Sunday 22 October 2017
Saturday 21 October 2017
Horse's Rear of the Year
Anthony John ‘Tony’ Abbott
Liberal Member for Warringah & sacked former Australian Prime Minister
On the subject of the 2017 Same Sex Marriage national voluntary survey
Stop the boats, save the goats!
Believe it or not tweet
Catholic priest wouldn't baptise friend's daughter because I was not fit/proper person as godfather. He got convicted as a paedophile.— Derryn Hinch (@HumanHeadline) September 16, 2017
Friday 20 October 2017
US President Trump says he is proud to be among so many friends in October 2017
Donald Trump became the first sitting US president to attend and give a keynote speech at the annual Values Voter Summit which this year was held in Washington DC on 12-15 October.
This event included at least nine other misogynistic, anti-Muslim and/or anti LGBTI speakers - six of whom belong to ‘hate groups’ listed by The Southern Poverty Law Centre - as well as a three-hour long Values Voter Summit Activist Training workshop for attendees.
Trump previously spoke at this far-right ‘Christian’ summit in 2015 as a candidate and then in 2016 as the Republican presidential nominee.
Excerpt from the White House transcript of Trump’s 13 October 2017 summit speech:
We believe in strong families and safe communities. We honor the dignity of work. (Applause.) We defend our Constitution. We protect religious liberty. (Applause.) We treasure our freedom. We are proud of our history. We support the rule of law and the incredible men and women of law enforcement. (Applause.) We celebrate our heroes, and we salute every American who wears the uniform. (Applause.)
We respect our great American flag. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
And we stand united behind the customs, beliefs and traditions that define who we are as a nation and as a people…..
“When I came to speak with you last year, I made you a promise. Well, one of the promises I made you was that I’d come back. See? (Applause.) And I don't even need your vote this year, right? That's even nicer. (Laughter.)
But I pledged that, in a Trump administration, our nation’s religious heritage would be cherished, protected, and defended like you have never seen before. That's what’s happening. That's what’s happening. You see it every day. You're reading it.
So this morning I am honored and thrilled to return as the first sitting President to address this incredible gathering of friends -- so many friends. (Applause.) So many friends. And I'll ask Tony and all our people that do such a great job in putting this event together -- can I take next year off or not? (Laughter.) Or do I have to be back? I don't know…..
So I'm here to thank you for your support and to share with you how we are delivering on that promise, defending our shared values, and in so doing, how we are renewing the America we love.
In the last 10 months, we have followed through on one promise after another. (Applause.) I didn't have a schedule, but if I did have a schedule, I would say we are substantially ahead of schedule. (Applause.)
Some of those promises are to support and defend the Constitution. I appointed and confirmed a Supreme Court Justice in the mold of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia, the newest member of the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch. (Applause.)
To protect the unborn, I have reinstated a policy first put in place by President Ronald Reagan, the Mexico City Policy. (Applause.) To protect religious liberty, including protecting groups like this one, I signed a new executive action in a beautiful ceremony at the White House on our National Day of Prayer -- (applause) -- which day we made official. (Applause.)
Among many historic steps, the executive order followed through on one of my most important campaign promises to so many of you: to prevent the horrendous Johnson Amendment from interfering with your First Amendment rights. (Applause.) Thank you. We will not allow government workers to censor sermons or target our pastors or our ministers or rabbis. These are the people we want to hear from, and they're not going to be silenced any longer. (Applause.)
Just last week, based on this executive action, the Department of Justice issued a new guidance to all federal agencies to ensure that no religious group is ever targeted under my administration. It won't happen. (Applause.) ….
We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values. (Applause.)…
We know that it's the family and the church, not government officials, that know best how to create strong and loving communities. (Applause.) And above all else, we know this: In America, we don't worship government -- we worship God. (Applause.) Inspired by that conviction, we are returning moral clarity to our view of the world and the many grave challenges we face……
For too long, politicians have tried to centralize the authority among the hands of a small few in our nation’s capital. Bureaucrats think they can run your lives, overrule your values, meddle in your faith, and tell you how to live, what to say, and how to pray. But we know that parents, not bureaucrats, know best how to raise their children and create a thriving society. (Applause.)
We know that faith and prayer, not federal regulation -- and, by the way, we are cutting regulations at a clip that nobody has ever seen before. Nobody. (Applause.) In nine months, we have cut more regulation than any President has cut during their term in office. So we are doing the job. (Applause.) And that is one of the major reasons, in addition to the enthusiasm for manufacturing and business and jobs -- and the jobs are coming back.
That's one of the major reasons -- regulation, what we've done -- that the stock market has just hit an all-time historic high. (Applause.) That just on the public markets we've made, since Election Day, $5.2 trillion in value. Think of that: $5.2 trillion. (Applause.) And as you've seen, the level of enthusiasm is the highest it's ever been, and we have a 17-year low in unemployment. So we're doing, really, some work. (Applause.)
We know that it's the family and the church, not government officials, that know best how to create strong and loving communities. (Applause.) And above all else, we know this: In America, we don't worship government -- we worship God. (Applause.) Inspired by that conviction, we are returning moral clarity to our view of the world and the many grave challenges we face.”
In this administration, we will call evil by its name. (Applause.) We stand with our friends and allies, we forge new partnerships in pursuit of peace, and we take decisive action against those who would threaten our people with harm. (Applause.) And we will be decisive -- because we know that the first duty of government is to serve its citizens. We are defending our borders, protecting our workers, and enforcing our laws. You see it every single day like you haven't seen it in many, many years -- if you've seen it at all. (Applause.)
Please note that statements made by Trump in this speech need to be fact checked for accuracy.
It's getting uglier by the day. Trump has given a speech to an anti-LGBTQ group...and he called them his 'friends'. pic.twitter.com/WEoSoSwGDI— James Melville (@JamesMelville) October 13, 2017
Tony Abbott will never stop until he has destroyed Australia
“the shame and humiliation of losing high office drives him on, with the thinnest of rationalisations for his actions” [Judith Brett]
La Trobe University Emeritus Professor Judith Brett writing in The Monthly, August 2017:
Once again Tony Abbott has wrecked the chances of Australia achieving a bipartisan policy on emissions reduction. When, at the end of 2009, he successfully challenged Malcolm Turnbull for leadership of the Liberal Party, the catalyst was Turnbull’s co-operation with the Rudd government over the introduction of an emissions trading scheme. Winning by one vote, Abbott immediately announced a secret ballot on whether the party should support the Labor government’s legislation. The result, 54 against to 29 for, spelled the end of the Opposition’s co-operation with the government on its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. When the scheme reappeared in 2011 as a price on carbon under Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her climate change minister, Greg Combet, Abbott made this “great big new tax on everything” the centrepiece of his campaign against the government. And when he won the election in 2013 he repealed the legislation.
To be sure, others have also contributed to the long-running disaster of Australia’s climate policies: the Greens under Bob Brown, who, in a fit of self-indulgent high-mindedness, refused to support Labor’s legislation in the Senate; Kevin Rudd, who walked away from the “great moral challenge of our generation” when the going got tough; and Julia Gillard, with her culpable naivety in promising that there would be no carbon tax in a government she led, and then agreeing that the scheme her government introduced could be called a tax. But it has been Abbott’s continuing belligerent prosecution of what shadow environment minister Mark Butler calls in his new book the Climate Wars that has turned going slow on emissions reduction into a Liberal cause. It is Abbott who has given focus and a voice to the motley collection of climate sceptics in the Coalition party room and kept alive the delusion that coal has a viable long-term future. For even if it were not the case that burning coal is contributing to global warming, the rapid development of renewables and their plummeting price would be numbering its days. If one can make energy from the sun, wind and tides, why would anyone bother digging up and transporting coal?
And he is at it again. For a brief moment early in June, the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market, chaired by Australian Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel, held out the hope that Australian politics might reach a bipartisan consensus on a scheme to both reduce emissions and increase energy supply, by providing the certainty the private sector needs to invest in new energy generation. Fearing Abbott and his troops, Prime Minister Turnbull had already ruled out an emissions intensity scheme, despite its widespread industry support. Finkel knew he couldn’t consider it, even if it were a better option than the clean energy target he eventually recommended. The clean energy target seemed like clever politics. As it was “technology neutral” it did not explicitly rule out coal. Labor promised to work with the government to hammer out a deal it could live with when it returned to government. Business welcomed the possibility, finally, of a bipartisan agreement that would provide the certainty needed for new investment in energy generation. The Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group, the Energy Users Association of Australia and energy retailers Origin, AGL and Energy Australia were all on board, and argued that the clean energy target would lower prices for consumers.
Not so, said Abbott, whose special contribution to the debate has been to reduce complicated, technical arguments to simple cut-through slogans with little connection to reality. The clean energy target is a tax on coal, he declared. Since the Finkel review was delivered, Abbott has upped his profile and his attacks on the government. Setting out his conservative manifesto to the Institute of Public Affairs at the end of June, he called for a moratorium on new wind farms, a freeze on the renewable energy target at its current level of 15% and the construction of another “big coal-fired power station”. Contrary to the evidence in the Finkel review and the assertions of the energy providers, Abbott claimed that the renewable energy target was causing people’s power bills to increase by making coal uneconomic, and that if private investors would not build a new coal-fired power station, then the government should step in and make good this market failure “as soon as possible”. Just why this last suggestion is either a liberal or a conservative one is hard to fathom. It sounds much more like an old-fashioned socialist argument for re-nationalisation of the power supply.
But consistency has never been Abbott’s strong point. His major preoccupation has always been product differentiation, drawing up the battlelines between the Liberal Party and its major enemy the Labor Party and winning the fight. From this perspective the main problem with the proposed clean energy target is that it is too similar to Labor’s policy. Abbott believed, he told Paul Kelly in early July, that energy policy was “the best hope for the government to win the next election”. Attacking the big fat carbon tax worked in 2013, so why wouldn’t it work again? Peta Credlin, whom Abbott described as the fiercest political warrior he had ever worked with, has since admitted on Sky News that Labor’s climate change policy was never a carbon tax, but that by pursuing “brutal retail politics” the Coalition made it one in the minds of the electorate, replacing fear for the future of the planet with a fight about the hip pocket.
Read the full article here.
www.tonyabbott.com.au, 11 October 2017
Thursday 19 October 2017
Be a hero - save an endangered Swift Parrot family today
Swift Parrot
Lathamus discolor
Psittacidae
Psittacidae
Critically endangered (Australian federal listing)
IUCN Red List
Image: Geoffrey Dabb/ Canberra Birds
Swift Parrots breed only in Tasmania and then fly across Bass Strait to forage on the flowering eucalypts in open box–ironbark forests of the Australian mainland. While on the mainland, they are nomadic, spending weeks or months at some sites and only a few hours at others, determined by the supply of nectar. [Birdlife Australia]
Go to https://pozible.com/project/operation-pko to donate
ABC
News, 18
October 2017:
The
parrots are nomadic and eat nectar, travelling in flocks to nest near flowering
eucalypts.
"This
year, all their food is on the east coast of Tasmania, and that area is full of
sugar gliders," Dr Stojanovic said.
"We're
very concerned that all the birds we bred on predator-free islands last year,
will end up nesting on the mainland in sugar glider habitat and be eaten."
With
the help of an electrician, Dr Stojanovic has designed "a
possum-keeper-outer" nest boxes, with a door to close behind the parrot
once darkness fell.
"Effectively,
it's just a little motor and a light sensor," he said.
"As
soon as it's daytime the sensor automatically detects that there's ambient
light and it will open to release the parrot to go about their business….
Dr
Stojanovic said previous research had shown the possums could eat parrots
"within a couple of days" of the bird laying its eggs.
"About
half of the female swift parrots that nest on the mainland of Tasmania each
year end up being eaten by sugar gliders," he said.
"It
can be a really severe rate of predation."
Dr
Stojanovic said the crowd-funding protection measures were needed due to
ongoing deforestation of the swift parrot habitat, by logging.
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