Quotes of the Week

“He’s nothing but a pre-Fitzgerald corruption inquiry Queensland walloper”  [An anonymous Liberal MP speaking of Australian Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton, quoted in The Saturday Paper by journalist Paul Bongiorno, 21 April 2018]

“The Liberals complaining that ASIC is sleep is rich considering who administered the fucking anaesthetic.”  [Journalist Richard Chirgwin, Twitter, 23 April 2018]

“At the same time, returns to the AEC show that these same corporations paid a total of $21,733,192 in political donations to political parties with Westpac standing out with donations totalling of nearly $12 million during the 2014-15 financial year alone.“  [Campaigner Rosie Williams, in “What can open data tell us about Australia’s major banks?”, 20 April 2018]

Nationals MP for Page Kevin Hogan jumps on the bandwagon now royal commission is revealing truths about Australian banking, finance and insurance sectors

There has been some 'emergency' repositioning occurring in Turnbull Government circles since Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry hearings began to reveal the extent of bad behaviour in the banking, finance and insurance sectors.

Former money market and bond trader with State Bank of NSW & Colonial State Bank,

former investment officer with the Australian Catholic Superannuation and Retirement Fund, former accountant and current Nationals MP for Page, Kevin Hogan, joined in on 20 April 2017.

Posting a video clip of what appears to be the one occasion he openly expressed disappointment with a bank during a committee hearing last year.

Note: For those interested in the exact wording of the exchange Hogan posted it on YouTube on 9 March 2017.

Even though Hogan was on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics when it conducted a 2016-17 inquiry into Australia’s four major banks and the Committee's recommendations clearly showed that the inquiry revealed serious deficiencies in bank practices, he has never been on his feet in the House of Representatives calling the banks out for unethical behaviour or supporting a call for a royal commission.

He certainly never voted for the creation of such a royal commission in October 2016 or June 2017.

Perhaps because the National Party of Australia has received over $1.15 million in political donation from the banking, finance and insurance sectors since the 2012-13 financial year - and MPs probably expect more donations ahead of the forthcoming federal election?

The second round of Royal Commission public hearings is currently considering the conduct of financial services entities that provide financial advice to consumers, including the treatment of consumers, compliance with the law and community standards and expectations,and the sufficiency of the current legal and regulatory structure.

Mr. Hogan might allow himself to become a little more animated in his disapproval given some of the evidence involves the actions of independent financial advisers such as the jaw dropping example set out below,

But maybe not. There might be a smidgen of fellow feeling there, because Kevin Hogan just like the hapless Sam Henderson was also an independent superannuation consultant and before that had a regular financial segment on Sky News.  

ABC News, 24 April 2018:

A public servant was impersonated while receiving financial advice from a high-profile financial planner, the banking royal commission has heard.

Donna McKenna, who is a Fair Work commissioner, told the inquiry she went to firm Henderson Maxwell after seeing its chief executive Sam Henderson in the media.

Ms McKenna said if she had followed the advice Mr Henderson gave her, she would have lost $500,000.

Mr Henderson followed Ms McKenna in the witness stand.

The financial planner is a regular media personality, with a show on Sky News Business channel and articles published in the Australian Financial Review and Money Magazine.

Mr Henderson's appearance before the commission did not get off to a good start, when it was revealed he does not have a Master of Commerce degree, as stated in a 2016 financial services guide from the firm.

The hearing was then played a damning recording of a Henderson Maxwell employee impersonating Ms McKenna in several phone calls to her super fund.

In the recordings, the employee can be heard giving Ms McKenna's membership number and the State Authorities Superannuation Scheme (SASS) representative refers to her as Donna….

he inquiry heard up to six phone calls were made to the SASS super fund by Henderson Maxwell's customer service officer.

Mr Henderson said the information his employee had provided him about Ms McKenna's account was inconsistent with the information given to him by Ms McKenna.

Mr Henderson refunded Ms McKenna the nearly $5,000 in upfront advice fees she had paid.

The customer service officer who impersonated Ms McKenna was not fired…..

Ms McKenna made a complaint to the Financial Planning Association (FPA) about the quality of the advice.

Despite complaining in March last year, the complaint is still not finalised.

The inquiry heard Mr Henderson responded to the complaint in a lengthy letter to the FPA, describing Ms McKenna as "nitpicky" and her complaint as a "barrage of aggressive and presumptive accusations".

In March this year, Mr Henderson proposed a deal with the FPA that would see him admit to multiple failings in the financial advice he provided to Ms McKenna and agree to implement a number of changes at the firm.

The deal would have also required the FPA to agree to not publish Mr Henderson's name in relation to the proceedings.

The FPA wanted an additional provision that would prevent Mr Henderson appearing in the media for a year.

That proposal was not acceptable to Mr Henderson and the complaint has not yet been formally resolved…..

President Donald J. Trump: We need to go after the reporters

"We need to go after the reporters.....They spend a couple of days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk"  [US President Donald, J. Trump, 14 February 2017]

Finally, an indication of the lengths to which US President Donald J. Trump would go in order to find whistleblowers or silence journalists.

Two excerpts from former FBI Director James Comey's confidential memos supplied to the US Congress last week by the Department of Justice:

Former US Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey's Memos by clarencegirl on Scribd

BACKGROUND

The New York Times, 7 July 2005, Judy Miller Goes To Jail

Well hoorah, NBN Co is to roll out its inbuilt obsolescence across Yamba commencing in June 2018

It has been reported in local media that NBN Co will be commencing the Yamba rollout of its allegedly high speed broadband in June 2018, with Maclean and Grafton rollouts to commence in January 2019.

This news is quite frankly underwhelming.

Whatever information NBN Co was giving out obviously didn’t include the type of connection that was on offer, as this important point was not mentioned by journalists and there is contradictory information on the company's website.

These three urban areas in the Clarence Valley are yet to hear if households and businesses are being offered fibre-to-the-curb, fibre-to-the-node or fixed wireless.

Because it is certain that the best option fibre-to-the-premises isn’t on offer to regional second cousins of the big metropolitan areas.

Personally I will carefully refuse to look at any construction works taking place in Yamba come June, July and August.

The sight of all those water-filled trenches will be too depressing.

Who starts extensive in-ground construction in winter at the low-lying, high water table mouth of a floodplain, I ask you?

* Image from Hakuri Sad Party

Everytime someone buys a bottle of water in Australia it has consequences for a community somewhere in the world

By November 2017 Tweed Shire's est. 93,458 residents faced a water security trifecta.

Floods in the first quarter of the year had affected water quality and local infrastructure, a  tidal anomaly in August had caused saltwater to enter the Bray Park Weir, the following month Terranora Lagoon was contaminated by raw sewerage from the treatment plant and the walls of Clarrie Hall dam still needed raising to cope with urban water needs.

Water sustainability still remains an issue in 2018.

In this case it appears to be Black Mount Pty Ltd and Mt. Warning Spring Water Company's commercial water supply needs which are the main culprit.......

Echo NetDaily, 13 April 2018:

A call for the halt of water mining in the Tweed Valley has been made by NSW Greens MP and North Coast spokesperson, Dawn Walker in state parliament this week and is supported by the Tweed Water Alliance. Concerns over the impact on underground water resources, alleged poor compliance with extraction licenses and the damage caused by heavy vehicles have all been raised.

‘Water is our most precious resource and gigalitres of water beneath Tweed Valley are being sucked up and bottled for commercial profit, leaving the community high and dry with the impacts. Water mining licences are being handed out by the government without adequate monitoring and in many cases, water meters haven’t even been installed,’ said Ms Walker.

Water mining licences are controlled by the state government while work on the property and permission for truck movements are controlled by the local council.

‘We certainly support the ban,’ said Jeremy Tager, spokesperson for the Tweed 

water alliance who believes the water extraction companies are ‘operating lawlessly’.

‘Extracting water is a lose lose prospect for here and most other places. Water is taken away from local users; it creates little or no employment as most of the operators are water transporters. That means the trucks come in and get filled up and then are taken away to be bottled elsewhere.

‘They only pay a a small road contribution to drive these big trucks on rural roads that were never designed for them.’

In December 2017 the Tweed council voted to amend their LEP (local environment plan) 2014 to remove the clause that the previous council had put in to allow water extraction for bottling water in the Tweed shire. This has been sent to the state government for approval as part of the Gateway process. If the state government decide that the change can proceed then Tweed council will be able to put the LEP amendment on public display.

The state government can also request that a ‘savings clause’ be put in that would allow current applications that are waring to be assessed to be allowed.

Echonetdaily asked the state government what the time frame for responding to the Tweeds request for removing the water mining clause from the LEP was and if they would request the inclusion of a ‘savings clause’.

A spokesperson for the department of planning and environment responded stating that; ‘The department is currently in the early stages of assessing a proposal from Tweed Shire council to remove the water extraction and bottling clause to the Tweed Shire 2014 LEP.

Local extractor takes council to court

Larry Karlos, a local water extractor, is currently taking the Tweed Council to the Land and Environment court to appeal their decision not to allow them to increase the size of the trucks they use to transport water from six meters to nineteen meters.

‘The council refused the application for 19m trucks because they felt that the road was no suitable for that size truck,’ said Tweed Mayor Katie Milne.

‘Urlip Road is really narrow and in some places it is only one lane. There are also areas where it is very steep on one side and has a steep drop off on the other.

ABC News, 21 March 2018:

It's the new battle in the bush — the bottled water wars.

On one side is Australia's $800-million-a-year bottled water industry and its suppliers, on the other, rural residents who fear their most precious resource, groundwater, is being squandered.

"It's dividing the local community," said Larry Karlos, one of half a dozen water extractors in the Tweed Valley in northern New South Wales.

He's been pumping water from an aquifer beneath his property for 16 years.

But his recent bid to increase the amount he sells to bottling companies has ignited local opposition.

Fourth-generation farmer Patrick O'Brien fears his children's future is being jeopardised for the profit of the water industry.

"If they don't stop this type of thing then, you know, what's going to be left?" he told 7.30.

“What's going to left for future generations? No-one was really worried when they were trucking the water out in small amounts, but then they want more, they want more trips, they want bigger trucks."

Did the Australian Bureau of Statistics spy on Telstra customers at one remove in 2016?

“…with its near-complete coverage of the population, mobile device data is now seen as a feasible way to estimate temporary populations” [Australian Bureau of Statistics Demographer Andrew Howe, quoted in The Australian Bureau of Statistics Tracked People By Their Mobile Device Data at Medium, 23 April 2018]

Cryptoparty founder. Amnesty Australia 'Humanitarian Media Award' recipient 2014 and activist Asher Wolf recently reported that in 2016 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) without informing or seeking permission from mobile phone users ran a secretive, publicly-funded tracking program via signals emitted by the mobile phones of an unspecified number of people, in order to find out where they travelled over the course of an unspecified number of days and how long they stayed at each location.

A presentation of the basic details of this pilot study was made by the ABS researcher leading the pilot at a Spatial Information Day in Adelaide on 11 August 2017.

A second ABS researcher also made a presentation on the day.

Spatial Information Day (which has the ABS as one of its sponsors) is characterised by the organisers as an annual educational and promotional event and was first held just on 18 years ago.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics was swift to reply to Asher Wolf's Medium article, stating that it has only been supplied with hourly agregate data by the telco (Telstra) which did not identify individuals.

However, the aggregated data supplied to the ABS was at the second lowest SA2 Level and some of these statistcal areas have populations of well under 3,000 residents according to 2016 Census data. Which makes the task of matching names to some of the tracked population movements just that much easier for a demographer or determined hacker.

Given recent less than transparent disclosures by data mining corporations concerning data collection/retention practices, readers might forgive me for waiting to see if the other shoe drops in this ABS-Telsta data mining and privacy matter.

One might say that thanks to Ms. Wolf we are all being educated further about big data and the ethics of data collection.

This is the response Ms. Wolf received when she contacted privacy experts concerning the pilot study:

“I find this tracking of people using their telephone location data without their knowledge and consent extremely concerning. The fact that the telecoms company allowed this data to be handed to a third party, and then for that third party to be a government agency compounds the breach of trust for the people whose data was involved,” said Angela Daly, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Law, research associate in the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society and Digital Rights Watch board member.

“After the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal this is yet another example of why we need much tougher restrictions on what companies and the government can do with our data.”

Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Justin Warren also pointed out that while there are beneficial uses for this kind of information, “…the ABS should be treading much more carefully than it is. The ABS damaged its reputation with its bungled management of the 2016 Census, and with its failure to properly consult with civil society about its decision to retain names and addresses. Now we discover that the ABS is running secret tracking experiments on the population?”

“Even if the ABS’ motives are benign, this behaviour — making ethically dubious decisions without consulting the public it is experimenting on — continues to damage the once stellar reputation of the ABS.”

“This kind of population tracking has a dark history. During World War II, the US Census Bureau used this kind of tracking information to round up Japanese-Americans for internment. Census data was used extensively by Nazi Germany to target specific groups of people. The ABS should be acutely aware of these historical abuses, and the current tensions within society that mirror those earlier, dark days all too closely.”

“The ABS must work much harder to ensure that it is conducting itself with the broad support of the Australian populace. Sadly, it appears that the ABS increasingly considers itself above the mundane concerns of those outside its ivory tower. This arrogance must end.”

“For us to continue to trust the ABS with our most intimate details, the ABS must maintain society’s trust. Conducting experiments on citizens without seeming to care about our approval or consent undermines that trust.”

International privacy advocates also raised concerns about the study.

“Data the companies, like telcos, collect inevitably becomes very attractive to government agencies looking to track, monitor, and survey people. Like here, users are rarely informed, let alone consent to these uses. The impact on privacy rights is severe: location information (especially combined with other sensitive data) can reveal startlingly detailed information about your life (where you live, work), connections (who you talk to or visit), preferences (what you buy and when), and health (doctors and pharmacies frequented),” stated Amie Stepanovich, U.S. Policy Manager for digital rights organisation Access Now.

Read Asher Wolf’s full article at https://medium.com/@Asher_Wolf/the-australian-bureau-of-statistics-tracked-people-by-their-mobile-device-data-and-didnt-tell-them-16df094de31