This is the sort of river experience that the Lower Clarence delights in.....
Sunday 3 July 2016
The type of Clarence River experience that Yamba, Iluka, Maclean and other estuary towns wish to preserve for their families, visitors and holiday makers alike
This is the sort of river experience that the Lower Clarence delights in.....
Saturday 2 July 2016
AEC Virtual Tally Room, Antony Green, Twitter & SnagVotes - all the links you need on 2 July 2016 federal polling day
Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) Virtual Tally Room – vote tally as it happens from 6pm onwards.
ABC News 24 – continuous live election coverage and geo-block lifted for international viewers.
ABC and Antony Green with live election cover tonight at http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2016/
Australia Plus Television and Radio Australia – live election night coverage for Asia and Pacific regions.
Sky News - live cover from 5pm
Snagvotes - map of election booths with sausage sizzles.
Friday 1 July 2016
Australian Dept. of Immigration, Border Force and Federal Minister Peter Dutton damned by these findings
A ministerial portfolio, government department, contractor and officers medically negligent and/or corrupt…….
The Guardian, 28 June 2016:
Australia’s immigration department failed to appropriately oversee the multinational that provides healthcare for asylum seekers and was unable to cope with the “commercially aggressive practices” that led to numerous failures to meet medical benchmarks, a series of damning internal reviews have found.
The findings substantiated a number of key allegations published by Guardian Australia in July 2015 about the relationship between International Health and Medical Services and the immigration department.
Leaked documents showed IHMS failed to meet medical targets, deliberately included incorrect data in reports and admitted it was “inevitable” fraud would occur as it tried to meet government standards. The documents also revealed that IHMS failed to undertake working with children checks and police checks on Manus Island.
Three reviews were commissioned by the immigration department to examine the allegations. Two were internal and one was to be conducted by KPMG.
IHMS, a subsidiary of the global healthcare giant International SOS, has received more than $1.6bn in government funding to provide asylum seeker healthcare in Australia and on Manus Island and Nauru.
The detention assurance review team report, released under freedom of information, which drew together findings from the KPMG audit and the first initial internal audit, said: “Through the review processes, both internal and external reviews agree that IHMS took an approach of seeking to maximise profits, including through actively reducing opportunities for the department to seek contract abatements.”
It later continued: “There is a fundamental conflict between contractual and clinical objectives where profit and cost dictate clinical operations.”
ABC News, 27 June 2016:
Australian Border Force staff have been referred for investigation over more than 100 cases of alleged corrupt activity in Australia's skilled and student visa program.
A 7.30-Fairfax Media investigation has discovered that in the last 12 months, Australian Border Force chief Michael Pezzullo has referred 132 cases of suspected corruption inside the department to the national corruption watchdog, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI).
It comes as a former immigration official claims that a focus on boat arrivals has allowed migration crime involving people arriving by plane to flourish unchecked.
"In the border security debate, it has been easy to deflect the public's attention to boat arrivals," said Joseph Petyanszki, who worked at the Department of Immigration for 27 years and was joint head of the Department's investigation office between 2007 and 2013.
"But this fear-mongering has totally ignored where the vast bulk of real fraud is, most significantly undermining our immigration programs."
Australian Federal Election 2016: waxing poetic on Malcolm's decline
Elizabeth Farrelly waxing poetic in the 18 June 2016 issue of The Sydney Morning Herald on Malcolm’s decline:
Malcolm has long been rich, but the hollowness is recent, starting from his installation as PM. So, theory two: that the wealth and the hollowness are co-symptoms, both signifying something else.
Naturally, Malcolm denies it, insisting he hasn't changed "one iota". But the approval of 3.3 million voters he's lost in six months begs to differ. That's a lot, 3.3 million. Almost 18,000 a day. Malcolm has shed voters more assiduously than he shed kilos. How? By looking like the hero we craved, then yielding, one principle at a time, to grimy old politics-as-usual. Changed? From where we sit, we the voters, he's all but unrecognisable.
It's amazing how the inner change appears without. Malcolm used to be charismatic, in a cocky, I'm-so-rich kind of way. Now, he seems thinner by the day, and not from the Chinese tea and cycle vacs. The PM seems spiritually thin, hollowed out from the inside. So thin you can almost see the hand within, making the arms wave, the jaw move.
There's a macabre fascination in witnessing this evisceration, like watching someone's cosmetic surgery go horribly wrong. There's also pathos, as though the crows of fate, spotting a juicy flaw, lifted Malcolm high into the stratosphere only to watch him fall and break.
Some therefore defend him. What could the guy do, they reason, working for such masters? But I say you don't get to leave your conscience on the nightstand just because you're prime minister. You can sell off Medicare, outsource your concentration camps, but you can't offload responsibility. The fault, and the blame, are his.
True, it's not all about Malcolm. He's prime minister after all, not president – but really, that's the point. Lear is not about Lear. Macbeth is not about Macbeth. The great tragedies are about power, greed and ambition and how these seek out and amplify human frailty, especially that of the protagonist.
For here, as in any Shakespearean tragedy, the fall-from-great-height, and the tangle-with-irresistible-forces that generates it, are triggered by the protagonist's core weakness. His fatal flaw. Ambition.
The rest is all there. There's no shortage of Gonerils and Edmunds behind the LNP arras, God knows. Any number of garrulous poisoners, tuppeny swordsmen and passive-aggressive manipulators among the LNP's profit-junkies, poor-haters, tycoons, homophobes, hardheads, opportunists and climate deniers. Abbott, Bernardi, Joyce, Madigan, Frydenburg, Leyonhelm, Dutton ...
They're pulling Malcolm's strings, much as he denies it, waggling his jaw with or without his consent to mouth hypocrisies without number.
Of these, the most obvious and damaging is climate change. On Saturday, Malcolm's Collaroy condolences linked storm damage to climate – within weeks of approving Reef-destroying coalmines and having taken Australia from 20th worst to 3rd worst carbon-polluter, ahead only of those bastions of social and environmental enlightenment Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.
Sunday, Malcolm Instagrammed excitedly about heritage-listing Centennial Parklands, despite his abject silence as local MP over the ongoing destruction of the Anzac avenue and of parkland hectares in his electorate. Monday, he pretended the Orlando massacre was a "hatred of freedoms" and an "attack … on our borders" rather than recognising it as a homophobic hate crime, despite having made headlines attending Mardi Gras a few weeks earlier.
He mouths support for gay marriage, then proposes a plebiscite that will likely fail. He once crossed the floor on climate change, but now he holds to a policy-vacuum shaped by backroom sceptics and deniers. Two years ago, on UK television, he described Abbott's stop-the-boats policies as "harsh measures … some would say they're cruel…" Now he backs Peter Dutton's "illiterate and innumerate" comments as "outstanding". He once (in Spycatcher days) stood for civic conscience and free speech. Now he speaks with hobbled tongue.
It's not that I think Malcolm is personally unsympathetic toward climate change, sexual diversity, indigenous cultures, asylum seekers or trees. Maybe yes, probably no. I suspect his earlier views were more genuine – but that makes it worse.
Some say he just never stopped being a lawyer. Lawyers get used to being hired guns, shooting for the bad guys. They become adept at ignoring their own principles to further causes in which they have not the slightest interest or belief. Indeed, the very idea of belief disappears, very often, from their mental lexicon.
Either way, it means the deal he did with his party was indeed Faustian, exchanging self-sovereignty for the throne. Why? Ambition. Like Macbeth, Malcolm had everything – wealth, love, family, respect – but he wanted more. But where Macbeth is tempted by the witches' insinuations of greatness, the character Malcolm, you recall, is the rightful king. Malcolm is entitled.
The delicious irony is that the LNP's determination to reshape Malcolm actually makes them 10 times less electable, as backroom deceivers, and him a hundred times, as a marionette.
But who is Malcolm's noble fool, dispensing unheard wisdom? Who his Cordelia, sweetly absorbing others' guilt and dying in consequence? In both cases, we are. Us. Dead as earth.
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