Political activists exploit Indigenous Australians for their own ends

JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE

There may have been some people surprised to hear a Federal Court judge describe a “cultural mapping” exercise and other key components of the Environmental Defenders Office case against the Santos Barossa gas project as “so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on them” and tainted by “confection” and “construction” of evidence. But I wasn’t one of them. Using Indigenous Australians and our history to push a particular agenda is nothing new; indeed, the whole country witnessed the practice on its biggest scale yet during the 2023 voice referendum.

The euphemistically named Environmental Defenders Office, which has received more than $8m from the Albanese government, knew exactly what it was doing when it was, in the words of Federal Court judge Natalie Charlesworth, “distorting and misrepresenting” the words of traditional owners. The “subtle coaching” of Indigenous Australians, and the attempts to “encourage and hint” to come to particular conclusions, are common examples of activists trying to manipulate and use Indigenous Australians to pursue their own agendas, regardless of the best interests of those they are using.

This is all too common in Indigenous Australia: activists, academics and bureaucrats, with good education, opportunity and financial security, pursuing their own agendas, with complete disregard for and indifference to the genuine challenges being faced by Indigenous Australians in remote and rural Australia. Organisations such as the EDO, and the individuals who run them, are only too happy to use the plight of some of our most marginalised Australians to further their own ideological or political agenda.

It’s difficult to say what the most damaging part of this sort of behaviour is: the legal damage, the economic deprivation or the division and hurt it causes among all Australians. In the case of the EDO against Santos, distortion and misrepresentation were used, as Tasmanian senator Jonno Duniam put it, as a form of “environmental lawfare’’ that frustrates the courts, brings important projects to a standstill, and puts vital industries – and the thousands of Aussie jobs they create – at real risk. As even a former Labor MP, Joel Fitzgibbon, said following the Santos decision: “Hopefully the broader community is beginning to see activist lawfare for what it is, ideological and a threat to our living standard.”

The absurdity of the Albanese government funding an organisation hellbent on undermining government processes beggars belief and points to a government that is both out of touch and out of its depth. The claims that these activists are working for Indigenous communities while pushing their radical environmental agenda is likewise absurd. We know the quickest and most effective way to permanently improve the lives of our most marginalised is to encourage and facilitate economic advancement. However, as West Australian Labor Premier Roger Cook said: “We now see environmental groups undertaking that same strategy that we all condemned in the early 2000s, where they pull people away from the group and use that to undermine their own self-determination in relation to projects.”

The Northern Territory government will review its funding of the Environmental Defenders Office over its conduct… during a Federal Court challenge to the Barossa gas project. Santos won the case, and work has now resumed on laying the pipeline from the Barossa field to Darwin, with the first gas More
Indeed, far from wanting to help, activists attacking mining and energy companies – attempting to stymie new development and trying to revisit and change past decisions – are actually hurting investment and depriving Indigenous Australians of those economic opportunities. We now find ourselves in the incredible situation where the federal government is actually funding organisations pursuing the deprivation of Indigenous economic participation, while simultaneously spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to implement ill-conceived, silver-bullet policy solutions to Indigenous disadvantage.

Is it any wonder Indigenous disadvantage is so entrenched, when the rich and powerful see something like the Barossa gas project as a greater environmental threat than an opportunity for Indigenous economic advancement. I believe we must also consider the damage these acts do to the goodwill of so many Australians towards Indigenous issues. A recurring theme of the 2023 referendum was the amount of taxpayer money being spent, both directly and indirectly, on Indigenous issues, and its efficacy.

At a time when Australians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, finding out millions of dollars in taxpayer money is going to an organisation filled with radical environmentalists, which seeks to obstruct progress and opportunity, and exploits Indigenous Australians to do it, only damages that goodwill and stokes more division.

The Coalition has repeatedly called for an audit into spending to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where the waste is – calls routinely rejected by the Albanese government. That Anthony Albanese and Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek would continue to allow taxpayer money to be wasted like this is simply astonishing. It begs the question: is this all just a thinly veiled attempt to, as Queensland senator Susan McDonald puts it, “secure votes in inner-city seats under threat from the Greens”? This was on display on Wednesday when Solomon MP Luke Gosling fell into line, saying he “still sees a role for the EDO”.

The truth is that what was uncovered by the Federal Court is not uncommon. Instances such as Santos’ Barossa gas project and the “white hands on black art” exercise are just the tip of the iceberg. The EDO needs to be defunded not just because it is a proven bad actor, but also to send a clear message that the age of exploiting Indigenous Australians to achieve political goals is at an end. This is what Peter Dutton and the LNP are ready to do, and what Albanese and the Labor government are incapable of doing.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/political-activists-exploit-indigenous-australians-for-their-own-ends/news-story/3d15b4d4754e7008caeed1fe88ccda8b

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Steal from the rich. Steal from the poor. Steal from them all!

What does our Prime Minister really think about money? Does he see himself as the ‘Robin Hood’ of Australian democracy?

Absent any systematic treatise, it seems we have to guess how his thinking works based on his words and actions. Over the last week, his words have changed. The Prime Minister’s reasoning for this change, as reported by him, is because he was driven by a sense of ‘fairness’ to deliver more tax relief to more people.

But is our Prime Minister’s ‘fairness’ actually ‘just’? That depends on our view on the role of taxation. For example, if taxation is primarily about providing minimum care for those who cannot provide for themselves, that is very different to if we view taxation as a means of ensuring everyone receives the same benefits regardless of individual context.

It seems that our Prime Minister has confirmed that he is in the latter camp. He has demonstrated a tone deafness to the nuances of taxation changes and changed his mind, dramatically, under the cover of his plaintiff cry, ‘But this is fairer!’

The irony is that his drastic turn-around is purported to fix a problem of his own government’s making. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is driven, amongst other things, by the rising price of energy. The unnecessary and ineffective rush to so-called renewables, and the banning of alternatives, is central to the difficulties being experienced by families and businesses.

Does it make sense to give more money to those with less, regardless of the cause? Drs Laffer and Domitrovic have suggested that this is not necessarily helpful. Indeed, they have identified that beyond a certain point (perhaps 20 per cent of GDP), more taxation is counter-productive, regardless of the distribution pattern. According to their ‘transfer theorem’, when you take money from those who are involved in increasing goods and services, they have less to invest in their productivity. And when you give that money to those who have a little less, this alternative source of income detracts from their incentive to be productive (and earn more on their own).

As Dr Laffer explained in an interview: ‘Whenever you transfer resources you always reduce total production in the system. Always. You take from those who have a little bit more, reduce their incentives to produce, and they’ll produce less. You give to those who have a little bit less, provide them with an alternative source of income, and they, too, will produce a little bit less. Whenever you redistribute income you always reduce total income, period.’

Here is why our Prime Minister’s Robin Hood act of fairness is more than a broken promise. He is, long term, aggravating the very dynamic he pretends he is fixing! He claims this is good economics. He is wrong. Why? Because he is, again, creating options that decrease productivity. It is unjust. It is against the principles of respect for individuals within a community. It is against the principles of choice within the community itself. We can call it ‘big government’ or ‘socialism writ large’, but at a deeper level, it is an attack on our humanity.

Why? We humans are choice-makers towards meaning and truth. Existential questions of life are important to us. For example, we recoil against the horror of any war. We should throw ourselves into protecting others from the evil of those who rejoice in the horror of war.

In leadership, our choices should be made in a manner that demonstrates a transparent relationship between responsibility and authority. But when the government takes too much of our money, it is taking authority which is not its to use. This is why allowing taxation bracket creep to flourish is unjust. It separates the responsibility of productivity from the authority to make decisions about our productive efforts. Again, Laffer puts it bluntly:

‘Whenever you redistribute income, you never actually redistribute income. You destroy total income completely. Every revolution on planet Earth has been fought in order to change the distribution of income. Not one of those revolutions has ever succeeded in redistributing income, but all of them have succeeded in destroying the entire quality and quantity of total income. All of these attempts at high tax rates have been attempts to redistribute income, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Robin Hood. And none of them have succeeded. But what they have succeeded in doing is destroying total income and the quality of life in our country.’

That is what the Prime Minister is doing when he claims he is being ‘fairer’. He is continuing to reduce the quality of life in our nation. Is this why he shied away from what he was intending to do (or at least thinking about doing) with blatantly misleading responses to questions about the already legislated Stage 3 tax cuts.

There is an old saying that explains that what comes out of our mouths demonstrates the state of our heart – where our heart is the total of who we are. What does this say of our Prime Minister?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/steal-from-the-rich-steal-from-the-poor-steal-from-them-all

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Stop wasting water

Almost every river in Eastern Australia is pouring surplus water into the sea.

Despite this, only two dams have been built in Queensland in the last 20 years – the Wyaralong Dam (built 13 years ago), and Paradise Dam (built 19 years ago).

Droughts will come again and we will wish for another dam builder like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose government built at least eight dams in Queensland – the Burdekin, Wivenhoe, Hinze, Beardmore, Haig, Fairbairn, Bjelke-Petersen, and Eungella dams.

All that dam-building came to a halt in 1988 when the plans to build the Wolffdene Dam were scuttled by the usual suspects.

Taxpayers also spent some $460 million on preliminaries for the Traverston Dam, but then cancelled it when the infamous Peter Garrett rejected the project. And recently it was revealed that the Paradise Dam in the Bundaberg Region had faults in the wall and a new wall would have to be built.

So, while our water storages are stagnant or declining, our politicians support dangerously high levels of immigration as well as promoting tourism, games, and circuses, all of which add to the demand for water. The population clock managed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that Australia’s population increases by one person every 50 seconds. They all need water.

And some fools want to use more of our precious stored fresh water to produce hydrogen fuels (every tonne of hydrogen produced by electrolysis consumes at least nine tonnes of fresh water). The ‘green hydrogen’ cycle needs lots of water and will always be a net consumer of electricity.

Climate alarmism of the it’ll never rain again variety resulted in the rash approval and construction of artificial desalination plants in Australia about 15 years ago. Recently, Hunter Water announced that it was going to spend $500 million on a desalination plant south of Newcastle. All desalination plants are costly to build and operate, and many stand idle most of the time. And of course, green politicians want the power to be supplied from wind-solar adding greatly to the costs and environmental destruction.

To let surplus fresh water escape to the oceans and then try to recover it using artificial desalination plants is the ultimate water stupidity.

Right now, Cyclone Kirrily is demonstrating nature’s power of desalination – sucking moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumping it on land. This is free fresh water with no costs to taxpayers.

Sensible people have their water storage facilities ready – new dams and weirs built, silt cleaned out, dam walls and overflows checked, and no leaves clogging the tank strainers etc.

Australia must build more dams for flood mitigation, urban water supply, and irrigation. Most East Coast Rivers have surplus water that races to the sea during floods. It could be conserved.

And it is time to apply our engineering skills to building the Bradfield water scheme – it will certainly provide better returns to Australians than green energy dreams like Snowy 2 or powerlines from the Northern Territory to Singapore.

A sensible society would identify the best dam sites and have a long-term plan for acquiring and preserving the land rights needed for them. We do the reverse. Decisions are postponed until the need is critical. Then landowners with vested interests, green busybodies, and media stirrers manage to scare the politicians, and the water conservation proposal is killed.

Then the ‘No Dams Ever’ Mafia takes over, trying to sterilise the site for all future dams by quietly changing land-use or vegetation classifications. They search for (or manufacture) evidence of native title or endangered species, and declare national parks over critical areas.

Green destroyers have also grossly mismanaged stored water by insisting on excessive and ill-timed ‘environmental’ flows. This is a scheme where you build a dam to catch water and then try to manage the water as if the dam did not exist. It is very slow and expensive to get this lost water back from the sea using desalination plants.

Existing dams have two great enemies – silting which gradually steals their water capacity, and evaporation which continually steals the water itself. Our engineers can manage ‘desilting’ and the CSIRO could divert some resources from climate alarmism to reducing evaporation from water supply dams.

But most of all we need more stored water. The wet La Niña will inevitably be followed by a droughty El Niño.

Let’s find a new Joh who will build more dams.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/stop-wasting-water/ ?

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Death sentence by capital starvation

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones is planning a devastating attack on around 1400 listed Australian companies – around 60 per cent the companies listed on the ASX.

And he is following that up with a similar attack on thousands of smaller high technology private companies delivering equally savage blows to our embryonic venture capital market.

When I understood the pending disasters my first reaction was that Jones was “doing his bit” by joining in the ruthless Anthony Albanese attack on family businesses which I have documented many times.

That initial conclusion might be right, but I now think it more likely that in this case Jones actually had good intentions but consulted the wrong people — the big end of town — who simply didn’t understand what would happen if the nation made it much harder to be classed as a “wholesale” investor.

Jones’ plan that Australia should have the toughest definition of “wholesale” investor in the developed world (outside Hong Kong) will result in the vast majority of the 1450 ASX-listed companies with a market capitalisation under $100m being starved of capital slowly squeezing them to death.

The same death sentence by capital starvation will apply to most small enterprises being backed by Australian venture capitalists.

Very few major stock exchanges provide a market for small enterprises like the ASX and because I am partly responsible for this unique Australian situation I should have realised the pending disaster much earlier.

Back in the early days of the internet (around 1997) I was in charge of BRW Media group. BRW had a unique Australian advantage because our large readership base had a huge number of medium to smaller enterprises and we knew the opportunities the internet would create.

So on a tentative basis, myself and Amanda Gome (congratulations Amanda on your AM on Australia Day along with along with another former colleague David Koch), started exploring whether we could create a “BRW market” for equity in smaller enterprises.

Our early feasibility work had not gone as far as telling the Fairfax top management and board but it reached the ASX who may have thought we were further advanced than we actually were.

They reacted swiftly to cut us off by opening their listing doors to much smaller enterprises. They were rushed and the numbers kept growing as the years passed. We were correct in seeing that there was a national need but there were also a lot of hazards to be explored before BRW entered such a field. We smiled because our objective was achieved.

What made the market so large was the development of a remarkable capital raising industry dominated by wholesale investors.

Non “wholesale” investors are called retail investors and they can buy and sell the small company shares on the ASX market every day, but when it comes to raising capital there are severe restrictions on their ability to subscribe — that’s why the money to keep the 1400 companies alive must come from “wholesale” investors.

It’s crazy that retail investors can buy any quantity of shares on the ASX without restrictions but are restricted in subscribing to essential new raisings. But that’s the way it is and companies are able to finance their activities because the wholesale investor market is strong, led by many enterprises like InvestorHub.

Naturally there have been failures and some of the listed companies are dormant but the ASX rules have protected investors

In the non-listed market, Startmate is one of a number of organisations that mobilise funds to invest in venture capital start-ups.

Startmate chief executive Michael Batko says his group has one pool of 441 investors and he believes 98 per cent of them would be knocked out by Jones’ proposed criteria.

Under the current rules, a person can be a wholesale investor if they have net assets of more than $2.5m including the family home or an income for two years at or above $250,000. That figure has not changed for many years and the rise in the value of the family home has greatly expanded the number of people who are eligible “wholesale” investors.

Accordingly, Jones asked the Financial Services Council, ASIC and Treasury to make recommendations. Clearly none of them had any idea of the extent and sophistication of the role of wholesale investors in capital raising for listed companies with capitalisations under $100m.

Given the absence of major scandals, the investigators were forced to go back six years to find what they thought was a good example where something went wrong.

It was actually a bad example but it illustrated how well this market is operating.

Australia’s corporate failures are currently dominated be the impact of inflation on building and Covid and not the operation of the wholesale investor.

But on the Assistant Treasurer's table is a recommendation to double the required assets, including the family home, to $5m and set up a $2.5m net assets trigger point without the family home. The alterative income test proposal is $450,000 annually for two consecutive years.

That takes us way out of line with the rest of the world. The Londoners recently looked at an appropriate level and decided on $A850,000 as the net assets minimum requirement. Williamson thinks $850,000 excluding the family home is workable but given that the rise in the value of the family home has substantially boosted the numbers of qualified wholesale investors there is no detailed data.

And I would add that it makes no sense to have any limit on a capital raising in a listed security where retail traders can buy the same security on the ASX without a limit on their finances.

I plead with the Assistant Treasurer to hold back and speak with Williamson and Batko and others who are leading this market and confirm for himself that making the proposed changes will cause havoc to an essential part of Australia’s future.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/investor-rule-changes-set-to-squeeze-startups-to-death/news-story/ec3b81cc8ef5eaae5b08c26ebfd775a5

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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