Nationals New England MP Barnaby Joyce has been returned to the backbench and the Turnbull Government coverup has begun at the expense of an accountable parliamentary democracy......
Hansard, 26 February 2018
Wednesday 28 February 2018
The face of betrayal
Nationals New England MP Barnaby Joyce has been returned to the backbench and the Turnbull Government coverup has begun at the expense of an accountable parliamentary democracy......
Shorter Michael McCormack Nationals MP for Riverina: turns up for work, never rebels
So who is the 53 year-old Nationals MP for Riverina Michael Francis McCormack, the new Leader of the National Party in federal parliament and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia?
Like Barnaby Joyce before him he was raised Catholic in a country New South Wales town.
Also like Joyce his professional career before entering politics was not associated with the land or farming.
After leaving school McCormack became a journalist at The Daily Advertiser in Wagga Wagga, went on to become a run of th mill editor before starting a small publishing firm, MSS Media Pty Ltd which appears to have produced very forgetable books.
Like many federal politicians he's a homeowner with an investment property, a working wife and children who are now adults.
Again, like many Liberal-Nationals politicians before him he failed to properly declare income derivied from this investment property - until it became certain that he would be putting his name forward for the deputy prime minister ballot.
Also like many other federal ministers he regularly attends major sporting events as the guest of big business.
According to They Vote For You McCormack, first as an ordinary backbencher and later as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister, Assistant Minister for Defence, Minister for Small Business, Minister for Defence Personnel, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC and Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, has never voted against the Coalition Government party line since he entered the House of Representatives in 2010.
He voted very
strongly for:
In other words the new Deputy Prime Minister is a typical National Party member.
In favour of: selling off government assets, raising the cost of health care, lowering the take-home pay of ordinary workers, making the lives of welfare recipients miserable; breaking international law in relation to the treatment of asylum seekers; upending state CSG mining moratoriums and hounding the unions.
Tuesday 27 February 2018
US President Trump censors House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence minority memo concerning FBI Russia investigation before releasing it for publication
The mess that Barnaby left
Environmental Defender’s Office NSW, undated 2017:
EDO NSW, on behalf of
its client the Inland Rivers Network, has commenced civil enforcement
proceedings in the NSW Land and Environment Court in relation to allegations of
unlawful water pumping by a large-scale irrigator on the Barwon-Darling River.
The two water access
licences at the centre of these allegations allow the licence holder to pump
water from the Barwon-Darling River in accordance with specified licence
conditions, as well as rules set out in the relevant ‘water sharing plan’. The
conditions and rules specify – amongst other things – how much water can be
legally pumped in a water accounting year (which is the same as the financial
year) and at what times pumping is permissible (which depends on the volume of
water flowing in the river at any given time).
Our client alleges that
the holder of these licences pumped water in contravention of some of these
conditions and rules, thereby breaching relevant provisions of the Water
Management Act 2000 (NSW) (WM Act). The allegations are based on licence
data obtained by EDO NSW earlier in 2017 from Water NSW, a state-owned
corporation charged with the responsibility of regulating compliance with the
WM Act.
Analysis of this data,
along with the relevant rules and publicly available information on river
heights, indicates that the licence holder may have pumped significantly more
water than was permissible on one licence during the 2014-15 water year, and
taken a significant amount of water under another licence during a period of
low flow when pumping was not permitted in the 2015-16 water year. Despite
being made aware of these allegations by EDO NSW on two occasions, in April and
August 2017, and having had access to the data since at least July 2016, Water
NSW has not provided any indication that it intends to take compliance action
against the licence holder.
Both allegations concern
the potentially unlawful pumping of significant volumes of water, which may
have had serious impacts on environmental flows in the river and downstream
water users. However, our client is particularly concerned by the alleged
over-extraction in the 2014/15 water year, as this period was so dry that the
Menindee Lakes – which are filled by flows from the Barwon-Darling River – fell
to 4 percent of their total storage capacity. This in turn threatened Broken
Hill’s water security and led the NSW Government to impose an embargo on water
extractions during part of that year in order to improve flows down the
Barwon-Darling into the Lakes and Lower Darling River.
In these proceedings,
the Inland Rivers Network is seeking, amongst other things, an injunction
preventing the licence holder from continuing to breach the relevant licence
conditions. In addition, and in order to make good any depletion of
environmental flows caused by the alleged unlawful pumping, our client is also
asking the Court to require the licence holder to return to the river system an
equivalent volume of water to that alleged to have been unlawfully taken, or to
restrain the licence holder from pumping such a volume from the river system,
during the next period of low flows in the river system. Failure to comply with
a court order constitutes contempt of court, which is a criminal offence.
EDO NSW is grateful to
barristers Tom Howard SC and Natasha Hammond for their assistance in this
matter.
Brendan Dobbie, Senior
Solicitor at EDO NSW, has carriage of this matter for IRN.
The Australia Institute, Moving
targets: Barnaby Joyce, Warrego valley buybacks and amendments to the Murray
Darling Basin Plan, February 2018:
In 2008, then Senator
Joyce criticised the Labor government’s purchase of water in the Warrego
valley: that is going to have no effect whatsoever in solving the problems of
the lower Murray-Darling, and especially the southern states.
Despite the now Deputy
Prime Minister and Water Minister’s own fierce criticism of that purchase, he
approved the $16,977,600 purchase of another 10.611 gigalitres of water in the
Warrego valley in March 2017 at more than twice the price paid by the Labor
government. Questions should be raised about what changed the Deputy Prime
Minister’s mind and whether that purchase was value for money.
This purchase also has
serious implications for the recent amendments to the Basin Plan that was
disallowed by the Senate on 14 February 2018.
This purchase was not
required to meet the water recovery target in the Warrego under the
Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Instead, it was intended to count towards the water
recovery target in the Border Rivers. This swap required an amendment to s6.05
of the Basin Plan, which was tabled in parliament and disallowed by the Senate.
Yet, the Warrego purchase was not reflected in the Sustainable Diversion Limits
(SDLs) put to Parliament as part of the amendments.
Murray-Darling Basin
Authority (MDBA) is required to base its recommendations to change SDLs based
on best available science, but the proposed amendments allowed MDBA and States
to subsequently change the SDLs in a valley without any consideration of the
science.
While MDBA was seeking
public submissions on changes to valley SDLs, based on science; the Department
of Agriculture and Water Resources (DAWR) was in negotiations to change those
valley targets, not based on science.
Parliament was asked to
pass an amendment to the Basin Plan with SDLs that would have been changed
based on a deal agreed over a year earlier, if the amendment had passed.
Given that the new SDLs
were known and agreed by governments, it is not apparent why the MDBA did not
include the new SDLs in the amendment put to parliament.
Monday 26 February 2018
Facebook Inc remains part of the problem
Tin-eared social media giant Facebook Inc demonstrates once again that it is part of the problem and not part of the solution, as it promotes toxic gun culture at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and fails to come to grips with its part in spreading conspiracy theories and "fake news".
Facebook
has pulled a demo of Oculus Rift's VR
shooter Bullet Train from the Conservative Political Action
Conference in Maryland amid concerns over gun violence, Variety reported
earlier.
It
doesn't appear to have been Bullet Train's violent content that
prompted the withdrawal per se, but rather that CPAC draws lots of gun rights
advocates right at the same time those same National Rifle Association types
are drawing a massive wave of criticism in the wake of another
school massacre in Parkland, Florida this month.
A
number of companies have cut ties with the NRA, like software firm Symantec,
which decided
to pull discounts for the pro-gun group's members this week. A
running New
York Times tally of others to do so includes banks, airlines,
automotive rentals and services, insurance companies, and a home security
company.
As
the Times noted on
Friday, boycott campaigns tend to fade over time but this time the pressure has
built quickly, buoyed by a number of Parkland survivors speaking out on social
media and leaving some corporations with no middle ground to recede to.
Facebook is at CPAC and they have a VR shooting game pic.twitter.com/wmV23jezpN— Sean Morrow (@snmrrw) February 23, 2018
A demo clip
of Bullet Train hosted on the Oculus Rift website shows that at
least one level in the game involves the player fighting through waves of
"resistance forces" in a fairly generic rail station setting. It does
not appear to be particularly bloody, though video of CPAC attendees using the
game's motion-tracking controls in a vague pantomime of actual shooting
probably did not help, either.
In
a statement to Variety, Facebook virtual reality VP Hugo Barra said:
There
is a standard set of experiences included in the Oculus demos we feature at
public events. A few of the action games can include violence. In light of the
recent events in Florida and out of respect for the victims and their families,
we have removed them from this demo. We regret that we failed to do so in the
first place.
Yet
the optics of the Oculus Rift demo are probably not the most important issue
Facebook should be worried about right now.
Facebook
itself has also come under fire for the rapid spread of conspiracy theories
about the Parkland shooting, which as
CNN noted migrate from internet underbellies like 4chan onto
mainstream social media sites via "conservative pages, alt-right
personalities, nationalist blogs and far-right pundits." Posts on Facebook
promoting the idiotic smear that survivors speaking out against guns were
"crisis actors," i.e. some hazily defined variety of professional
propagandists paid off to promote gun control, went far and wide; the social media
giant repeatedly declined to discuss how it was enforcing violations of its
community guidelines against offenders when asked by CNN.
Per
the New
York Times, it is still really, really easy to find hundreds of posts
claiming the shooting was part of a "deep state" black flag operation
or the like using Facebook's built-in search option, which kind of calls into
question the company's sincerity:
On
Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, searches for the hashtag
#crisisactor, which accused the Parkland survivors of being actors, turned up
hundreds of posts perpetuating the falsehood (though some also criticised the
conspiracy theory). Many of the posts had been tweaked ever so slightly -- for
example, videos had been renamed #propaganda rather than #hoax -- to evade
automated detection.
The
spread of the theories on Facebook has also caused some in the tech media to
question whether the long-maligned and ill-defined "trending"
metric should be retired. Users who post conspiracy theories often
rabidly engage with others promoting similar ideas, which in numerous instances
means the posts are promoted right to the top of Facebook and other sites like
YouTube.
Where have all the insects gone?
ABC
News, 24
February 2018:
A global crash in insect
populations has found its way to Australia, with entomologists across the
country reporting lower than average numbers of wild insects.
University of Sydney
entomologist Dr Cameron Webb said researchers around the world widely
acknowledge that insect populations are in decline, but are at a loss to
determine the cause.
"On one hand it
might be the widespread use of insecticides, on the other hand it might be
urbanisation and the fact that we're eliminating some of the plants where it's
really critical that these insects complete their development," Dr Webb
said.
"Add in to the mix
climate change and sea level rise and it's incredibly difficult to predict
exactly what it is."
Entomologist and owner
of the Australian Insect Farm, near Innisfail in far north Queensland, Jack
Hasenpusch is usually able to collect swarms of wild insects at this time of
year.
"I've been wondering
for the last few years why some of the insects have been dropping off and put
it down to lack of rainfall," Mr Hasenpusch said.
"This year has
really taken the cake with the lack of insects, it's left me dumbfounded, I
can't figure out what's going on."
Mr Hasenpusch said
entomologists he had spoken to from Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and even as far
away as New Caledonia and Italy all had similar stories.....
The
Guardian, 19
October 2017:
The abundance of flying
insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a
new study that has shocked scientists.
Insects are an integral
part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it
was known that some species such
as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the
losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for
ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.
The new data was
gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all
landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said.
The cause of the huge
decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and
widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may
play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to
landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been
collected.
“The fact that the
number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area
is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, at Radboud University in the Netherlands
and who led the new research.
“Insects make up about
two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific
decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team
behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable
to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon.
If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
The research, published
in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur
entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardised ways of
collecting insects in 1989. Special tents called malaise traps were used to capture
more than 1,500 samples of all flying insects at 63 different nature reserves.
Sunday 25 February 2018
Just in case you think that Barnaby Joyce will only have his backbench salary to live on
Given soon to be former deputy-prime minister Barnaby Joyce has wrapped himself in a self-pitying cloak of undeserved victimhood, it may not be long before he is crying poor to whichever journalist will listen.
So just to remind everyone that the son raised by well-to-do "multi-millionaire" parents,who had him privately educated in his highschool years as a border at St. Ignatuis' College Riverview, is not without resources.
As of 1 January 2018 a federal MP's base salary stands at $203,030 per annum and, in addition to this salary Joyce as the Member for New England will receive an electoral allowance of est, $40,000 per month, along with a subsidised car, travel & accommodation allowance, free home phone as well as a daily allowance when in Canberra of $90 per day.
He also reportedly owns five rural investment land parcels in the Warrumbungle district totalling around 2,400ha and then there is the family.....
Aerchie
Archive, undated
2016:
But the Joyce family's
main property is Rutherglen, in Woolbrook, which sprawls across more than
1780ha north of Tamworth. No price was disclosed for that asset, which has been
owned by the family for more than five decades.....
He attended St Ignatius’
College, Riverview in Sydney where he played Rugby, and the University of New
England in Armidale, where he resided at St Albert’s College and graduated with
a Bachelor of Financial Administration degree in 1989He attended St Ignatius’
College, Riverview in Sydney where he played Rugby, and the University of New
England in Armidale, where he resided at St Albert’s College and graduated with
a Bachelor of Financial Administration degree in 1989…..
The
Australian,
12 March 2016:
Mr Joyce also enjoys
considerable wealth, largely stemming from the Joyce family trust, which is
controlled by his parents, Beryl and James Joyce.
The family owns more
than 33,700ha of land in Enngonia, north of Burke,
which was bought between 2000-04 for $1.7m, along with a two-bedroom holiday
house valued at $400,000 in Mission Beach, between Townsville and Cairns….. [my yellow highlighting]
It is noted that in his declaration of member's interests in January 2018 Barnaby Joyce specifically stated he had no dependent children.
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