000 per annum five-year performance based contract still has approximately 20 months left to run and doesn’t end until around six to seven weeks after the September 2016 local government election. 

However, these two mayoral minutes raise certain questions.

Is Mayor Richie Williamson attempting to ensure that the general manager doesn’t have to face a possible new mix of councillors when renewing his contract? Or perhaps face a set of councillors disinclined to keep him in this position?

Is the contract renewal minute occurring this far out because the NSW Government has signalled that it will not approve of councils renewing general manager contracts in the six months prior to any local government election and, by having the matter addressed now is the mayor hoping no-one will make a connection with the next council election?

Are current councillors really desirous of keeping this general manager under contract until 2020, thereby side stepping the six month limit and binding a post-September 2016 Clarence Valley Council to this particular general manager?

Background

Excerpt from the NSW Government Response to the Independent Local Government Review Panel Recommendations:

The next time you buy eggs, poultry or bacon....

….check that the companies producing the food going into your grocery trolley are not involved in factory farming.

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TRUST: no respite for Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott

Peter Martin, Economics Editor at The Age, blogging it like it is on 10 February 2015:

As Abbott brought forward the timing of the leadership vote on Sunday his supporter and finance minister Mathias Cormann told the ABC the economy was "heading in the right direction".

He wanted "to build on the achievements we made in 2014".

Take a moment to consider the achievements and the direction in which things are heading.

That year began with a quarterly rate of economic growth of 1 per cent. After the budget it slid to 0.5 per cent, and then to 0.3 per cent. It's falling, rather than rising.
The direction is down….

The Reserve Bank made its view about economic growth clear on Tuesday. Here's what it said when it cut rates an hour or two before its governor briefed Cormann and others in cabinet:

"In Australia the available information suggests that growth is continuing at a below-trend pace, with domestic demand growth overall quite weak."

It's weak and it's bleak. It isn't heading "in the right direction".

Looking ahead the Reserve Bank expects growth to remain "a little below trend for somewhat longer, and the rate of unemployment peak a little higher, than earlier expected."

Unemployment has climbed from a quarterly rate of 5.3 per cent at the end of 2012 to 5.8 per cent at the end of 2013 to 6.2 per cent at the end of 2014. We get the first figures for 2015 on Thursday.

The direction is undeniably clear, but it's not the right one. Unemployment is worse than it was at the peak of the global financial crisis. The Reserve Bank expects it to get worse still...

Hockey and Cormann will tell you that while unemployment is growing, employment is too. But it's not, really. The number of hours worked per month grew barely at all throughout 2014. More people may have been employed at the end of the year than the start but on average they've been working less, some shifting to part-time work and others to fewer hours of full-time work. Disturbingly, the Reserve Bank says the number of hours worked per month has scarcely changed since December 2011 despite three years of population growth.

None of these facts would surprise anyone in business or anyone looking for a job. What would surprise them would be to hear from the team at the top that things are "heading in the right direction". It would make them think they were being lied to….

Joe Hockey's first budget was far worse than it seemed on the night in part because he didn't tell us the truth about it on the night. The usual calculations showing the households that won or lost were missing.  The treasury had prepared them as usual, the treasurer withheld them.

And he made up stuff. He said treasury had told him that fuel excise was "a progressive tax". It hadn't. He said the poorest Australians "either don't have cars or actually don't drive very far in many cases," something many of them know to be untrue. Petrol takes up a much bigger share of a low-income budgets than high-income budgets.  

He said his own wealthy electorate of North Sydney had "one of the highest bulk-billing rates in Australia". It had one of the very lowest in all of Sydney. He said "higher income households pay half their income in tax". They pay nothing like half. Even those on $200,000 pay just 36 per cent. Back from his holidays this January he revived the claim and went further saying typical Australians pay nearly half their income in tax.

"When Australians spend the first six months of the year working for the government with tax rates nearly 50 cents in the dollar it is a disincentive. You're working July, August, September, October, November, December just for the government and then you start working for yourself and your own household income after that for another six months, he said.

But Australia's tax-to-GDP ratio is around 30 per cent, including account all taxes, state and federal. It simply can't be the case that typical Australians pay nearly half their income in tax. They don't.

And exaggerated claims have eaten away at trust. Hockey said Australia was on track to run out of money to pay for its health, welfare and education systems. The figures put forward by his then health minister suggested otherwise. In ten years the cost of Medicare had climbed 124 per cent, the cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme 90 per cent and the cost of public hospitals 83 per cent. But Australia's gross domestic product - the money we would use to pay for these things - climbed 94 per cent.

The government tells us it's concerned about future generations, but won't release the treasury's intergenerational report. It tells us it wants a discussion about tax, but won't release the tax discussion paper finalised late last year.

Without trust we lack confidence. We are neither spending nor investing what we should. Business and consumer confidence has been sliding since September….

The government itself has become an impediment to economic growth…..

Assorted Liberal MPs forget their own leader's history and make fools of themselves

On Wednesday 11 February 2015 six Coalition MPs allegedly took exception to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s Closing The Gap reply and vacated the Chamber while he was still on his feet.

Apparently Shorten committed the sin of partisanship by mentioning Abbott Government funding cuts to Aboriginal agencies and frontline services, while the sainted Abbott was obviously considered by his backbenchers to be statesmanlike in his preceding 2015 Prime Minister’s Closing The Gap Address.

That next day The Sydney Morning Herald online reported:

Victorian Liberal MP Russell Broadbent was first to show his anger by leaving the chamber and later said he believed the partisan comments belittled an occasion that should have been above point-scoring.

"The people of Australia are calling out for leaders who can rise above the fray," he told Fairfax Media.

Others who walked out included Andrew Nikolic, Angus Taylor, John Cobb, Ken O'Dowd and Melissa Price.

So was Shorten’s speech a departure from accepted practice in relation to Close The Gap reply speeches by opposition leaders?

Looking to Tony Abbott’s reply speeches as Opposition Leader I came across this February 2011 example of straying off piste as it were:

I accept that it is very difficult for the government to support legislation which will impact on the work of the Queensland government. But I do think it would be a great and fitting sign of good faith on the part of our Prime Minister if she at least prepared to entertain change on this issue. As I said at the start, there have been many fine speeches in this House on this subject—many heartfelt utterances, much depth of passion and great sincerity. But let us translate that into the very best that we can do for Aboriginal people in our place in our time. That is why I think the wild rivers legislation should be revisited. I think that it would be a good test of the real quality and the real commitment of this parliament if we could find it in our hearts to pass this particular bill.

February 2012 delivered this fine example where, returning to the same subject in his reply speech, he accuses the Gillard Labor Government of attempting to bury his unpopular private member’s bill, Wild Rivers (Environmental Management) Bill 2010:

Mr Speaker, at the risk of straying into partisanship, I think I do need to raise today the issue of the wild rivers legislation, which has now been before this House for the best part of three years, one way or another. It is a modest bill, the wild rivers bill, that I have now put it several times before this Parliament. All the wild rivers bill seeks to do is ensure that Queensland wild rivers declarations can only apply with the consent of the traditional Aboriginal owners. I am not against wild rivers declarations. I accept that where the traditional owners want them, they should apply. But if indigenous people are really to be in control of their own land, if they are to enjoy genuine land rights, surely this is not too much to ask. Yet this modest bill of mine, which has but a couple of operative clauses and which runs to less than nine pages, has now been subject to no fewer than five inquiries by committees of this House or the other place. This modest bill is so inquired into that you cannot but conclude that those who control this Parliament are not trying to analyse it, they are trying to bury it.

So it appears that the first break in any bipartisan tradition of Closing The Gap reply speeches actually came from the lips of their own party leader and now prime minister,Tony Abbott.

That show of righteous indignation by these six Liberal MPs was a gesture which only demonstrates how foolish those governing us can be.

UPDATE

Metgasco Limited: one picture is worth a thousand words

The Australian Stock Exchange, 11 February 2014:

Metgaso Limited (MEL) ordinary fully paid share $0.025 11 February 2015
Price $0.025 Volume 201,874.00 10 February 2014
Price $0.027 Volume 2,035,560.00 9 February 2015
Price $0.030 Volume 267,328.00 6 February 2015

The chart of daily prices over 1 year for security MEL

Are the punters finally abandoning coal seam/tight gas explorer and wannabe production company Metgaso?