Malcolm Turnbull & Co losing favour with rural/regional & older voters

The Australian, 3 October 2016

The Newspoll tables covering August-September 2016 clearly show the Turnbull Government continues to lose support in the electorate.

According to The Australian newspaper; The Turnbull government has lost support in every state since the election, with the sharpest falls in Western Australia, Queens­land and South Australia, and among older voters and those living outside the capital cities. A demographic analysis of Newspoll surveys conducted ­exclusively for The Australian since the July election also reveals Mr Turnbull’s support is weakest in his home state of NSW. Labor has made its biggest gains since the election among country voters, men and those aged over 50, with its biggest lift in South Australia and Queensland.

Like the Abbott Government before it, this government is increasingly seen as one which has achieved very little being led by a man who is either too frightened to govern or does not know how to govern effectively.

The ongoing issues with political probity certainly don’t help the Liberal and Nationals parliamentary parties with their public image – nor does the perception that far-right ideologues within their ranks have an inordinate influence on Coalition cabinet decisions.

Having squandered their double-dissolution card in order to achieve a slim two-vote majority in  the House of Representatives in July, holding only 30 of the 76 Senate seats and unable to go to another election until August 2018 at the earliest, one has to wonder how they will manage to turn matters around and regain the confidence of the national electorate.

Australian Government Data Retention: refraining from saying told you so......

ABC News, 29 September 2016:

The Health Department has removed data from its website amid an investigation into whether personal information has been compromised.

Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim has launched an investigation after academics found it was possible to decrypt some service provider ID numbers in the Medicare Benefits Schedule and Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule datasets.

In a statement, the Department of Health said the dataset published on data.gov.au did not include names or addresses of service providers and no patient information was identified.

"However, as a result of the potential to extract some doctor and other service provider ID numbers, the Department of Health immediately removed the dataset from the website to ensure the security and integrity of the data is maintained," it stated.

"No patient information has been compromised, and no information about the health service providers has been publicly identified or released."

Further comment has been sought.

The Guardian, 24 September 2016:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics inadvertently released contact names linked to more than 5,000 Queensland businesses in what was described as a “human error”.

The breach is one of 14 the ABS has reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner since 2013, and was released to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws.

The ABS has come under scrutiny over its handling of the 2016 census, initially for the extended retention of names and addresses for a period of four years. It then faced further criticism after the census website crashed, which it attributed to a series of foreign attacks.

While none of the breaches reported to the OAIC relates to the handling of any census data, some do highlight errors in the handling of other surveys as well as failures to correctly de-identify data, which is one of the criticisms raised by privacy advocates about the increased retention of census data.

The Canberra Times, 4 October 2016:

The federal government is caught up in a second data privacy scare, this time involving a massive data-set on more then 96,000 of its public servants amid fears their confidential information might not be secure.

In the second potentially serious Commonwealth data breach to become public in less than a week, the public service's workplace authority has confirmed that it has withdrawn the data gathered in its massive annual employee census from public view.

It is feared that identification codes for departments and agencies could be used to identify the individual public servants who filled in the census, the largest workplace survey undertaken in Australia, on condition of anonymity.

The data has been taken down from official websites to be washed of any features that could be used to breach the privacy of government officials.

But the Australian Public Service Commission has confirmed the data-set was downloaded nearly 60 times before the take-down, meaning the raw information is in circulation with no way to control how it is used or distributed further......

What would happen if weird was contagious?

Given the Turnbull Government's weird response to the 28 September 2016 South Australian mega storm one wonders what would happen if its way of looking at renewable energy was contagious.

Perhaps something like this……

From the Independent on 14 December 2015:

A US town has rejected a proposal for a solar farm following public concerns.

Members of the public in Woodland, North Carolina, expressed their fear and mistrust at the proposal to allow Strata Solar Company to build a solar farm off Highway 258.

During the Woodland Town Council meeting, one local man, Bobby Mann, said solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not go to Woodland, the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald reported.

Jane Mann, a retired science teacher, said she was concerned the panels would prevent plants in the area from photosynthesizing, stopping them from growing.

Ms Mann said she had seen areas near solar panels where plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight.

She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her solar panels didn't cause cancer….

Stuart Robert MP - the archetypal Liberal Party politician

Stuart Rowland Robert, Liberal MP for Fadden (QLD) since 2007, is truly the archetypal Liberal Party politician - in parliament for his own personal financial advancement, less than transparent about his investments and business connections or gifts he receives, as well as being quite comfortable with those dodgy political donations schemes operating at state and federal level.

Now it seems that the LNP Fadden Forum, which reportedly has a $12,000 annual membership fee, is in the news again.

The Australian, 30 September 2016:

A well-connected lobbyist gave more than $110,000 of her “own money’’ to the fundraising entity of federal Liberal MP Stuart Robert as her company was being wound up with unpaid debts.

Simone Holzapfel, a former longtime adviser to Tony ­Abbott, owed more than $430,000, including $355,000 to the Australian Taxation Office, when she donated $114,000 in 12 separate payments to Mr ­Robert’s “Fadden Forum’’ in mid-2013, ahead of the federal election.

Ms Holzapfel was then a lobby­ist for Gold Coast developer Sunland Group, now at the centre of the latest controversy to embroil Mr Robert, the Gold Coast MP sacked last year from the Turnbull ministry.

Months before the donations were made, Mr Robert had ­defended Sunland in parliament over its involvement in the ­detention of two Australians in Dubai, with a speech largely lifted from briefing notes supplied by Ms Holzapfel.

The notes had been sent to both Mr Robert and Mr Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, on the morning of the November 26, 2012, speech to parliament.

It can also be revealed that Ms Holzapfel sent the notes to Mr Robert and Ms Credlin while working as Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate’s media officer.

She left the council in February 2013 to pursue “commercial ventures’’ and reboot lobbying and PR company Shac, which had been set up in 2005.

The $114,000 donation in 2013 and Mr Robert’s bankrolling of “independent’’ candidates ahead of the Gold Coast council elections in March this year — as revealed by The Australian — are now part of an investigation by Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission.

Ms Holzapfel has previously told The Australian the donations were her “own money’’ and rejected suggestions she had given the money to Mr Robert’s Fadden Forum on behalf of clients.

“I ­donated because I wanted my ­former boss (Mr Abbott) to ­become prime minister, and that is my right to do,’’ she said then.

It has now been confirmed that at the time of making the donations — between July and September 2013 — Ms Holzapfel’s company was in external administration, with $437,000 in debt.

Ms Holzapfel was the sole directo­r of the company, Coolabird, which had changed its name from Shac months earlier and was eventually wound up.

Administrators confirmed yesterday that the company had debts of $437,000 when it was put into ­liquidation, including a debt of $355,000 to the ATO……

The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 September 2016:

A speech Turnbull government MP Stuart Robert gave to Parliament defending the Gold Coast property developer Sunland was substantially written by the lead lobbyist for the company.

Fairfax Media can reveal that former Tony Abbott staffer-turned-developer-lobbyist Simone Holzapfel was the true author of whole sections of the speech that Mr Robert delivered in November 2012.

Ms Holzapfel wrote a four-page defence of Sunland after a November 17 newspaper article scrutinised the company's dispute with an Australian man who spent five years trapped in a legal nightmare in Dubai.

Seven sections of that response - provided to various government officials and obtained by Fairfax Media - subsequently found their way into Mr Robert's adjournment debate speech on November 26.

Ms Holzapfel's words make up more than half of the speech.

Mr Robert has refused to comment on the revelation, which once again puts the spotlight on his connections with Sunland. Mr Robert's links to the company have come under scrutiny as part of a Queensland corruption inquiry into political donations to Gold Coast City Council candidates, which involves his fundraising body, the Fadden Forum......

UPDATE

The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 October 2016:

Turnbull government MP Stuart Robert has close ties to an African church that supports harsh anti-gay laws and is run by a preacher described as "one of the most homophobic people in the world".

Mr Robert was a founding director of Watoto Australia, an offshoot of the Ugandan-based pentecostal Watoto Church, and has called church leader Gary Skinner one of the "great influences" on his life…..

Gay and lesbian activists say Watoto and Mr Skinner are virulently anti-gay and have contributed to violent homophobia in Uganda. Mr Robert – who was also a member of Watoto's International Board – has travelled to the Ugandan capital Kampala many times to meet Mr Skinner, who says homosexuality is "degrading" and an "inhuman sin" that brings disease and destroys families.

Just in case you thought the Australian Minister for the Environment and Energy retained the brains he was born with.....

The 1 in 50 year storm, 28 September 2016

Gannawarra Times

This is Liberal MP for Kooyong and Minister for the Environment and Energy, Josh Frydenberg, writing in The Australian on 30 September 2016:

Public expects energy security

The total loss on Wednesday of South Australia’s electricity supply was a seismic event.

People were stuck in lifts, there was chaos on the roads and residents were huddled around candles while they were confined to their homes.

This is unacceptable in modern Australia and there must be a better way.

Energy security is non-negotiable and we are unapologetic in making it our foremost priority.

For too long much of the debate in this country regarding energy policy has focused on emissions reduction, namely how to reduce our carbon footprint to meet our climate change goals, as well as an ideological debate about increasing renewables, whatever the cost.

While a lower emissions future is undoubtedly important, it counts for little to the public if they are sitting in the dark.

We cannot trade away the reliability of the system as we transition to a low-carbon future because to do so would be far costlier in the long run.

This is why we need to understand what exactly took place in South Australia and the reasons behind it.

The preliminary advice to me from the Australian Energy Market Operator is that a once-in-50- years weather event, which included more than 80,000 lightning strikes across the state in one day, blew over more than 20 electricity transmission towers and “tripped” the two interconnectors — Heywood and Murraylink — that send electricity from Victoria to South Australia. But for that weather event, the blackout would never have occurred.

Questions, however, will be asked as to why the initial outage couldn’t be contained, preventing the blackout cascading across the state, and what measures should now be implemented to enhance the resilience of the system.

But regardless of the specific cause of this event, there are significant broader questions about the impact of the changing energy mix on the stability and reliability of the grid; in particular, how the increasing percentage of power generation from intermittent sources such as solar and wind creates large fluctuations in voltage and frequency, challenging the system.

In the words of the Australian Energy Market Commission earlier this month, “the system strength has been reducing” as wind and rooftop solar “have low or no physical inertia and are therefore currently limited in their ability to respond to sudden large changes in electricity supply or consumption”. This is unlike hydro, gas and coal, which by their nature “maintain a consistent operating frequency and maintain the strength of the system in localised networks”.

It was this issue that AEMO identified as most acute in South Australia, as its reliance on wind and solar at 41 per cent of power generation is extremely high and coal and gas-fired power stations at Northern and Pelican Point recently closed.

With South Australia and other states hurtling towards ever higher and aggressive state-based renewable energy targets, it is now time they heed the warnings of our independent energy market experts.

It is quite irresponsible for the Queensland government, with 4.4 per cent of the state’s power presently generated by renewable energy, to commit to a 50 per cent target by 2030; or for the Victorian government, with 12 per cent renewable energy today, to commit to a 40 per cent target by 2025 without a clear and practical road map for getting there with energy security guaranteed.

At the last Council of Australian Governments energy ministers meeting, the commonwealth, states and territories agreed to work on better understanding the impacts state-based renewable targets are having on stability and pricing in the system.

This work may be very important in the federal government’s attempt to harmonise the renewable targets…..

What an utter load of political tosh. Renewable energy targets had nothing to do with what went down in South Australia on Wednesday, 28 September 2016.

It was a large and violent weather event that took out the means of power transmission which led to that widespread power outage not the method by which energy is generated.

In other words, electricity transmission towers were being turned into scrap metal by the mega storm (including three out of the four transmission lines moving power between Adelaide and the north of South Australia), sub stations were being fried by lightning strikes and electricity poles and wires connecting homes/farms to the grid were being brought down by destructive wind gusts up to 130km/h and falling trees.

Images found on Twitter

UPDATE

The Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that the mega storm included several confirmed tornadoes.

A look at US presidential candidate Donald Trump

Letting the man's words speak for themselves……

* "My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body."

* "Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich"

* "The point is, you can never be too greedy."

* "I am the king of debt," he said. "I love debt. I love playing with it. I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good, it was good. So therefore, you can't lose."

* "I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." 

* MATTHEWS: Where would we drop — where would we drop a nuclear weapon in the Middle East?

TRUMP: Let me explain. Let me explain.

Somebody hits us within ISIS — you wouldn`t fight back with a nuke?....

MATTHEWS: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in 45, heard it. They`re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?

* TRUMP: If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I'm talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, "Oh, Trump doesn't want to protect you." I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth — you have the tape going on?

SANGER: We do.

HABERMAN: We both do.

TRUMP: With massive wealth. Massive wealth. We're talking about countries that are doing very well. Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, "Congratulations, you will be defending yourself."

* Nuclear is the single greatest threat. Just to go down the list, we defend Japan, we defend Germany, we defend South Korea, we defend Saudi Arabia, we defend countries. They do not pay us. But they should be paying us, because we are providing tremendous service and we're losing a fortune. That's why we're losing — we're losing — we lose on everything. I say, who makes these — we lose on everything. All I said, that it's very possible that if they don't pay a fair share, because this isn't 40 years ago where we could do what we're doing. We can't defend Japan, a behemoth, selling us cars by the million… All I said was, they may have to defend themselves or they have to help us out. We're a country that owes $20 trillion. They have to help us out.

*  "I, Donald J. Trump, am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

* I think my strongest asset, maybe by far, is my temperament. I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.

* "And by the way, with Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water. Okay, believe me."

* “Google search engine was suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton”

But wait, there's more!

* “I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.”

* “As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do. As a businessman, I need that.” 

* “Every time I said something, she would say something back. It was rigged.”…. “I have said time and time again that I would only do these debates if I am treated fairly. The only way I can be guaranteed of being treated fairly is if Hillary Clinton is not there.”

* “She [Hillary Clinton] could be crazy. She could actually be crazy.”

* “I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab them by the p—y. You can do anything.”

Hopefully the Yamba Mega Port proposal is dead in the water for the foreseeable future

After five years of wondering if the NSW Government would be mad enough to consider an unsolicited proposal to industrialise the Clarence River estuary by constructing a privatised international mega port built on the back of foreign investment, concerned Clarence Valley native title holders, residents, business owners, commercial fishers and farmers now appear to have an answer.

After a number of local people decided to make their concerns as visible as possible through word of mouth, the creation of a credible Facebook presence, distribution of factual leaflets outlining the proposal, the sale of bumper stickers,  a pop-up protest, a science-based information night, writing letters to politicians and lobbying to make the mega port scheme a local issue at both the July 2016 federal election and recent local government election, many more people began to discuss the issue and three things came to pass:

* eight of the nine recently elected Clarence Valley councillors have stated their opposition to the mega port proposal and, both state and federal MPs representing the valley also publicly indicated their lack of support for the scheme;

* the unsolicited proposal is in disarray with Australian Infrastructure Developments Pty Ltd having to admit that it cannot progress the proposal due to state government planning policies and strategies relating to NSW ports; and

* the NSW Minister for Roads, Maritime and Freight, Duncan Gay, has now stated the following.

Letter from NSW Minister for Roads, Maritime and Freight on the subject of the Port of Yamba, 2016

https://www.scribd.com/document/325740039/Letter-from-NSW-Minister-for-Roads-Maritime-and-Freight-on-the-subject-of-the-Port-of-Yamba-2016

This letter expands on a previous letter from Minister Gay to a NSW Greens member of parliament advocating on behalf of yet another concerned local resident.

As the contents of both letters correspond with the view of the Dept. of Premier and Cabinet directly put to a Lower Clarence resident on 17 August 2016, I am hopeful that the proposal for an international mega port in the Clarence River estuary - as envisaged by either Australian Infrastructure Developments Pty Ltd or United First Peoples Syndications Pty Ltd in conjunction with United Land Councils Ltd - will not be considered during the life of this current state parliament.

Once again Clarence Valley communities have demonstrated that when it comes to protecting the Clarence River system on which we all depend; they can act swiftly, with purpose and to effect.