Saturday 1 September 2018
Quote of the Week
“This
country would throw itself in the sea if it wasn't already girt by it.” [Freelance journalist Andrew Stafford’s 17
August 2018 tweeted
response to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s removal of a climate
change target from the National Energy Guarantee,
"sitting on the lap of the
member for Warringah [Abbott] like a really scary wooden puppet come to life.
With the hand of the member for Warringah up his... back. Like Chucky." [Labor MP for Sydney & Deputy Leader of
the Opposition Tanya Plibersek on the subject of Liberal MP for Dickson Peter Dutton, Twitter,
21 August 2018]
Friday 31 August 2018
A reminder that the world has known about the negative effects on the atmosphere of burning coal for over 100 years
Live Science, 14 August 2018:
A newspaper clip
published Aug. 14, 1912, predicts that coal consumption would produce enough
carbon dioxide to warm the climate.
Credit: Fairfax Media/CC
BY-NC-SA 3.0 NZ
A note published in a
New Zealand paper 106 years ago today (Aug. 14) predicted the Earth's
temperature would rise because of 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide produced by
coal consumption.
"The effect may be
considerable in a few centuries," the article stated.
The clip was one of
several one-paragraph stories in the "Science Notes and News" section
of The
Rodney and Otamatea Times, published Wednesday, Aug. 14, 1912.
The paragraph seems to
have been originally printed in the March
1912 issue of Popular Mechanics as the caption for an image of a large
coal factory. The image goes with a story titled "Remarkable Weather of
1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists
Predict for the Future," by Francis Molena. [Photographic
Proof of Climate Change: Time-Lapse Images of Retreating Glaciers]
Labels:
climate change,
history,
science
Will the Australian Government continue its policy of harrassment and intimidation in relation to Australia's national public broadcaster?
This was the situation before Malcolm Turnbull was politically beheaded by the hard right of the Liberal Party and Scott Morrison installed as the new Australian Prime Minister.....
Lenore Taylor
is Guardian Australia's editor. She has won two Walkley awards and has twice
won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism.
She has been
a journalist for over thirty years and covered federal politics for over twenty-two
years.
Despite being invited onto the ABC "Insiders" program as a political journalist and editor, she found that pressure appeared to have been placed on that program to remove its video of her one of comments from its Twitter feed.
Do not retweet - @JoshFrydenberg and @TurnbullMalcolm don't want this seen and told @InsidersABC to delete this clip. #auspol #reefgate pic.twitter.com/Xf4B0J7p5B— EBA Truth (@ebatruth) August 13, 2018
I raised a question on #insiders yesterday about how the reef foundation could have been so surprised by the grant if the govt had already done due diligence on it, as Josh Frydenberg revealed in the interview - this from @InsidersABC about why a tweet of my comment was removed https://t.co/VsJ2Swc4HF— Lenore Taylor (@lenoretaylor) August 13, 2018
“The comments bring into question remarks by the environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, on the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, that the government did “extensive due diligence” on the foundation before awarding it close to half a billion d…” https://t.co/LSSn7ixjlw— Ellie (@elliemail) August 13, 2018
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation denies there was any prior due diligence conducted concerning the $487,633,300.00 grant.This was my call yesterday and on reflection it was a mistake. I should have quote tweeted the original tweet and provided the new information given to me by government. Apologies to @lenoretaylor. Her comments remain on iview and on the Insiders website. https://t.co/3iJHHxm6hc— Samuel Clark (@sclark_melbs) August 13, 2018
“We had to certainly demonstrate value for money and our track record,” she said.
Once this particular cat was out of the bag ABC "Insiders" decided on 360 degree change of direction or suddenly remembered what being an independent public broadcaster actually means - readers can make up their own minds as to motive.
Once this particular cat was out of the bag ABC "Insiders" decided on 360 degree change of direction or suddenly remembered what being an independent public broadcaster actually means - readers can make up their own minds as to motive.
Remembering that as federal treasurer Scott Morrison led the charge to savagely cut ABC funding, the question that needs answering now is "Will he continue to bash the ABC by allowing minsters to apply inappropriate pressure on management and staff to alter editorial decisions?"We’ve republished this tweet. It was my call on Sunday to take it down, and that was a mistake. My apologies again to @lenoretaylor. https://t.co/NyivO2sJaL— Samuel Clark (@sclark_melbs) August 14, 2018
The real reason Turnbull gave the Great Barrier Reef Foundation
$487.6 million with few strings attached and a short deadline on the spend
Picture the scene: three
men in a room, two of them offering the third the deal of a lifetime.
The pair say they will
give the man’s little outfit – which has assets of only about $3 million,
turnover of less than $8 million and just a handful of staff – a
$444 million contract, under terms yet to be negotiated. The offer comes
out of a clear blue sky, totally unsolicited by the lucky recipient. For this
little organisation, it is like winning the lottery, except they didn’t even
buy a ticket.
Such a deal would be
exceptional, even in the corporate world. It would have been exceptional even
if the pair making the offer had been, say, investment bankers, and the third
man the head of a tech start-up.
But they weren’t. Two of
them were the prime minister of Australia and his environment minister, and the
third was the chairman of a charitable organisation called the Great Barrier
Reef Foundation. All three do have backgrounds as bankers, however: Malcolm
Turnbull, Josh Frydenberg and the foundation’s John Schubert worked with
Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Commonwealth Bank respectively.
The question is why it
was done this way. Why solicit this little organisation, of which most people
would never have heard, to be the recipient of the biggest such grant ever made
in Australia? Why was the money given without tender and without any prior
grant proposal? Why, instead of providing the money a bit at a time, subject to
satisfactory performance as assessed on an annual or biannual basis, was six
years’ worth of funding provided in one lump on June 28, less than three months
after that first meeting?
Geoff Cousins thinks he
knows the answer.
Cousins is a former
president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Perhaps more importantly,
he is a corporate boardroom heavyweight. For 10 years, he was an adviser to
John Howard.
“It’s a most cynical
piece of accounting trickery,” he says of the Barrier Reef grant.
“A piece of
chicanery. That’s the only way I can describe it.”
To explain why, he
traces back several years, to the government’s desperate attempts to persuade
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,
that it was a good steward of the Great Barrier Reef, and that the reef World
Heritage area should not be declared to be “in danger”.
To that end, the
government had promised, under its Reef 2050 Plan, to invest more than $700
million in measures to protect one of the world’s great natural wonders.
“For the Department of
the Environment and Energy to grant over $440 million to a small charity that
didn’t even prepare an application form or ask for the grant is inconceivable!”
“They made a commitment,
the Australian government, to the World Heritage listing committee, to spend
$716 million on the Barrier Reef, prior to 2020,” Cousins says.
“But they have
spent just a fraction of that, and there is no way that in the remaining 18
months or less that they can reach that target, which raises the potential of
the reef being put on the endangered list.”
In Cousins’s view,
someone must have realised the trouble the government faced in meeting its
spending targets on time. His guess is Frydenberg.
“Even if you started
now, you couldn’t actually spend that money. There’s not a list, not a pipeline
of projects approved and ready to go,” Cousins says.
“So Malcolm, then
putting on … his business head, his accounting head, says ‘Well, all we’ve
really got to do is make sure the money moves from the government’s accounts to
the bank account of some other private or not-for-profit institution, then the
money is spent.’ But the money hasn’t really been spent at all. Even the CEO of
the foundation says it won’t all be spent for six years.”
If you tried that kind
of dodge in the corporate world, Cousins says, “your accounting firm would say
… they would have to qualify your accounts”.
Cousins makes a very
strong circumstantial case. It is true the federal government has grossly
underspent on its UNESCO commitment, and that the money given to the reef
foundation will go much of the way to making good on that funding promise.
It is true also that UNESCO
has become increasingly critical of the government’s performance protecting the
reef. Last year’s meeting of the World Heritage Committee noted in particular
that progress on achieving water-quality targets was too slow to meet the
agreed time frame. As it happens, the largest single item on the reef
foundation’s to-do list is improving water quality, with $201 million
allocated to it.
Read the full aticle here.
Thursday 30 August 2018
Tony Abbott: unpopular and unwanted
Sacked former prime minister and current Liberal MP for Warringah Anthony John "Tony" Abbott in August 2018.......
I hope history will record that it was @TonyAbbottMHR whose vengeance permeated the failed Dutton #libspill. He wrecked the Gillard Government, his own Government, & the Turnbull Government. Surely this is the story of the week. How one man has trashed 3 Prime Ministers. #auspol pic.twitter.com/rd09koM98H— Dr Chris Pepin-Neff (@christopherneff) August 25, 2018
Crikey, 28 August 2018:
Next year, Tony Abbott
will rack up 25 years as an MP. And the best way for him to celebrate it -- for
his party, for the government, and most of all for Australia -- would be to
retire. 2019 should be the election at which he calls time.
Abbott said to one of
his media friends on Monday that he still sees himself as a young man. In fact,
Abbott has always been an old man; he is the classic example of Keating's
"young fogey", from his days as a student politician through his
stint as a seminarian and his devotion to BA Santamaria, through his entry into
politics first as a staffer and then as an MP. Abbott has only ever seen the world
through the eyes of an old man furious at the changes wrought by young people,
determined to reverse the desecration of all that is sacred in his world where
Christian white males hold unquestioned authority.
What did the rest of
Australia ever do to the voters of Warringah? Lucky to live in one of the
most blessed constituencies on earth, stretching from Sydney’s leafy north
shore to the northern beaches, its residents have nevertheless foisted on
Australia the single most destructive politician of our time: Tony Abbott. The
failed priest, nicknamed the “mad monk”, has done incalculable damage to this
country. And for someone who aspired to
be a “junkyard dog savaging the other side”, Abbott has lately mostly savaged
his own, culminating in last week’s Pyrrhic victory over Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull, which slaked his thirst for revenge but left the Liberals in their
worst position for a decade.
As a former director of
Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, Abbott was a key wrecker of the 1999
republic referendum, denying this country a head of state who was one of us.
Abbott employed David Oldfield, who moonlighted for Pauline Hanson and helped
create One Nation. Realising the threat that Hanson posed to the Liberals’
right front, Abbott was the brains behind shabby outfit Australians for Honest
Politics, which helped put her in jail for electoral fraud. As a pro-life
health minister, under John Howard, he tried to block women’s access to the
abortion drug RU486.
In 2009, Warringah’s
local member tore down Liberal Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull over climate
change. It was desperately cynical even then: Abbott admitted to Turnbull at
the time that he’d been a “bit
of a weather vane” on the issue. But Abbott decided it was “absolute crap”
that the science of climate change was settled and, right there and then,
introduced a kind of madness into our politics. Ever since, the country has
found it impossible to agree on an energy or climate policy.
Emboldened after
toppling Turnbull, the member for Warringah went on to launch a misogynistic campaign
against our first female prime minister; he also embarked on a misleading “axe
the tax” campaign against Labor’s emissions trading scheme, which his chief of
staff, Peta Credlin, later excused as an exercise in “brutal
retail politics”, given the ETS wasn’t a carbon tax at all. As prime
minister, Abbott’s first great achievement was to kill off our car industry,
and he went on betray his promise to the
electorate that his government would make “no cuts to education, no cuts to
health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or
SBS”. His first budget in 2014, possibly the worst in living memory, defunded
schools and hospitals to the tune of $80 billion compared with forecast
funding levels under Labor, and failed to pass the Senate. That year
Abbott made Australia the first country in the world to abolish a carbon price.
Then in 2015 he knighted Prince Philip on Australia Day, turning himself into a
laughing stock, and his downfall began. When the Liberal Party turfed Abbott in
September 2015, a grateful nation rewarded the new PM Turnbull with approval
ratings of 68
per cent.
Ever since, Abbott has
sniped, wrecked and undermined the Coalition. Although he describes his aim as
being the “best possible member for Warringah”, he has never cared to represent
his constituency faithfully. In the equal marriage postal survey, 75 per cent
of his electorate voted “Yes” – the highest proportion in New South Wales – but
Tony Abbott, a loud “No” campaigner, later scarpered from
the House of Representatives.
Now, without care for
the national interest, the institution of parliament, the office of PM or the
electoral fate of the Liberal Party, Abbott has torn down Turnbull a second
time. To what end? Not policy: Turnbull had conceded everything the hard right
demanded of him. Not politics: today’s Newspoll[$]
shows the damage caused by last week’s spill; the Coalition now trails Labor
44–56, and Bill Shorten is preferred PM. The member for Warringah will reportedly [$]
give a “call-to-arms” speech to rally Liberal members behind new prime minister
Scott Morrison. But can Abbott be trusted to serve Morrison loyally? Or will he
start the work of tearing down another Liberal prime minister?
The party is desperate
to put the Abbott-Turnbull wars behind it. Federal Liberal president Nick
Greiner said
yesterday [$] that Abbott is at least partly to blame for the
divisions in the party: “Tony is an excellent political salesman, a political
warrior; he should have been spending his time – and I of course said this to
him – much more on bringing down our political opponents rather than focusing
on internal differences.” Columnist Niki Savva was less politic on the
weekend, writing:
“If he had any decency Abbott would resign too, now that he has accomplished
his mission.”
Former PM Kevin Rudd
absolutely let
rip this morning: “I cannot remember a single positive policy
initiative that Abbott has championed and then implemented. Not one. As a
result, unconstrained by policy, the entire energy of this giant wrecking ball
of Australian politics has been focused on destroying his opponents – within
the Labor Party and the Liberal Party. Of all modern politicians, Abbott
is sui generis. His singular, destructive impact on national politics
cannot be underestimated.”
Labels:
right wing rat bags,
Tony Abbott
NSW North Coast candidates begin to line up for March 2019 state election
CLARENCE GREENS, Media Release, 19 August 2018:
Clarence Greens announce State
candidate
The Clarence Greens have
endorsed Dr Greg Clancy – a Greens councillor on Clarence Valley Council – as
the Greens candidate for Clarence in next year’s State election.
His announcement as candidate
follows a preselection ballot of Greens members from across the electorate
contested by Greg and Will Elrick of Woombah.
Dr Clancy stated that he
was very humbled to be selected and thanked the membership for placing their
trust in him.
‘I look forward to
working on the campaign with Will and the other members of the Greens to raise
the important issues,’ he said.
‘There are many issues
that should be the focus of the campaign,’ he said.
‘These include
supporting public services such as TAFE, hospitals and national park management
and retaining staff in the valley to deliver regional services. I am also keen
to promote the need for a new high school in the lower Clarence.
‘Of course, protecting
the environment is a key concern, as so much of our local economy relies on a
healthy environment,’ he said.
‘There needs to be
better oversight of native forest management, improved funding for national
parks, improved incentives for sustainable agriculture and a reversal of the
weakened land clearing laws. I will be continuing to oppose gas mining and the
proposed cobalt, antimony and gold mines in our catchments. A key statewide
issue is action to ban single-use plastics.’
‘I am looking forward to
promoting the four pillars of the Greens at the local level. They are
ecological sustainability, peace and non-violence, grassroots democracy and
social justice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The
Daily Examiner,
10 May 2018:
TRENT Gilbert has been endorsed as the Country Labor candidate for
Clarence in the 2019 state election and will once again run against sitting
member National's MP, Chris Gulaptis.
Mr Gilbert stood for
Labor in the 2015 election and gained an impressive 22.2% swing.
"I took it up to
Chris Gulaptis in 2015 and will use that experience to campaign hard again,” Mr
Gilbert said.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meet Alan Carr, Your
Nationals Candidate for Lismore
A qualified carpenter, a
university graduate with degrees in communications and economics, and now a
local macadamia grower, Austin will use his broad experience to advocate for
everyone.
Austin was raised and
educated in Northern NSW so understands the unique nature of our community and
is committed to protecting our way of life.
As the father of
three young kids, Austin knows the importance of good local schools, keeping
crime under control and how important it is for our kids to have the
opportunity to realise their dreams at home.
As a farmer, Austin
is committed to practical environmentalism — real action to make our local
environment more livable and sustainable.
As someone who hasn’t
been a long time member of a political party, a political or union staff
member, he brings a new approach to politics and a fresh face ready for
our future.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Echo
News, 13 June
2018:
HIGH profile public
interest lawyer Sue Higginson is set to be announced today as the NSW Greens
candidate for the seat of Lismore.
The announcement sets
the stage for a compelling state election contest next year with two
heavyweight contenders, in the form of Labor veteran Janelle Saffin and now Ms
Higginson - to pit themselves against Nationals newcomer Austin Curtin.
A well known figure in
Lismore, Ms Higginson was the solicitor for the Northern Rivers branch of the
Environmental Defender's Office for several years and was instrumental in
setting its local office up in 2006.
She is also a dry land
rice farmer on the Richmond flood plain who raised her family in the region,
and has garnered respect across the political divide for her principled legal
work.
From 2012 she commuted
to Sydney to take up the chief solicitor role with the EDO before becoming the
organisation's CEO in 2015, until stepping down last November to become a
member of the Greens, and seek pre-selection for the seat of Lismore.
Speaking to The Northern
Star this morning, Ms Higginson said going into politics was a "very
natural” progression after years of working to protect for the interests of
regional communities via law reform.
She said a
Parliamentarian's role was twofold - to be an advocate for the community, and
to make new laws for the state - and said she was an "expert” on the
complexities of the latter.
"I'm no stranger to
Macquarie St,” she said.
"I've spent many
long hours advising members of Parliament across the board.
"I feel that I am
absolutely the most qualified candidate for Lismore.”
She has also lived in
the Lismore region since her teens and has a grass roots activist past, having
participated in anti-logging protests in the early 1990s before going on to
become lawyer.
On the seat of Lismore,
she said: "I strongly believe it’s time for a change here”.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Labels:
federal election
Wednesday 29 August 2018
When you don't like the results when you Google yourself - threaten retribution
This was the US President Donald Trump on Tuesday 28 August 2018.....
Google responded to these accusations on the same day.....
Labels:
Donald Trump,
Google,
Internet
“Shit Life Syndrome” is sending Britons and Americans to an early grave…..
With Scott Morrison as the new prime minister, the Abbott-Turnbull era persistent attacks on the social fabric of the nation are bound to continue. Thus ensuring that Australians follow down the same path as Britain and America?
The
Guardian, 18
August 2018:
Britain
and America are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. They
are experiencing not merely a slowdown
in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing
to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across
all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people
to die early.
In
Britain, life expectancy, which increased steadily for a century, slowed
dramatically between 2010 and 2016. The rate of increase dropped by 90% for
women and 76% for men, to 82.8 years and 79.1 years respectively. Now, death
rates among older people have so much increased over the last two years – with
expectations that this will continue – that two major insurance companies,
Aviva and Legal
and General, are releasing hundreds of millions of pounds they had been
holding as reserves to pay annuities to pay to shareholders instead. Society,
once again, affecting the citadels of high finance.
Trends
in the US are more serious and foretell what is likely to happen in Britain
without an urgent change in course. Death rates of people in
midlife (between 25 and 64) are increasing across the racial and ethnic
divide. It has long been known that the mortality rates of midlife American
black and Hispanic people have been worse than the non-Hispanic white
population, but last week the British Medical Journal
published an important study re-examining
the trends for all racial groups between 1999 and 2016.
The
malaises that have plagued the black population are extending to the
non-Hispanic, midlife white population. As the report states: “All cause
mortality increased… among non-Hispanic whites.” Why? “Drug overdoses were the
leading cause of increased mortality in midlife, but mortality also increased
for alcohol-related conditions, suicides and organ diseases involving multiple
body systems” (notably liver, heart diseases and cancers).
US
doctors coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor
working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and
neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs
available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job
security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning
a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support
and contingent access to healthcare.
Finding meaning in life is close to
impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional
resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very
different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are
valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food
and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing
relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological
side-effects,
that is the killer.
Shit-life
syndrome captures the truth that the bald medical statistics have economic and
social roots. Patients so depressed they are prescribed or seek opioids – or
resort to alcohol – are suffering not so much from their demons but from the
circumstances of their lives. They have a lot to be depressed about. They, and
tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition,
constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base, easily tempted by rhetoric that pins
the blame on dark foreigners, while castigating countries such as Finland or
Denmark, where the trends are so much better, as communist. In Britain, they
were heavily represented among the swing voters who delivered Brexit.
Read the full
article here.
NOTE: The last time the United States saw a prolonged life expectancy decrease due to natural causes was during the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1917-1919 when life expectancy fell by twelve years.
Labels:
access & equity,
economics,
health,
inequality,
life expectancy,
society
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