NSW State Election 2011: As the worm turns.....

Snapshot from the Essential Report 23 March 2011

NSW North Coast MP Janelle Saffin supports pay increase for lowest paid workers

Saffin supports pay increase for lowest paid workers

Page MP Janelle Saffin said Australia’s lowest paid workers must not be left behind in the latest wage review.

The Australian Government submission to Fair Work Australia’s 2010 Annual Wage Review recommends that any increase in minimum wages be in line with cost of living and other economic changes.

Ms Saffin said many people on modest incomes are doing it tough and Fair Work Australia needs to take this into account.

“Pay increases for those in the workforce are for necessities, not luxuries.”

“The ACTU is calling for an increase of $28 a week. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) acknowledges that an increase in the minimum wage rate is warranted, although says it should be no higher than $9.50.

“It is important that the increase is a fair amount to help the lowest paid workers support themselves and their families.

“It is a worker’s right to seek a pay rise and the sky won’t fall in if this is granted,” Ms Saffin said.

“The minimum wage is a key part of Australia’s safety net. The Australian economy is performing well and can afford a fair increase to the wages of the lowest paid.”

21 March 2011

 

Big Screen Film Festival at Kyogle & Yamba March 31 - April 6 2011

The National Film and Sound Archive's Big Screen
Touring Australian Films

Coming to Yamba and Kyogle March 31 – April 6, 2011

Yamba Cinema
13 Coldstream Street
Yamba
Phone: 02 6646 3430

Richmond Valley Cinemas
26 Bloore Street
Kyogle
Phone: 02 6632 3285

Tickets: $15 opening night, $7 Family Screening (Adults Free), $7 other sessions.
Festival Pass Yamba: Pre-purchase only $35 for eight (8) different films (saving $22).

For the Big Screen Festival Programs visit www.nfsa.gov.au/bigscreen

Bookings for School Screen can be made by teachers only at http://www.metromagazine.com.au/

National School Screen program - Babe and Mao's Last Dancer will screen in Kygole, and Happy Feet, Bran Nue Day, Jackie Jackie, Caterpillar Wish and Harvie Krumpet in Yamba.

Thursday 31 March 7.00pm, Richmond Valley Cinemas, Kyogle – One Night Only

A suddenly widowed mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is trying to raise her unruly kids while coping with the tragic loss of father and husband. Eight‐year old Simone is convinced her father's spirit is protecting them from The Tree next to their home.

Friday 1 April 7.00pm, Yamba Cinema – Official Opening Night

Meet actor Gyton Grantley who will introduce The Reef and host a Q&A after the film. A great white shark hunts the crew of a capsized sailboat along the Great Barrier Reef. Matt (played by Gyton), is a heroic and believable character in this beautifully shot thriller, based on a true story.

Saturday 2 April at 12 noon, Yamba Cinema – Special Event

Gyton Grantley introduces another of his films, the epic Beneath Hill 60. The film has just won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing awards at the Annual Film Critics Awards.

Saturday 2 April 6.00pm, Yamba Cinema

The Tree: A beautiful film about a young mother and her unruly family recovering from the loss of their father.

Saturday 2 April 8.00pm, Yamba Cinema

A young police officer's first day of duty in a small town turns into a nightmare when he is forced to take the law into his own hands to survive. Red Hill stars Ryan Kwanten, Steve Bisley and Tom E. Lewis.

Sunday 3 April 10.00am, Yamba Cinema ‐ Family Screening

A young boy living with his father in the wild Coorong wetlands of South Australia, rescues a baby pelican, Mr Percival in Storm Boy. Print from the NFSA's Kodak/Atlab collection. Adults free!

Sunday 3 April 11.30am, Yamba Cinema

A Heartbeat Away is a feel‐good Australian musical comedy from internationally acclaimed director Gale Edwards. Starring Sebastian Gregory, Isabel Lucas, Tammy MacIntosh and Colin Friels.

Sunday 3 April 3.00pm, Yamba Cinema – Special Event

Meet director Claire Gorman and rising surf star Jess Laing who introduce their inspiring new feature film First Love. Follow three young surfers from Phillip Island on their journey to the big waves of Hawaii. When Jess is injured, will she recover?

Tuesday 5 April 10.30am, Yamba Cinema

A Heartbeat Away (details above)

Tuesday 5 April 12.15pm and 4.30pm, Yamba Cinema

The Tree (details above)

Wednesday 6 April, 10.30am, Yamba Cinema

Animal Kingdom is a powerful thriller about the battle between a Melbourne crime family, the police and the young man who finds himself caught in the crossfire. Starring Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn and Oscar nominee Jackie Weaver.

Can't believe they said that!

The Australian Federal Parliament House of Reps threw up these tasteful pearls of wisdom and goodwill on 21^st March 2011....

“Whilst I will not go so far as to sully the image of non-pension-age employees as generally unreliable or around the corner from pregnancy or a hangover—hopefully, not both at the same time—I believe that this constituent has a very valid point.”
How many more voters can the Libs Member for Bennelong John Alexander manage to insult in one sitting day?

“Answer the question, you harridan.”
On that same day fellow Lib and Member for Sturt Christopher Pyne interjects to demonstrate why he will never be considered a gentleman.

“Don‘t lie!”
While yet another Lib Sophie Mirabella, who currently has squatter’s rights in the Indi electorate, gets sin binned for this nasty three worder.

And a mad pollie's website ran with this on the 16th....

PRESENTER:Seriously, so, the only question I want to know is were you thinking of having a chest wax any time soon?
TONY ABBOTT:What, to get rid of my love rug?
Can the Leader of the Opposition and Federal Member for Warringah get more tackily boastful than this?

Late development: Nationals Steve Cansdell leans even further to the right

The camera doesn't lie.

Nationals MP Steve Cansdell has a paid-for how-to-vote in the free (throw-away) local paper the Clarence Valley Review that indicates he's bending over backwards to keep extreme right wingers onside.

Here's a pic of the ad:

Source: Clarence Valley Review, 32/3/11, page 5

A word or two to those No CarbonTax ragers. Yer? I really believe ya (not)

Take a look at these pics from today's No Carbon Tax Rally in Canberra, organised by Jacques Laxale of the Consumers & Taxpayers Association.
Definitely not a crowd whom on a good day I might suppose had actually considered the the pros and cons of placing a national price on carbon before introducing a market-driven emissions trading scheme.
I've a feeling that it was pure ignorance on show - a redneck extravaganza with Sophie, Bronnie, Pauline, Eric[a] and Angry in tow.
A rally chocka with the type of people who would never think that Opposition Leader Abbott was probably mentally laughing at them when he opened his rally speech with these words:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I want to say congratulations to all of you for coming out today and letting the Government of Australia know that the people of Australia can never be taken for granted. As I look out on this crowd of fine Australians I want to say that I do not see scientific heretics. I do not see environmental vandals. I see people who want honest government."

As MrDenmore remarked: "A group from the #noCTrally stayed behind for a party. See picture here."And when someone tries to inflate the Canberra rally numbers remember this panorma pic ....
Pics from Twitpics and News Ltd courtesy of Google Images

Over 100,000 Twitter users were psychologically assessed - without their knowledge or consent?

Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar ordissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed asthe correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent results indicate thatbeyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” canbe assortative in a social network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networksit is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social tiesare mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show thatgeneral happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record oftheir individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is thefirst result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply that onlinesocial networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real socialnetworks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalenceof online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an importantinstrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties.Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in“real life”…….We collected a large set of Tweets submitted to Twitter in the period from November 28, 2008 to May 2009.The data set consisted of 129 million tweets submitted by several million Twitter users. Each Tweet contained aunique identifier, date-time of submission (GMT+0), submission type, and textual content, among other information…We complemented this cross-section sample of twitter activity by retrieving the complete history of over 4 millionusers, as well as the identity of all of their followers. The final Twitter Follower network contained 4,844,430users (including followers of our users for which we did not collect timeline information). Armed with the socialconnections and activity of these users we were able to measure the way in which the emotional content of eachusers varied in time and how it spread across links. [Happiness is assortative in online social networks,Johan Bollen, Bruno Gonçalves, Guangchen Ruan, & Huina Mao,March 2011]

The 4,844,430 users (whose tweets were scanned in 2008 for the aforementioned study) would work out at about eighty per cent of the estimated 6 million Twitter accounts in existence during that year. Although only those who posted at least one tweet daily over a six month period were retained in the study, which ended up formally assessing 102,009 users.

One of those harvested appears to be a co-founder of ISP/telco Sonic.net who happens to be ‘followed’ by Barack Obama.
The wife of a co-founder of SDMOMfia.com was caught up in the tweet trawl and she is also followed by the U.S. President.
Obama was found again following a PR person from the Detroit area whose name cropped up in connection with the study.
One male who has no public Twitter bio is yet another who is identified by this study. He links back to Obama through an account the President follows.
However, it is highly unlikely that Barack Obama’s official tweets were assessed for Subjective Well-Being aka general happiness as he didn’t tweet daily.
There are a number of other tweeters mentioned in the study who can be easily identified by the general public or by their own followers.

What on earth was Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing thinking in allowing any persons used in this study to be identified either directly within the text or in presentations undertaken later by one of the authors (and in one instance assigned an emotional state)? Did no-one realise the power of Twitter and Google to disclose identities to the idly curious?

These tweets may be in the public domain, but surely there are limits to the uses to which others may put them.

Never a truer word spoken on the Mad Monk - Part Two

This time it’s journalist Mark Dreyfus over at The Sydney Herald on the 11^th March 2011:

“Abbott's wildest claim is that he is running a ''truth campaign''. Leaving aside the Goebbellian cynicism of labelling a scare campaign a ''truth campaign'', I think it shows Abbott's contempt for the Australian electorate. His gaze is so firmly fixed on the prize of power that he is blind to the damage he is causing to the strength of our political system and the quality of debate. It is contemptuous to simply not answer real questions, to dismiss valid criticism without reasoning, to deflect real argument with personal attack.”

Part One here.

Environmental Roundup March 2011

Old Bar Sand Replenishment Group 12 March 2011:

INDEPENDENT MP for Lyne Robert Oakeshott has urged the Prime Minister to act on recommendations made last October in a seminal report to government about the impact of climate change on coastal communities. The report, titled Managing our coastal zone in a changing climate: the time to act is now, made 47 recommendations related to the need for national policy action on issues including coastal erosion and associated liability issues.

Environmental Defenders Office (NSW) 17 March 2011:

The EDO is acting for the Snowy River Alliance Inc ('SRA') in their challenge to the Water Administration Ministerial Corporation's ('WAMC') review of the Snowy Hydro water licence and a subsequent variation to the licence. The Snowy Hydro Corporatisation Act 1997 (NSW) ('Act'), requires the WAMC to conduct a review of the obligations under the licence relating to the "Snowy River Increased Flows" and to exhibit a copy of any state of the environment reports prepared by the Snowy Scientific Committee ("SSC"). On 23 July 2010, the EDO commenced proceedings in the Supreme Court of NSW on behalf of the SRA challenging the validity of the review.
The case was heard before Justice Hislop on 14 March 2011. SRA argued that the WAMC's review failed to meet the description of "review" as required by the Act and failed to exhibit any SSC reports prior to the review. If the review is found to be invalid, the variation to the licence may also be invalid. Justice Hislop has reserved his decision.

The Daily Examiner 18 March 2011:

THE Coastal Communities Protection Alliance in Wooli has been given more fuel for its argument to deal with the coastal erosion issues plaguing the community in a way other than Clarence Valley Council’s planned retreat option.
Dr Shaw Mead, director of international consultancy ASR, spent several days at the beachside village assessing the potential for protective measures for the dune system and Wooli Wooli River mouth, which suffered degradation from severe weather events and changes in sand movement during past years.

ABC News online 18 March 2011:

Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke has given the Victorian Government until April 8 to get cattle out of the Alpine National Park.
The Ted Baillieu-led government reintroduced cattle grazing into the park in January to test if grazing cuts down the bushfire risk.
But Mr Burke has lashed out at the State Government and says the matter should first have been referred for Federal Government approval.
He says if the State Government does not take the cattle out in time and refer the plan for his approval, the Federal Government will act anyway.
"Every Australian company knows they're not above national law. Victoria decided maybe they were, well they're now in for a shock. They're not above the law and by April 8 the cattle will be out and the matter will be referred," he said.
He described the Victorian Government's responses to his department's requests for information about the trial as "a joke".

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