Bottom line - Mike Baird resigned before he could be pushed

This is Mike Baird’s announcement of his immediate resignation as NSW Premier and intended resignation as the Member for Manly.

Ex-investment banker Mike Baird entered the NSW Parliament on 24 March 2007 as a Liberal Party member of the Opposition.

Once the Coalition won government he first became Treasurer (2011), then Minister for Industrial Relations (2012), until becoming Premier, Minister for Infrastructure and Minister for Western Sydney in 2014 then jettisoning Infrastructure from his portfolio list in 2015.

He spent less than three years as premier and in that time his popularity with voters has markedly declined on the back of a sustained push to privatise government assets, the implementation of bad planning legislation which restricted a community’s ability to resist inappropriate development, poor funding decisions which impacted on women fleeing domestic violence and unpopular policy choices such as restricting opening hours for bars and clubs but not casinos, the controversial attempt to ban greyhound racing, forced local government amalgamations and the botched $16.8 billion WestConnex plan along with its compulsory acquisitions  – to name just a few.

The fact that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards a decision to curb the growth of coal seam gas exploration and mining was also a mark against his name in many rural and regional areas, while scandals reduced confidence in the state-run public hospital system on his watch.

So it is no surprise that Baird decided to jump when an opportunity presented itself rather than be pushed unceremoniously from the premier's chair.

The fault lines in the NSW Coalition were already beginning to publicly surface when a number of National MPS put a motion to conference for a gasfield-free Northern Rivers in 2015, crossed the floor rather than support the abolition of greyhound racing in 2016 and were joined in disunity by certain Liberal backbenchers who began to mutter against excessive land clearing laws and hospital funding that same year - now in 2017 we see the Nationals pushing against further council amalgamations.

ABC News, 20 January 2017:

New South Wales premier-in-waiting Gladys Berejiklian is likely to be the state's next premier, but she is already facing pressure from the Deputy Premier to scrap council mergers in regional areas.

Ms Berejiklian is the only person to put her hand up for the top job, after Transport Minster Andrew Constance bowed out of the race today and offered her his full support.

Deputy Premier John Barilaro has used Premier Mike Baird's resignation yesterday as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean for the coalition.

This includes a demand to end forced council amalgamations in regional NSW.

The Nationals leader, who took over from Troy Grant in November after the party lost the previously safe seat of Orange, said they would no longer be taken for granted.

"We will no longer be forcing local government mergers and that will be the first course of business," Mr Barilaro said.

"I want to make it absolutely clear to the incoming leader of the NSW Liberals and that is that the NSW Nationals no longer will be taken for granted.

"Today I draw the line in the sand that the NSW Nationals won't just accept the crumbs from the Liberal party table."

Last year there was speculation that Baird would retire in 2018 ahead of the March 2019 state election.

It’s highly doubtful that he would have made it to that March general election without a leadership challenge and it looks suspiciously like he finally recognised the no-win position he finds himself in with the electorate.

There is nothing left but for him to do but collect his lucrative parliamentary pension and perks then move on to a second go at a private sector corporate career. 

America is leaderless in 2017

Donald John Trump was not hiding his light under a bushel until after the presidential inauguration.

When during the Republican Party preselection process and then the long national presidential election campaign Trump kept telling the world how smart he was I’m sure there were those who secretly hoped this was so and, that the content of his stump speeches, his social media rants and very limited vocabulary were in combination simply a ploy aimed at the lowest denominator on the voter spectrum.

Unfortunately for those sanguine souls President Trump’s inauguration speech on 20 January 2017, his address to the Central Intelligence Agency the next day, as well as his inflating of swearing-in ceremony crowd size before sending his press secretary out to lie on his behalf, will have dashed theses hopes.

Donald Trump remains exactly as he always presented himself and now America has a predatory oaf as its 45^th president.

One so intellectually lightweight, wilfully ignorant, boastful, bigoted, paranoid, vengeful, erratic and work-shy, that effectively the United States of America is a nation which is leaderless as it goes forward.

Who will fill the vacuum is anyone’s guess.

Will it be his immediate family framing policy and making decisions for him to strut before the cameras? Will it be his newly installed far-right captain’s picks in the White House administration running the country in spite of Trump’s inadequacies? Or will it be a combination of family members, captain's picks and Congress racing around putting out political fires as Trump uncontrollably rampages across the economic and social landscape?

The future is unknowable until it becomes the present and by then it may be too late for America.

* Netflix image found on Twitter

Micro moth with unusual characteristics named after Donald Trump

One might call the genitals of this moth oddly shaped rather than proportionately small, but such is the level of antipathy that Donald Trump managed to generate over the last eighteen months that sections of the media rarely let an opportunity to insult pass it by........

Neopalpa donaldtrumpi

Neopalpa donaldtrumpi genitalia

IFLscience!, 18 January 2017:

......."the Donald" has received the honor of having a new species of moth officially named after him: Neopalpa donaldtrumpi.

Totally unrelated to the moths’ namesake, the new species has a strange blonde thing on its head and small genitals.

The golden-haired species has been described this week in the online journal ZooKeys. With a wingspan of just 7-12 millimeters, these moths can be found around the future location of the Great-Wall-Of-Trump, Arizona, California, and Mexico’s Baja California.

Evolutionary biologist Dr Vazrick Nazari discovered the new species and named it in honor of the soon-to-be president. After sifting through a collection of moths from the genus Neopalpa, he noticed that a few specimens didn't match the criteria for previously known species. For one, the study notes it has “genitalia comparatively smaller” than its closest relative N. neonata. Using DNA barcoding analysis and catalogs from various natural history institutions, Nazari showed that it was indeed a separate unrecognized species….

Dr Nazari said he named the moth as such because of its uncanny resemblance to Trump’s iconic hairdo. However, he also stressed that he hopes the name will generate interest in the species and promote conservation efforts for North America’s neglected micro-fauna.

"The discovery of this distinct micro-moth in the densely populated and otherwise zoologically well-studied southern California underscores the importance of conservation of the fragile habitats that still contain undescribed and threatened species, and highlights the paucity of interest in species-level taxonomy of smaller faunal elements in North America," Nazari said in a statement.

Who knows, as expressed by a tweet from the discoverer Nazari (below), perhaps this species’ name could even grab the attention of the tycoon-turned-president himself.

Vazrick Nazari @vazrick

So I named a species after @realDonaldTrump. Maybe now he'll make conservation of fragile US ecosystems a priority?https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312488576_Review_of_Neopalpa_Povolny_1998_with_description_of_a_new_species_from_California_and_Baja_California_Mexico_Lepidoptera_Gelechiidae …

2:11 AM - 18 Jan 2017 · Ottawa, Ontario

While Trump pleads for money ACLU receives six times its annual donations in a single day

The Committee to Defend the President (a project of the Republican Stop Hillary Hybrid PAC¹ which raised money to assist Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign) is again seeking donations and expressions of support for Trump:

https://soundcloud.com/user-932995833/djtcommitteetodefendthepresident

Mirror UK, 29 January 2017:

Donald Trump's presidency is under attack from the crooked media - that was the bizarre message beamed into millions of homes last night, urging supporters to call a phone number to help.

The vaguely sinister advert warns Trump's agenda to tear up the Affordable Healthcare Act, slash taxes for corporations and spend billions of US taxpayers cash are under "vicious attack".

In a shouty, robotic voice, it insists: "They think they are going to destroy Trump's Presidency - but THEY ARE WRONG."

It goes on to claim Democrats are setting up a "war room" to undermine the President, but doesn't really explain what that means.

And in a tone reminiscent of a TV infomercial, it warns "time is running out" and urges people to call a toll free number to prove Trump has the "overwhelming support of the American people."

Video of the deeply weird clip quickly spread on social media with confused Americans questioning why a sitting President appeared to be in campaign mode…..

You may think Donald Trump isn't a candidate any more, but you'd be wrong.

On the day of Trump's inauguration, he registered with the Federal Elections Committee as a candidate in the 2020 Presidential election. He's legally running for re-election already.

Is that unusual?

Yep. Nobody's ever registered as a candidate in the next election before their Presidency has started in the history of the United States.

Image found at @resisterhood

The Hill, 30 January 2017:

The American Civil Liberties Union received more than $24 million in donations over the weekend after the ACLU sued over President Trump’s executive order blocking refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.

The donations are roughly six times what the ACLU normally receives in one year, CNN reported. 

About 356,306 people contributed $24,164,691 to the organization this weekend, CNN reported.

A spokesman said the group ran “one last set of numbers” at the end of the night on Sunday that brought  the total to more than $24.1 million, CNN reported.

Officials have called the swift rise in donations “unprecedented.” An organization official, in an interview in CNN, had just one word to describe the rise in donations: “Wow.”

The organization is also reporting  a rise in membership since the start of the Trump administration.

Yahoo News reported ACLU membership rose from 400,000 to more than 1 million since the election. 

Given that during the 2016 presidential election allegedly over US$8 million of campaign money raised through political donations ended up in the bank accounts of Trump businesses, it is not hard to guess why Trump has declared his second candidacy so early.

NOTES:

1. The Stop Hillary PAC was one of three co-filing a lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court in December 2016, seeking to stop the Wisconsin vote recount after the November 2016 presidential election.

Evans Head Residents for Sustainable Development warn that NSW North Coast in for a "right rogering" as Baird's proposed changes to NSW coastal planning legislation come into effect

Echo NetDaily, 19 January 2017:

The NSW coast is in for a ‘right rogering’ should the state government have its way and implement new coastal plans and policies, according to Dr Richard Gates from the Evans Head Residents for Sustainable Development group.

Dr  Gates said the new planning instruments would suit big developers and give lots of discretionary legislative ‘wiggle room’ for local and state governments to do as they please with the coast.

‘If this stuff goes through you can expect a bulldozer in your backyard anytime soon and high density development,’ he said.

‘We are on our way to a new Gold Coast. I have already seen plans for major developments which are being held back until the new legislation goes through.’

Consultation on the draft Coastal Management State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) and draft maps of the coastal management areas that make up the coastal zone closes on 20 January 2017 (for more detail see: http://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/CoastalReform ).

The community has an opportunity to have its say at: coastal@planning.nsw.gov.au

The new Coastal Management Act 2016, which is contingent on the mapping and other coastal planning instruments, was passed by Parliament on 31 May 2016 and will become operational following consultation on the draft Coastal Management SEPP government sources claim.

The new suite of instruments tears up former  NSW Coastal Policy and replaces three State Environmental Planning Policies (SEPPs) with one.

Dr Gates said the problem was that the environmental maps on which the new instruments were based were not complete, do not exist, or are based on material that was defective when it was used back in the 1980s.

Sydney New Year's Eve display failed on local content

I think the city of Sydney and all those involved in planning the new year's eve fireworks celebration should be ashamed of themselves.  The theme of celebrating the artists 'we' lost in 2016 featured foreign artist's and not our own.  Australia lost many great talents last year and they should have been at the forefront of this celebration but instead it was a most un-Australian event.  Eyes of the world were on Sydney and were told we value their artists over our own.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the work of Prince, David Bowie and Gene Wilder but if we are to celebrate the talent of those who had passed in 2016, surely and more appropriately it should have, without question, been our own artists put on show for the world to see.  We should have celebrated our own people and showed pride in their achievements and presented them to the world as worth remembering. It is for these reasons I find the display on new year's eve, disgusting!

Quickly to mind, who should have been featured instead; Musicians: Jon English and Stevie Wright. Jon English was a master at rock 'n' roll, ballads, rock opera, operetta, comedy and drama. Stevie Wright was a rock 'n' roll legend in this country and his rock classic Evie pts 1, 2 and 3 could bring the house down (or a bridge). The pick of works from these two could have been put to an impressive light display that we could have been proud of.

As far as celebrating one Australian Actor: Peter Sumner (who, if you want more international appeal, was in Star Wars) who had a long and distinguished career in this country, but he wasn't our only actor loss to choose from.

The limited approach and lack of consideration of celebrating our own people in the City of Sydney NYE display was a telling reminder that this country still suffers 'cultural cringe' when presenting itself to the world.  The only thing Australia and certainly, Sydney, need to cringe about is its dismissal of its own talents lost in 2016.

Celeste Warren

Yamba

 * Guest Speak is a North Coast Voices segment allowing serious or satirical comment from NSW Northern Rivers residents. Email ncvguestpeak at gmail dot com dot au to submit comment for consideration.

Yamba still in the NBN twilight zone

Akamai 2016 State of the Internet

The National Broadband Network (nbn) was established on 9 April 2009 to design, build and operate Australia's new broadband network.

By June 2017 it should reach the halfway mark in its build.

The cost of this national network is expected to reach $29.5 billion before the end of 2017 and require an est. $20 billion more to complete.

In 2011 58% of homes in the Clarence Valley local government area and 55% of homes in Yamba had a broadband internet connection.

The official population of Yamba as of the 30th June 2015 was 6,344 and this roughly doubles during peak holiday seasons.

By now over 1,744 homes are without decent upload/download speeds for their existing Internet connections - as well all the businesses internet connections in the two shopping/accommodation/dining precincts and small industrial area in this popular tourist destination.

Yet the given date for commencement of the rollout and current rate of progress, NBN connection for this town is still years away.

In fact, if the completion date of 2020 holds then Yamba is well and truly near the end of the queue.

National Broadband Network status for Yamba NSW 2464:

The rollout of the nbn™ network is planned in this area

Planned availability: Jan-Jun 2019*.

*This is an estimate and could change.

*The speeds actually experienced by end-users via fibre, fixed wireless or satellite will depend on a number of factors including the retail broadband plan they choose, their equipment and their in premises connection.

Given the way the build has been managed so far the extra money may run out before the NBN reaches Yamba and the town may yet have to buy shares in tin cans and string to compensate for the erratic performance of current Internet connections.