Castillo Copper Limited image |
Wednesday 12 September 2018
Yet another opportunistic mining exploration company has the Clarence Valley in its sights: Public Meeting 2.30pm on 13 September 2018 at Grafton Regional Library
Having received approval from the NSW mining regulator in June 2018 Castillo Copper Limited (CCZ) has
proceeded with its exploratory drilling program with a view to establishing an
open cut mine at Cangai in the Clarence Valley.
This small West
Australian base metal exploration company may be operating on a shoestring
budget and currently trade at only $0.039 per ordinary share, however an open
cut mine so close to the Mann River means that the greed of Messrs. Peter Meagher, Peter Smith And Alan
Armstrong has the potential to severely damage the Clarence River system.
2 hrs ·
Goodbye Mann and Clarence Rivers if this gets approval. The plan is to
open cut mine and that involves removing a large hill and metal extraction
usually involves highly polluting chemicals. This is no win for the Valley. It
is a disaster. A meeting is being held at the Clarence Regional Library in
Grafton at 2.30 PM on Thursday September 13 to discuss this threat to the
Rivers. All welcome.
Labels:
Clarence Valley,
environmental vandalism,
mining,
pollution
Assistant Minister for Regional Development and Territories & Liberal MP for Farrer Sussan Ley shows her true colours
"This is an industry with an operating model built on animal suffering" [Sussan Ley, 21 May 2018]
Recently
welcomed back into the Coalition ministerial fold after being forced to resign
as health minister due to her expense scandal, Assistant Minister for
Regional Development and Territories & Liberal MP for Farrer
Susan Ley, placed her lack of moral
compass on full display this week when she abandoned her commitment to limit the
cruel trade in live sheep.
Compare her present actions with her description three months earlier of the live sheep trade which she then condemned in no uncertain terms.
Compare her present actions with her description three months earlier of the live sheep trade which she then condemned in no uncertain terms.
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
10 September 2018:
They threatened to cross
the floor to stop the trade they felt was so heinous. But when it came to a
vote on Monday, Liberal MPs Sussan Ley and Sarah Henderson staged a change of
heart and used their deciding votes to prevent a debate on a ban on the live
animal export trade.
As backbenchers the pair
led a government backlash against the live export trade after horrific footage
showing the deaths of thousands of sheep en route to the Middle East last year
emerged. They even proposed their own bill to stop the trade.
That was within grasp on
Monday, when a private member's bill sponsored by the Greens and crossbenchers
to stop the trade passed the Senate 31 votes to 28.
Just two votes were
required to approve it in the House of Representatives but Ms Ley and Ms
Henderson, who were recently elevated to the outer ministry in Scott Morrison's
reshuffle, voted against moves to bring it on for debate.
To cross the floor, they
would have needed to quit their ministerial positions.
The pair then also
rejected Labor attempts to bring on a debate in the House on their own bill.
Their two votes made the difference with the bill going down 70-72.
Labor's agriculture
spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said the pair had put their political interests ahead
of animal welfare.
“Sussan Ley and Sarah
Henderson sponsored a bill to phase-out the live sheep export trade and made
passionate speeches in support of their proposal," Mr Fitzgibbon said.
"But today they put
their own political careers ahead of their policy convictions.
"Given the 72-70
result, their votes were the difference."
Both bills now disappear into history and the issue of cruelty to exported livestock remains unresolved.
Tuesday 11 September 2018
Kevin Hogan's political backflip
On Thursday 23
August 2018 Kevin
Hogan MP for Page announced that; “This constant rotation of Prime Ministers by both the
Labor Party and the Liberal party, I cannot condone. I am announcing today,
that if there is another leadership spill for the position of Prime Minister
prior to the next Federal election, I will remove myself from the government
benches and sit on the cross benches.”
A second leadership
spill occurred on Friday 24 August 2018 and parliament went into recess.
Kevin Hogan
was nowhere near the cross benches when the Australian Parliament resumed on
Monday 10 September 2018.
He is still a fully-fledged member of the Parliamentary National Party.
Still a National
Party Whip.
Still Deputy
Speaker in the House of Representatives.
This was Kevin
Hogan on the morning of 10 September firmly ensconced in the Speaker’s Chair.
At 12:15 on the same day Hansard shows that Kevin Hogan voted as a Nationals MP against a motion by the Labor Opposition.
Hogan's official statement included an undertaking that he was going to be an independent in a similar style to former MP for O'Connor Tony Crook*.
However Tony Crook's parliamentary entry looks like this....
and Hogan's looks like this.....
Not even a pretence of the announced independence on Hogan's part.
NOTE
* Tony Crook was elected as a WA National Party candidate in August 2010 but sat as an Independent MP for less than three years before retiring prior to the September 2013 federal election. He never sat in the Coalition party room and apparently only attended the Nationals party room for a brief period towards the end of his parliamentary career.
Crook voted with the Gillard minority government on numerous occasions.
New Holland Publishers picked a lemon in the MP for New England Barnaby Joyce
The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 2018:
Back in the day,
estimates of book sales were just that – estimates. These days, courtesy of the
Bookscan system, which measures sales from nearly every book store across our
brown and pleasant land, you can be very accurate – at least if you have a
'Deepthroat' high up in the publishing world like I do. I can report thus, that
after being on sale for four weeks, Barnaby Joyce’s memoir, Weatherboard
and Iron, has sold 1570 copies.
Having gone from being priced at source for $32.99 a copy, it had been reduced to $24.99 by QBD books after only 3 days.
It should be in the $10 bin at local book stores by the beginning of October 2018.
So much for a story of Politics, the bush and me being an additional income source for the egotistical, greedy and 'entitled' Nationals Member for New England, Barnaby Joyce.
Monday 10 September 2018
Under Morrison's prime ministership will church and state begin to regressively merge?
Liberal MP
for Cook, former Australian Immigration Minister and former Treasurer, Scott
John Morrison, is being marketed as Australia’s first Pentecostal prime
minister.
Right from
the start of his parliamentary career Morrison politicised his own faith and made
sure he identified as a Pentecostal ‘Christian’ in his First
Speech in the House of Representatives on 14 February 2008.
This month
the Pentecostal ministry returned the favour by commencing his re-election
campaign….
The
Guardian, 7
September 2018:
Pentecostal leaders have
warned their congregation that “darkness” will spread across Australia and
Christians will be persecuted if Scott Morrison
does not win the next election.
Others have been told
that Morrison’s rise to power was a “miracle of God” that answered three days
of prayer and fasting. They have been told that Morrison has made a public
stand for Christian freedoms, and has promised to keep doing so, so God intervened
to ensure he beat the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, in
the Liberal leadership spill.
Videos posted to YouTube
show how Pentecostal and evangelical religious communities are reacting to the
rise of Morrison as prime minister.
Last Sunday, pastor Adam
F Thompson from Voice of Fire Ministries and Adrian Beale from Everrest
Ministries told a congregation of Hope City Church that Morrison’s elevation to
power was divinely inspired.
Thompson, who says he
can interpret dreams and that supernatural signs and manifestations accompany
his ministry, said he’d received a message from God that Morrison and the
Coalition must win the election.
“The Lord woke me up at
4.30am this morning,” Thompson told the Hope City Church congregation on
Sunday, in a
video he asked to be recorded.
“Scott Morrison, he’s a born-again Christian,
he’s probably one of the first ever born-again prime ministers, but it’s not
time to celebrate at the moment.
“This is a crucial time
right now … In the next six months it’s time for the body of Christ [the
Christian church] to put its differences aside … and come together and agree
that Jesus is the Messiah and start praying together and calling it in and
praying for our prime minister right now, and for our government.
“I really see that the
body of Christ is going to have influence in the arena of – the political arena
of this nation.
“[But] if the prime
minister right now doesn’t get elected in this next election there’s going to
be darkness coming. And I’m not being negative. The laws are going to change
where darkness is going to come and there will be persecution on the church.”
Thompson asked the
congregation if they truly wanted a Pentecostal revival and reformation in
Australia.
“If it doesn’t happen in the next six months,
in the next year I should say, there is going to be, the laws are going to come
in, where they’re going to change and darkness will come,” Thompson said.
“The Lord is saying he
wants us to rise up and pray, rather than come into persecution where we’ll
have no choice.”
In the video, Beale from
Everrest Ministries then leads the congregation in prayer for Morrison, calling
on God to help Australians grasp the value of his intervention in the
leadership spill.
“Just as Scott has come to the fore, unexpected
Lord, you’ve kept him hidden for a time such as this,” Beale said.
“Lord, we pray that the
whole of the body of Christ in Australia would grasp the value of what you’ve
done, Lord, and get behind our new leader … and that the next election would be
won so that godly principles would be put into place, rather than the enemy
having his way.”
In a
different video posted to YouTube, Warwick Marsh from the Australian
Christian Values Institute has claimed three days of prayer and fasting had
been answered with two miracles.
“Firstly, on the 15th of
August, the Senate voted down the euthanasia in the territories proposal. No
one expected this. This was an absolute miracle,” Marsh says in the video,
which was posted last month.
“Secondly, on Friday the
24th, the Liberal party voted in a new prime minister, Scott
Morrison, after a week of political turmoil.
“Many people here in
Australia of faith believe this was a miracle of God, as Mr Morrison has a
strong faith in God and has made a stand for Christian freedoms and has
promised to do so in the future.
In apparent response Morrison has stated....
Pause for a moment and consider the ramifications for an Australian democratic secular society, when the far-right leader of a right wing federal government apparently believes that secular society has no greater claim to legitimacy than faith-based society and, that prayer not environmental or economic policy is an appropriate response to the effects of climate change.
BRIEF BACKGROUND
Scott
Morrison was managing director of Tourism
Australia from 2004-2006 when he lost
his $350,000-a-year job after what insiders describe as a bitter falling-out
with the federal Tourism Minister and Liberal MP for McEwan, Fran Bailey.
Subsequently
he stood for parliament as a Liberal Party candidate and won the seat of Cook
in the 2007 federal election.
On the
election of the Abbott Government in 2013 he began his ministerial career:
Cabinet Minister from 18.9.2013
Minister for Immigration and Border
Protection from 18.9.13 to 23.12.14
Minister for Social Services from
23.12.14 to 21.9.15
Treasurer from 21.9.15 to 26.08.2018
Prime Minister from 24.8.2018.
As Minister
for Immigration and Border Protection Morrison had a reputation for refusing
information to parliament, mainstream media and the general public.
Eight asylum seekers in onshore/offshore detention died during his term as immigration minister - these deaths included three suicides (one by self immolation), one ruled a death in custody, one due to failure to receive adequate medical care whilst in offshore detention and another a murder of an asylum seeker by offshore detention security guards.
His well-known antipathy towards asylum seekers has been demonstrated by his actions and statements such as this in 2013:
Eight asylum seekers in onshore/offshore detention died during his term as immigration minister - these deaths included three suicides (one by self immolation), one ruled a death in custody, one due to failure to receive adequate medical care whilst in offshore detention and another a murder of an asylum seeker by offshore detention security guards.
His well-known antipathy towards asylum seekers has been demonstrated by his actions and statements such as this in 2013:
In 2015 and 2018 Scott Morrison took part in the removal of two Liberal prime ministers - Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. In the first instance by agreeing not to stand as deputy on Abbott's ticket and in the second instance by sending his own supporters to lobby for the second leadership spill and then successfully standing for the vacant prime ministership.
The first two Newspolls published after he was sworn in as Australia's 30th prime minister were unfavourable to the government he leads. The second was the Coalition Government's 40th consecutive unfavourable Newspoll with First Preference voting intentions running at Labor 42% to Coalition 34% and Second Preference voting at Labor 56% to Coalition 44%.
So unlike the prime minister he replaced, Morrison experienced no 'honeymoon period' after he came to office.
Due to the resignation of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on 31 August 2018 Scott Morrison currently leads a government without a majority in the House of Representatives.
The first two Newspolls published after he was sworn in as Australia's 30th prime minister were unfavourable to the government he leads. The second was the Coalition Government's 40th consecutive unfavourable Newspoll with First Preference voting intentions running at Labor 42% to Coalition 34% and Second Preference voting at Labor 56% to Coalition 44%.
So unlike the prime minister he replaced, Morrison experienced no 'honeymoon period' after he came to office.
Due to the resignation of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on 31 August 2018 Scott Morrison currently leads a government without a majority in the House of Representatives.
Morrison has not been generally viewed in a favourable light by the media nor by some who worked with him in the private sector.
The
New Daily, 25
August 2018:
Morrison attended Sydney
Boys’ High School through to Year 12. In March 2015, approximately 300 alumni
of the schools former students signed a letter protesting Mr Morrison’s
attendance at a fund-raising event. The letter accused Mr Morrison of having
“so flagrantly disregarded human rights”…..
Veteran Canberra
journalist Laurie Oakes once said on television that the government “should
avoid the goading and arrogance of Scott Morrison, where he just pours mullock
on journalists”. Oakes added that his attitude towards journalists was
disgusting. “When people like Scott Morrison give us the finger when we ask
tough questions, we’ve got to shine a light on that and expose it because it’s
not acceptable.”
To become Liberal
candidate for Cook in 2007, he lost the preselection ballot, 82 votes to 8, to
Michael Towke, a telecommunications engineer and the candidate of the Liberals’
right faction. However, allegations emerged that Towke had engaged in branch stacking and
embellished his resume.The Liberal Party’s state executive disendorsed Towke
and Morrison won the pre-selection. Later, the allegations against Towke were
disproved and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph was successfully sued by
Towke.
When 48 people died in
the Christmas Island disaster of 2010, Morrison objected to the Gillard
Government offering to pay for families’ fares to the funerals in Sydney……
The BBC’s Nick Bryant
ungenerously wrote: “My hunch is that Scott Morrison doesn’t spend much time
agonising over the contradictions that have marked his career, or fretting
about the veering course of a political journey that has taken him from the
moderate wing of the party, to the right. The main point for him is that his
career has been heading in an ever-upward trajectory.”
The
Saturday Paper,
8 September 2018:
Twelve years ago,
Morrison was sacked from Tourism Australia – two years into his term as boss
there. The then Liberal minister for tourism, Fran Bailey, in 2006 said the
board could no longer work with him. He was “incapable of being a team player”
and faced a revolt from state and territory tourism executives.
An Australian National
Audit Office report released a scathing report into Tourism Australia’s
management of “perceived conflicts of interest” while Morrison was at the helm
and quoted industry observers who had “expressed the view that the perceived
conflicts of interests of board members are a major risk to Tourism Australia’s
reputation”.
Morrison’s reported
half-a-million dollar payout was questioned as excessive and not in accordance
with regulations according to then Remuneration Tribunal president John Conde.
Morrison’s ability to
listen to others was questioned during his time as treasurer. Sydney Liberal
John Alexander, who headed a group of parliamentary colleagues worried about
housing affordability, was incensed by Morrison’s dismissive attitude to him.
The task of holding his badly fractured government together will make
Morrison’s time at Tourism Australia seem like a walk in the park.
Karl Stefanovic put it
bluntly on the Nine Network: “You are the boss but you have little or no
control over the party … Your party is an absolute dog’s breakfast.” Amazingly,
Morrison said he was “not fussed” about all that. “We are focused on the job
ahead.” But in a giveaway that it’s getting to him, the PM leaked one of his
own pending announcements: that his five-year commitment to raise the pension
age to 70 was being ditched. Labor’s Jim Chalmers quipped the PM was getting in
first.
The
Sydney Morning Herald,
3 November 2012:
In 1998, aged 30,
Morrison went to New Zealand to run that country's national Office of Tourism
and Sport, answering directly to the then tourism minister, Murray McCully. He
became known as "Murray's Rottweiler", so enthusiastically did he
throw himself into a battle between the minister and the national tourism
board. When the dust settled, the casualties included the board's chairman and
chief executive, as well as McCully himself. A Wellington newspaper reported
that in the ensuing inquiry, Morrison emerged as "a cross between Rasputin
and Crocodile Dundee".
Sunday 9 September 2018
How the NSW Wagga Wagga By-election is playing out for the Berejiklian Government
Darryl William Maguire ceased to be the state Member for
Wagga Wagga on 3 August 2018 when he was allowed to resign in disgrace, after
being identified
by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption as being involved in
corrupt conduct.
The Wagga Wagga State District By-election was
held on Saturday, 8 September 2018.
Electors enrolled
on 17 August 2018 numbered 55,220 with 46,272 people casting their vote in this
by-election.
There was a
field of seven candidates voters could choose from.
By Saturday
night it was evident that the NSW
Liberal Party had likely lost the seat which it has held continuously since 1957,
with an est. 30 per cent swing against the party on first preference voting.
Second
preference ballot counting is now underway and the two remaining candidates are Independent Joe McGirr and Labor's Dan Hayes.
The final result is expected to leave the Berejiklian Coalition Government with 72 members out of a total of 135 upper and lower house parliamentarians, with the Coalition holding 56 per cent of the lower house seats.
The next NSW general election is on 23 March 2019.
Australian Communications and Media Authority has found that Channel Seven Sydney breached the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice during “Sunrise” program segmennt on indigenous children
On
13 March 2018 the Channel 7 Sunrise program’s “Hot Topic” chat segment
featured Sunrise co-host Samantha Armytage, commentator
Prue MacSween, and Brisbane radio personality Ben Davis.
The ensuing discussion of indigenous children was reportedly inaccurate,
insensitive, uttered stereotypical generalisations and was borderline racist.
Almost five months later an investigation into the incident conducted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) under the Broadcasting
Services Act 1992 was concluded and in September a media release was issued.
Australian
Communications and Media Authority, media
release, 4 September 2018:
The Australian
Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has found that Channel Seven Sydney
breached the Commercial
Television Industry Code of Practice in a Sunrise ‘Hot
Topics’ segment broadcast on 13 March 2018.
The ACMA found that the
introduction to the segment claiming Indigenous children could ‘only be placed
with relatives or other Indigenous families,’ was inaccurate and in breach of
the Code. The licensee explained that this repeated a statement from a
newspaper of the day. However, the ACMA considered that Seven should have taken
steps to verify the accuracy of this claim before it was used as the foundation
for a panel discussion.
The ACMA noted the
follow-up 'Hot Topics' segment broadcast by Seven on 20 March 2018 was a more
informed discussion in which a panellist accurately described the true position
regarding placement of Indigenous children. However, the ACMA found that the
follow-up segment did not correct the earlier error in an appropriate manner in
the circumstances.
The ACMA
investigation also found that the segment provoked serious contempt on
the basis of race in breach of the Code as it contained strong negative
generalisations about Indigenous people as a group. These included sweeping
references to a ‘generation’ of young Indigenous children being abused. While
it may not have been Seven’s intention, by implication the segment conveyed
that children left in Indigenous families would be abused and neglected, in
contrast to non-Indigenous families where they would be protected.
‘Broadcasters can, of
course, discuss matters of public interest, including extremely sensitive
topics such as child abuse in Indigenous communities. However, such matters
should be discussed with care, with editorial framing to ensure compliance with
the Code,’ said ACMA Chair, Nerida O’Loughlin.
‘The ACMA considers that
the high threshold for this breach finding was met, given the strong negative
generalisations about Indigenous people as a group,’ added Ms O’Loughlin.
The ACMA is in discussions
with Channel Seven about its response to the breach findings. Channel Seven has
indicated that it may seek judicial review of the ACMA’s decision.
Labels:
Channel 7,
unethical media
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