WARD OF THE STATE



Ward is a hate-filled and man-like far-Leftist

Safe Schools socialist Roz Ward recently defended Aboriginal activist Tarneen Onus-Williams, who told an Australia Day rally: “We have organised this to abolish Australia Day because f--k Australia.”

“It wasn’t a surprise that the Murdoch empire would strike back with a concerted campaign against Tarneen,” Ward wrote.

“When the Murdoch press led the campaign against Safe Schools, they focused on my personal involvement in the program [and] described me as a ‘hardline Marxist’.”

That would be because Ward is a hardline Marxist.

Moreover, this piece appeared in the Socialist Alternative’s Red Flag, which believes a “revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is the solution.” Red Flag links to only five sites, including Marxist Left Review, Marxism Conference, Marxist Interventions and Marxist Internet Archive. The fifth? International Socialist Review.

“They deployed ammunition in words,” Ward continued. “Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair, Janet Albrechtsen and others were wound up by their editors to spin the narrative.”

As it happens, I’d been at a mate’s place playing cricket on Australia Day and posted my first item on Tarneen the following morning. No editorial directives were involved. No spinning, either, unless you count my slow-rotation offies.

Writing about another ally, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Ward seethed: “Bigot MP George Christensen suggested self-deportation might be the answer.” Which is exactly what Abdel-Magied did, fleeing to London.

Ward signed off with a sarcastic reference to “the great nation of Australia”. It’d be substantially greater if she also followed Christensen’s fine advice.

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Bill Shorten’s industrial relations promise to militant CFMEU

Workplace Minister Craig Laundy has slammed Bill Shorten for calling the industrial relations system “cancer”.

Mr Laundy said the Opposition Leader should be defending the independent umpire that was created by the former Labor government.

“These comments are wrong across the board on a few different fronts but sadly symptomatic of what you are seeing with the modern Labor,” Mr Laundy told Sky News.

“What he is conveniently forgetting is the Fair Work Act is their act, it was implemented by them between 2007 and 2009. They are completely beholden to the unions for not just their financial support for his support on the floor of parliament.”

Mr Laundy rejected Mr Shorten’s “lie” the enterprise bargaining system was broken.

“Apparently according to the Labor Party the bargaining system is broken yet in the last 12 months 3 per cent of terminations ..were contested, 97 per cent were not,” he said.

Bill Shorten vowed to tear up the nation’s industrial laws during a rallying speech late last year to workers at a Queensland coalmine where CFMEU protesters were revealed to have allegedly threatened to rape the children of non-striking workers.

In a secret recording of the ­Opposition Leader’s stump speech delivered at the Oaky North coalmine on October 6, Mr Shorten told striking CFMEU workers that he would rewrite ­labour laws if he won office.

“We now have a situation where the laws of this land are being distorted; where they are being mutated; where they’re being metastasised, like a cancer,” Mr Shorten is heard to say in a video recording obtained by The Australian. “We will change laws if we form a government or when we form a government.”

The speech was delivered four days before it was revealed that several CFMEU protesters had engaged in serious intimidation of families of non-striking miners. One protester was recorded saying they would rape their children.

Mr Shorten, who was accompanied at the rally by opposition employment spokesman Brendan O’Connor, later condemned the comments made in the weeks ­before their visit. “I do not condone unlawful or disrespectful ­behaviour, whoever does it,” he said at the time.

The Opposition Leader claimed he had been there to lend support to the 175 CFMEU workers who only yesterday were granted a return to work by the Fair Work Commission after a 230-day lockout imposed by Glencore following a dispute over an enterprise agreement that the union claimed stripped workers of basic rights.

In his address to the CFMEU workers, Mr Shorten said: “You should also say to your families that Bill and Brendan have the highest respect for the mining and engineering division of the CFMEU. These people will be with you the whole way, always have been and always are, always will be. If we form a government, yeah, we’ll do the right thing, we won’t let you down. The privilege for us today is to be in your ­company.”

Mr Shorten has stuck with a pledge to rewrite laws that allow employers to put workers back on to an award where an agreement can’t be reached on a new EBA. But he has backed down in recent weeks over a policy to override the Fair Work Commission and legislate for minimum wage rises.

His comments to the private meeting of CFMEU workers ­appeared to echo calls by ACTU secretary Sally McManus who has attacked industrial laws as a “joke”.

The Oaky North speech has been seized upon by the Turnbull government to exploit the factional deals between Mr Shorten and the militant union designed to protect his leadership.

Employment Minister Craig Laundy last night accused Mr Shorten of having a plan to rip up labour laws to benefit union power. “It proves that if Bill Shorten becomes prime minister, he would give the unions a blank cheque and rewrite the industrial landscape to suit them,” he said.

Less than a week after Mr Shorten’s address to the CFMEU workers at Oaky North, it was revealed that a small band of the same CFMEU workers had a month earlier made threats to security guards and other miners who were refusing to engage in the industrial action.

The Courier-Mail posted a video of CFMEU members ­appearing to abuse workers. In one incident, a worker was heard to tell another worker to “crash your car into a tree on the way home”. The video was dated September 6, 2017.

Glencore at the time claimed that they had evidence that CFMEU members had also allegedly threatened others with ­obscenities including: “I’ll f..king rape your kids, c..t. I’ll f..king rape your kids, c..t.”

Other threats included: “I’ll ­attack you with a crowbar. “I’ll rip out your spine … ya f..king dog.”

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Aspiring doctors begin Macquarie's 'cash grab' $250,000 medical degree

Amid outrage and controversy, Australia's newest full-fee medical school opened its doors on Monday, welcoming about 50 fresh-faced students who have the ability to cough up $250,000 for the privilege.

While they too welcomed the aspiring doctors, the Australian Medical Students' Association (AMSA) and Australian Medical Association (AMA) lambasted Macquarie University for its "short-sighted cash grab", saying the degree didn't come with a guarantee of an internship and would cause greater bottle necks in the training system.

“The pipeline is stretched and bursting; in 2016 we had 200 medical graduates left without an internship which you need to become a qualified doctor,” said AMSA president Alex Farrell.
Alex Farrell, president of Australian Medical Students' Association, says the opening of Macquarie University's new medical school is not a good thing.

Alex Farrell, president of Australian Medical Students' Association, says the opening of Macquarie University's new medical school is not a good thing.

“Macquarie University is irresponsibly profiting from the dreams of young students [because] these students may end up with a six-figure debt and no job.”

On Monday, the public university kicked off its four-year, graduate-entry Doctor of Medicine program. It welcomed 50 domestic students, which is 10 more than its aim.

But the university failed to hit its target of 20 international students, enrolling only three for the 2018 cohort and leaving a funding gap of more than $1.75 million over four years, according to AMSA.

Ms Farrell said Macquarie University had made a “business move” and was concerned that other universities would follow suit and exploit the same loophole, which allows public universities to offer domestic, full-fee places for graduate-level programs.

“We know from overseas that high tertiary fees drive graduates into highly paid specialties, and away from areas of workforce shortage such as general practice or rural practice,” said Ms Farrell.

“In doing so, these programs, while lining the universities’ pockets, do a disservice to the public and the Australian healthcare system.”

But Professor Patrick McNeil, Macquarie University’s executive dean of medical and health sciences, told Fairfax Media that no university could guarantee an internship to any student at any program in Australia.

He said some of the graduates would receive post-degree training at MQ Health, the university’s medical centre. He rejected the suggestion the program would “clog the pipeline”.

“We don’t have an oversupply of graduates and in fact Australia imports nearly 3000 foreign trained doctors to Australia every year,” he said.

“Also, given the size of Australia’s population increase, the world’s not going to end because we’re graduating a small number of graduates.”

Professor McNeil said the fresh cohort was “incredibly excited, highly motivated” and their GPA and GAMSAT results were similar to that of their peers at University of Melbourne.

He revealed they had 500 applicants. The final cohort is made up of 30 women and 20 men, and the average age is 23.

AMA president Michael Gannon said he opposed the opening of new medical schools, expansion of student numbers and “what Macquarie represents”.

“We’re already seeing the states and territories struggling to provide internships for all medical graduates so we’re worried that a university will just decide to chase the funding and the prestige that comes with having a medical school without having any need to give consideration to what the product means at the end,” he said.

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Sydneysiders don't want a bigger population. They are voting with their feet

Traffic jams. Housing costs. Packed beaches. High-rise living. The pace and general stress of life.

Many of Sydney people’s everyday concerns can be linked in some way to population growth. What if we could just turn it off, and keep a stable population of around five million?

It might surprise you to learn it would be relatively easy for Sydney to cut its population growth to near zero. It wouldn’t take an onerous “one-child” policy like China’s. All we’d have to do is turn off the tap of foreign immigration, to a net in-take of zero, and almost overnight the city’s population would plateau, staying basically flat right out to 2036.

At least, that’s what modelling done by the state Department of Planning and Environment in 2016 showed.

The department, which expects the city’s population to reach 6.4 million by 2036, said that the population would actually stagnate at beneath five million without any immigration (we have since already passed five million). Their projection takes into account both the loss of immigrants expected to arrive, and the babies they would be expected to have.

So it can happen. The question is, do we really want it to happen?

There would be side effects, that’s for sure, and they wouldn’t all be pretty. My colleague, Jessica Irvine, detailed some in an article in 2016. The budget would be in disarray. The ageing population would cause increase strain on working people. Education and tourism would suffer.

Ever the opportunist, Tony Abbott popped up again last week, arguing for a reduction in immigration to reduce supply pressure in the economy. His comments were immediately denigrated by Liberal colleagues, but it was hard not to suspect they were playing the man and not the ball.

The question is, is dreaming of a stable population unreasonable? Do we want Sydney to grow the population ad infinitum? Will there ever be a point when we say ‘that’s enough’? Ten million? Twenty million?

There are many first-world cities with populations much larger than Sydney, so it clearly can absorb more growth. But it would appear Australians don’t want that.

The clue is in the hundreds of thousands of people who are voting with their feet, deciding that Sydney is not for them. As the Herald reported on Monday, more people leave Sydney than arrive from within Australia every year. And it has been that way for four decades.

This seeming distaste for a bigger, more expensive Sydney seems born out in the planning department modelling also. Otherwise, why would the city’s only path to growth be via immigration?
Australians are overwhelmingly in favour of multiculturalism. But a majority don't want further population growth. The thing is, they don’t want a recession either.

Changing our relationship with population growth is complex because it requires a rethink of our economic approach.

At the moment, growth dictates our priorities. Australian rightfully celebrates going 27 years without a recession (defined as two consecutive quarters without economic growth). And politicians are no doubt determined to not be in charge when that streak ends.

However, Australia has been taking the shortcut on this by growing the population. Growing the economy while growing the population is a lot easier.

There’s another system that requires a constant input of new people to achieve returns: a Ponzi scheme. Those don’t normally end well. Unless you are prepared to grow literally forever, then such a system is set up for failure eventually.

If some day we want to consider having a stable population without an economic meltdown, it might pay to start thinking about how we do it. Japan is having to do just that, and is seemingly making an OK fist of it.

But it requires having a nuanced conversation that, in this political climate, seems somewhat optimistic. It doesn’t help if anyone who raises the idea of reducing immigration is tagged a racist or economically illiterate.

Whatever the optimum size for Sydney might be, it would be nice to get there as the result of considered decision making rather than just drift into it because we couldn’t face the hard questions of how to deal with the economic ramifications.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here