Australian Politics
Sunday, November 06, 2022
Pay increase of 15pc for 300,000 aged-care staff
More inflation! You will pay for this at your supermarket. There is no magic money tree to fund this and the Federal government has promised no new taxes. So there will in fact be a big tax -- on the money you spend on groceries etc. The Federal government will print money to pay for this wonderful new world and that will devalue all money, thus pushing up the price for everything. And the destruction of your savings will continue
Leftist governments have a compulsion to spend for good causes. But there is no end to good causes. This is a good cause but where are the cutbacks elsewhere to pay for it? There is not even the suggestion of it
More than 300,000 aged-care workers will get a pay rise of at least 15 per cent after the Fair Work Commission found their work had been historically undervalued and significant changes to the way they worked over the past 20 years justified the lift in wages.
The Albanese government immediately reaffirmed its commitment to fund the pay rise after the commission found an interim 15 per cent pay rise for aged-care nurses and workers in direct care roles was “‘plainly justified by work value reasons”.
The timing and phasing in of the pay rises is to be determined, and the commission did not rule out a further rise for direct care staff. It is also yet to rule on a union claim for a 25 per cent wage increase for administrative and support aged-care employees such as cleaning staff.
Aged care is one of the government’s biggest and fastest-growing spending programs, budgeted to cost $27bn this financial year and rising to nearly $35bn by 2025-26, even without incorporating the commission wage decision.
A commission full bench, headed by president Iain Ross, said it was not suggesting the 15 per cent interim increase necessarily exhausted the level of pay rise for direct care workers, and whether any further increase was justified would be the subject of further submissions.
Aged-care workers covered by the interim award increase include those working in direct care roles in nursing homes and those providing in-home care.
About 210,000 workers are in direct care roles in residential aged-care centres, according to the most recent aged-care workforce census published last year, with another 124,000 providing in-home care services under government programs.
The full bench said it accepted the expert evidence that “as a general proposition, work in feminised industries, including care work, has been historically undervalued and that the reason for that undervaluation is likely to be gender based”.
“It is common ground between the parties that the work undertaken by registered nurses, enrolled nurses and Certificate III personal care workers in residential aged care has changed significantly in the past two decades such as to justify an increase in minimum wages for these classifications,” the full bench said.
“We also recognise that there is ample evidence that the needs of those being cared for in their homes have significantly increased in terms of clinical complexity, frailty and cognitive and mental health. In respect of direct care workers … the existing minimum rates do not properly compensate employees for the value of the work performed.”
While the evidence relating to support and administrative employees was not as clear and more submissions were needed, “we see no reason to delay an increase in minimum wages for direct care workers while that … takes place.”
The government confirmed it would fund the interim increase in line with its election commitment, saying better pay for aged-care workers was a critical step to attract and retain the numbers of staff required for the growing cohort of older Australians.
“Aged care is hard work, but it’s undervalued work,” Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said.
“This result is the first step in changing that.”
The Health Services Union welcomed the 15 per cent interim pay rise but said a “larger and broader increase is needed to stem the industry’s crisis”.
“This is a reasonable start but we need the commission to go further and permanently end the poverty wage settings that dominate aged care,” HSU national president Gerard Hayes said.
“Fifteen per cent is a down payment but nobody should be mistaken. This will not fix the crisis. We still have massive unfinished business in aged care.”
Aged-care providers welcomed the decision as a “substantial pay rise” but said key aged-care staff were not covered.
“We note the decision does not cover staff not involved in direct care such as kitchen, laundry, recreation activities and administrative staff, and we look forward to a further decision by the commission which addresses their pay,” Aged & Community Care Providers Association chief executive Tom Symondson said.
Analysis by the Grattan Institute said aged-care wages would rise by around $3bn a year if the 25 per cent increase was implemented this year for all workers under the claim.
The commission said it was “not persuaded that varying the relevant awards to give effect to the interim increase … will have any material effect on the national economy”.
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Income rules a barrier to Australian pensioners filling skills gaps, advocates say
Retirement was going well for Henry Gasior.
After a long career in the aviation industry, the pensioner was enjoying volunteering and helping out at his local food bank in Bacchus Marsh, about 40 kilometres out of Melbourne.
Then, a year and a half ago, the 76-year-old did something he never saw coming: he went back to work. "I had to supplement my pension," he said.
"The bills kept on coming in, [and not] just gas bills or electricity bills. I had to dip into my superannuation: large amounts on about three different occasions."
Mr Gasior now works as a personal care worker, providing assistance for older Australians living at home.
He works about 12 to 15 hours a week, earning anywhere from $670 to $840 a fortnight. That's well over what he's allowed to earn before his pension payments are reduced.
Currently, those on the Age Pension are allowed to earn a "Work Bonus" of $300 a fortnight for a single person, or $320 a fortnight for a couple. For every dollar earned above that amount, pension payments are reduced by 50 cents on every dollar.
It means the more hours Mr Gasior works, the more his pension shrinks. And because he's married, his wife's pension is also reduced. "It would be a big, big help if they increased the threshold," he said.
In this year's federal budget, the government announced plans to do just that.
The Work Bonus will be increased from December 1, taking it from $7,800 a year to $11,800 for this financial year. But the measure will expire on July 1.
Advocates and industry groups say the move is a step in the right direction — but likely not enough to entice more pensioners into the workforce.
The latest statistics show a huge demand for more workers, particularly in the field of health care and social assistance. The sector has an older workforce and had 74,000 job vacancies nationwide in August.
Despite the moves in the budget, National Seniors chief advocate Ian Henschke said the government had not addressed one of the key barriers when it came to pensioners working: the prospect of interacting with Centrelink.
He said the government needed to make the system "simpler, more understandable and fairer" — and to make the move permanent.
"We've got fewer than 80,000 pensioners [working] in Australia when we've got a pensioner population of 2.25 million," he said. "When you've only got less than 3 per cent of your pensioners doing work, it's not because they don't want to work. We believe [Centrelink] is the big barrier."
Tapping the 'grey economy'
Aged care is one sector of the economy that could benefit from pensioners re-entering the workforce, according to the experts. The latest workforce census revealed 45 per cent of personal care workers were over the age of 50.
For in-home care providers, there is a huge demand for older workers, with advocates saying clients feel more comfortable with care workers closer to their own age.
"This 'grey economy', what [we] need to do is [tap into] that market," said Georgia Downes, the chief operating officer of aged care provider Home Instead. "At the moment, we are in dire need of more caregivers. [In our business] we would love to take on up to 1,000 to 1,200 more."
She believed the system was too complicated and the amounts pensioners were allowed to earn too low -- even with the one-time boost provided in the budget.
"We've got caregivers that are currently turning down shifts, although they need the money, and they'd like the work," she said. "They're turning down shifts because they're scared of affecting their pension."
In a statement, Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said the boost to the Work Bonus in December would have a positive impact.
"This measure not only incentivises pensioners to work and boosts the supply of labour to meet workplace shortages, but it also gives pensioners the opportunity to work flexibly," Ms Rishworth said.
"All aged pensioners [will] receive the up-front $4,000 income credit and will be able to work and earn more before their aged pension is reduced. It's a simple measure that provides certainty — pensioners know exactly what they are getting up-front and how much they can earn."
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Queensland schools data reveals private school enrolments growing
As private schools go from strength to strength, Queensland state school enrolment numbers are crashing due to the low birth rate in 2017, homeschool popularity and interstate migration.
Samford Valley Steiner School, an independent school offering Prep-Year 12, has experienced significant growth, so much so they have this year opened six new classrooms.
“We are growing the school from the bottom up,” enrolments manager Joan Weir said.
“I’ve seen the migration trends (with the school’s enrolments), particularly out of Victoria.”
From 2018-2020, state school enrolments increased on average 10,000 ayear. But this growth slowed in 2021 and decreased by almost 4000 in 2022.
From 2018-2022, secondary enrolments have continued to increase, but primary enrolments have shrunk since 2019, with the decline becoming sharper every year.
Education Minister Grace Grace said Covid-related international and state border closures in place until the end of 2021 created a lag in new enrolments.
“We have also seen a rise in home schooling as some families chose to keep vulnerable children at home during a health pandemic,” she said.
“There were also one-off factors like the fact that back in 2017 Queensland had a lower birthrate than usual, which has flowed through now in lower numbers starting prep in 2022.”
Independent school enrolments climbed by 4.8 per cent in 2020-21, which was a 10-year high, and followed this up with a 4.1 per cent jump in 2021-22.
Independent Schools Queensland chief executive Chris Mountford said enrolments were at all-time high across the sector.
“A key factor in this growth over recent years is the increase in in-migration to the sector throughout the pandemic. This could be students coming from interstate, overseas, or the state or catholic sectors,” he said.
“From 2019–2022, net in-migration enrolments at Queensland independent schools jumped, on average, about 50 per cent to 4350 students.”
The Catholic sector enjoyed consistent growth in the past five years, boosting enrolment numbers by more than 10,000 in total, at a yearly average of 1.2 per cent.
“Nine new Catholic schools have opened in Queensland since 2018 to meet the demand in high-growth areas,” Queensland Catholic Education Commission executive director Dr Lee-Anne Perry said.
“These schools have been in high demand with initial enrolments exceeding expectations and, in some cases, requiring additional classes to be offered.”
From 2018-2022, the number of state schools in Queensland grew from 1240 to 1258.
The state government plans to build 11 new state schools in 2023-24 – including five in Ipswich, three in Logan, one on the Sunshine Coast and one in Redland City.
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Dwayne Johnstone murder trial jury told officer acted lawfully when he shot shackled Indigenous man
A jury has been told a NSW Corrections officer was acting lawfully when he shot and killed a shackled Indigenous man outside the Lismore Base Hospital.
The accused man, who is referred to as Officer A for legal reasons, is standing trial for the murder of 43-year-old Dwayne Johnstone on the evening of March 15, 2019.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charge.
The court has heard Mr Johnstone was handcuffed and had restraints on his ankles at the time.
The jury heard the officer fired three shots as Mr Johnstone tried to flee, and twice shouted out "stop or I'll shoot".
The third shot hit Mr Johnstone in the back and he died in hospital a short time later.
Defence barrister Philip Strickland SC told the court on Monday the regulations surrounding when a Corrections officer could discharge a firearm were clear.
"A correctional officer may discharge a firearm if the officer believes on reasonable grounds that it is necessary to do so in order to prevent the escape of an inmate," he said.
"You may agree with this law or you may disagree with it, you may think it gives officers too much power, but I urge you if you do think that then disregard it. "It doesn't matter if you like the law or you don't like the law."
The defence barrister told the court the drama played out over the course of 11 or 12 seconds. ''He had to make, in a few seconds, a decision of momentous consequence," Mr Strickland said.
The court was told Mr Johnstone was "desperate to escape" and a nurse at the Lismore Base Hospital thought he was overheard offering someone "10 grand if you help me get away".
The court was told the nurse did not alert authorities because they were unsure if they had heard correctly.
Crown prosecutor Ken McKay has argued Mr Johnstone posed no risk to any person and Officer A had no lawful excuse to shoot him. "What you have here is an unarmed offender, in restraints, not posing an immediate threat to anyone," he said.
Mr McKay told the jury corrections officers were trained to make split-second decisions, to always seek a peaceful outcome and to use a firearm as a last resort. "A firearm is the most lethal weapon in the Corrective Services armoury because it has the potential to kill," Mr McKay said.
"You would have no reasonable doubt that the accused intended to inflict really serious bodily harm on the deceased."
The trial continues next week.
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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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Friday, November 04, 2022
The Albanian thinks democracy is under threat
He is too sweeping. He himself is a very popular leader and Scott Morrison must the be the most wishy washy authoritarian ever. So where is the threat to democracy in that?
The USA could be a better case for a breakdown of democracy, with the Left going all out to suppress conservative comment. They have censored one of my blogs, even. But the election underway there at the moment will see the Left lose control of Congress so that will put a stop to any new moves in that direction
Russia, Iran, China and the African and Arab states are a different matter, of course. Democracy has never flourished there
Anthony Albanese says the hammer attack on US Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, is a symptom of the increased polarisation and extremism of political discourse across the West.
“The attack on Mr Pelosi was horrifying – to think that something like that could happen,” the Prime Minister said in an exclusive interview.
Mr Albanese described democracy as “fragile” and said the contest between democracy and authoritarianism was part of the broader strategic competition between democracy and the various different types of authoritarianism around the world.
“Democrats have to stand up for democracy; we can’t duck these issues,” he said.
Mr Albanese was critical of his predecessor, Scott Morrison, for not denouncing former US president Donald Trump for inspiring the riots on Washington’s Capitol Hill on January 6 last year by supporters who believed the presidential election had been stolen.
“Then prime minister Scott Morrison was alone, really, among democratic leaders in not calling it out; in the UK, France, Germany, Canada, it was called out and it should have been,” he said. “The circumstances in the US, with people almost in paramilitary gear, is a concern. That concern has been expressed, quite rightly, by President (Joe) Biden.”
Mr Albanese said he has been worried for years about increasing extremism and intolerance in political exchanges.
“Much of the debate in politics generally has got far worse” during the quarter of a century he had been in parliament, he said.
Mr Albanese has drawn attention to increased polarisation, to people suffering “conflict fatigue”, and to the role of social media.
“The way political discourse is being conducted is far less civil. I think it is of real concern,” he said. “I can look at any time at a social media feed of mine and find something (in response) that is completely over the top.
“You see the rise of social media where people, sometimes anonymously, behind anonymous handles, will say things that they would never say face-to-face. “That then leads to responses and to an escalation that is extraordinary.”
All of this, he said, had a damaging effect on politics itself. “It undermines people’s participation in the process,” Mr Albanese said. “I think for young people considering going into politics, they’ve got to worry about what will be said about them. They’ve also got to worry about what’s on their social media feed from 30 years ago.”
Such entries furnished “gotcha” moments to be used against people, he said. “We’re going to end up with no one who has ever done anything interesting participating.”
The Prime Minister also called for media companies to take a more discriminating attitude to what they allowed to be published and broadcast: “Some of the media commentary is far more aggressive and I think that media operators have a responsibility to be more responsible about that.”
He contended that much of the political debate carried out on social media was far too simplistic: “A lot of these issues don’t have a 24-hour time grab, or don’t have an easy sound-bite grab. Dealing with the energy crisis, for example, is not a simple thing.”
Most of all, he wanted people committed to democracy from all parts of the political spectrum to behave with civility and to defend democratic principles.
“Sophistication in political dialogue is an asset,” he said. “It’s something that we have that differentiates us from the lack of political discourse in Russia, for example.”
Mr Albanese made his remarks as part of the most wide-ranging and forthright interview he has done on foreign policy and national security since coming to office in May.
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A tertiary tragedy
Of the assorted areas of life that have deteriorated over the neoliberal era – energy costs, health, and trust in institutions – has there been a greater erosion in esteem than that of higher education? The state of the Australian academy evokes Oscar Wilde’s refrain that’s all that’s now known is ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’.
This wasn’t always the case. Australia – given our history – has never been an apogee of the intellect. Our Anglo-European inheritance did once furnish us with an estimable academy, but we were one of the first places in the modern world to establish secular universities in the spirit of the Athenian model, and one of the first to offer tertiary education to women.
The establishment of an Australian academy was, as Governor-General Sir Charles Fitzroy remarked upon the founding of The University of Sydney in 1850, a development undertaken for the ‘advancement of…morality, and the promotion of useful knowledge’; an institute erected ‘for the promotion of literature and science’, with entrance not contingent on religion nor social-status, but on ‘the basis of academic merit’, as MP William Wentworth would confirm.
It was a noble intention that would come to fruition as our academy spawned a range of world-renowned figures. Inter alia, the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer and entertainer – and Dame Edna herself – Barry Humphries emerged out of The University of Melbourne. While at The University of Sydney, the Kid from Kogarah, Clive James, and acclaimed art critic Robert Hughes were fellow alumni back in the 1950s. Other notable names, like opera singer Dame Nellie Melba and Nobel-prize-winning author Patrick White, were an integral part of our academic and artistic milieu.
The Australian academy – including the CSIRO – was also the site of inventions of major historical importance. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Australian inventions – like Wi-Fi, the bionic ear, or the airplane ‘black box’ – many of the advances and comforts of modern life wouldn’t be with us.
Yet such developments are a far cry from our current academic state. Alongside a decline in public literacy and numeracy – even among teachers – and a deterioration in school performance, as evident in our PISA results, hardly a day goes by without a major malfeasance at one of our tertiary institutions.
As a recent article in The Australian starkly observed, the Australian ‘education experience is just a sham’ with plagiarism and cheating rife. Alongside sector-wide contract cheating, there are now common examples of students who’ve faked their way through their entire degree.
There is a favoured method involving students bypassing university plagiarism software by employing ghostwriters in poor yet English-proficient places like East Africa. As one ghostwriter remarked: ‘I have some students who I have worked for since their first year and I’ve done all the assignments until they graduate.’ Adding that what really worried him was the ‘the medical students who have never done even one assignment since their first day’.
Like our ‘Most Liveable Cities’ crown, our position in the recently-published Times University Rankings is a partial reflection of our institutes and not a more acute gauge of the whole. Indeed, 60 per cent of these rankings are based on the narrow notions of research and citation, while only 30 per cent is given over to the more fundamental practice of teaching.
On top of this are increases in class sizes and a decline in academic standards, with the latter evident in the fall in the use of final exams and the consequent increase in group assignments. That is, assessments designed to help weaker, overwhelmingly foreign, students slide through on the coattails of their more competent classmates.
Universities are now engaged in a sleight-of-hand in which the content remains the same, yet the onus is taken off the individual. For as commentator – and ex-student – Meshel Laurie noted of her university experience: ‘It’s a neat trick: group assessment (with groups allocated by instructors) in courses overloaded with full-fee-paying, non-English speaking students means the English speakers bear the burden of catching the others up, translating the course content for them, and helping them pass.’
Thus – like our cities’ ostensible liveability – our university results are useful fodder for the marketers; but in reality, our universities are the educational equivalents of fast-food outlets whereby an outwardly attractive appearance belies the utter lack of sustenance found within.
Given such sophistry, what has caused this fall from grace? And why it allowed to persist? The sad fact is that in opposition to the crucial role that is still performed by parts of our universities in training our doctors, lawyers, and engineers – vast swathes of the sector are now nothing more than a warehousing program for young and a ‘degree factory’ run along economic lines for favoured interests.
Of these interests, the biggest beneficiary has been the foreign students themselves – particularly those from the developing world. Our top ten source countries are dominated by nations from what was once known as ‘third-world’ with the top three – China, India, and Nepal – comprising well over 50 per cent of our overall annual intake. It is a fact made more acute by the rapid increase in total numbers, with the amount of international students in Australia almost doubling between 2010-20.
Australia has by far the largest per capita presence of foreign students of any place in the world, at over a quarter of our tertiary cohort. Our universities have come to function not as a place of education, but as a means to a first-world wage and living conditions, and an indirect route to permanent residency: with a sizeable minority of ‘students’ (around 16 per cent) obtaining residency after their studies.
This trend is further reinforced by the vast numbers who don’t obtain residency, but who nevertheless stay on in one form or another: with ‘more international students than ever…remaining in Australia for up to four years on graduate work visas following their studies’. The figure is made worse by the non-negligible number who – both here and in the UK – simply overstay their visas and remain here illegally.
A cynical interpretation could be that these things don’t really matter, as long as such incidents remain isolated and the integrity of the academy remains. Yet unsurprisingly, the entrance of a raft of non-native students into a nation’s tertiary-education sector, often with little knowledge of its history, culture or customs – or even its language of instruction – has not proven salutary.
English language requirements are often forged and pre-university preparatory courses are little substitute for years of immersion in the ideas and idiom of instruction. Some students even regress in their English the longer they are here, rarely leaving their first language enclaves of their home and place of work.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/a-tertiary-tragedy
****************************************Gas price caps a cure worse than the disease
When a good becomes scarcer, the logical response is to reduce its demand and increase its supply.
The “solutions” that are being floated to the recent surge in gas prices would do the exact opposite. Were the price spikes merely transient, the resulting damage might be acceptable. There is, however, no reason to believe they are a passing phenomenon.
It is true that the higher prices reflect the war in Ukraine, with the sanctions on Russia unleashing a worldwide scramble for alternative sources of natural gas.
But the sanctions are not about to be lifted; and even if they were, the supply disruptions will have a lasting impact in making relatively stable producers, such as Australia, more attractive to global buyers.
As those buyers switch from less to more reliable sources, demand for our exports will increase, placing added pressure on domestic gas availability and further raising prices.
The Albanese government will therefore face mounting calls to intervene on consumers’ behalf. The question is whether it can do so in ways that facilitate, rather than impede, Australia’s adjustment to the gas market’s new realities.
The strongest case for intervention is in respect of households. While welfare payments are indexed (and hence will adjust automatically as rising energy prices push up the consumer price index), most residential consumers remain fully exposed to price hikes. The Ukraine war and its consequences for energy bills are hardly events they could have insured themselves against; it can make sense for the government to step in as an insurer of last resort, smoothing the cost of wars, like that of pandemics and natural disasters, over time.
Providing low and middle-income earners with cash transfers that offset the war-related component of the price increases would be the best way of fulfilling that role. As consumers would still face the higher prices, their incentives to economise on energy would be undiminished, particularly if the transfers were clearly time-limited. Overall, the adjustment process would be neither slowed nor blunted.
In contrast, the approach many European countries have adopted of subsidising and/or capping power bills is administratively simpler but – unless the subsidies apply only to a basic level of energy use – has the perverse effect of boosting energy demand, aggravating the underlying problem.
The case for assisting commercial and industrial users is much weaker. Unlike residential consumers, whose incomes are largely fixed in the short term, businesses can raise their prices – and when cost increases affect entire industries, they typically do.
To that extent, their viability is determined through changes in the level and structure of prices. Moreover, because it is the firms that make the greatest use of gas that will have to raise their prices most, allowing the price mechanism to work will shift demand from energy guzzlers to more energy-efficient firms and products, curbing gas consumption and dampening the price spikes.
A hands-off approach consequently has compelling merits. But that is not going to quell the calls for a mandatory code that forces the major gas exporters to supply part of their output to the domestic market at a low, administratively determined, price.
Viewed in historical perspective, those proposals are a throwback to the days before the Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments progressively dismantled the byzantine regulations that kept the prices domestic oil and gas producers received below world levels. Unfortunately, in a far more globalised market, the current proposals could prove even more harmful than their unlamented predecessors.
To begin with, even assuming the schemes were workable, the assistance they provide would be completely untargeted. Far from rewarding firms that had economised on the use of gas, the largest benefits would flow to the firms that had cut back least; as those firms used the subsidies to displace more efficient rivals, overall productivity levels would fall, and living standards with them.
Nor is that effect likely to be trivial: in his classic study of broadly similar schemes, Yale’s Paul MacAvoy found those misallocations meant that each dollar in mandated sales cost the economy two.
Compounding the damage, artificially low, capped, prices would encourage gas to be used instead of other energy sources, whose prices would remain more volatile. Domestic demand for gas would therefore rise, slashing national income both by forcing gas producers to forgo higher-priced export sales and by promoting a use of resources that took no account of relative costs.
And as firms locked in gas-intensive methods of production, repealing the scheme would become ever harder, perpetuating the damage.
Last but not least, retrospectively imposing the proposed mandates on the gas exporters would deter new investment by directly reducing their profits and increasing sovereign risk.
The proponents of these schemes strenuously deny that investment would be chilled. But as far back as 1980-81, assessments by Treasury, the Industries Assistance Commission and the OECD all concluded that the two-price schemes had (in the words of the OECD) helped precipitate the “sharp decline in exploration activity throughout the 1970s”. To believe reinstating them in new form would not undermine the development of desperately needed supplies is as inconsistent with decades of careful analysis as it is with common sense.
As a result, were the proposals adopted, we would find ourselves in the worst of all possible worlds: greater demand, lower supply and pervasive inefficiency.
Despite that, the government may eventually feel obliged to increase the domestic availability of gas, particularly to the major industrial users.
In that event, it should purchase the gas at world prices and then require those users to bid for it in a competitive auction. That would ensure the gas went to the firms that expected to extract the greatest value from its use – and unlike the proposed schemes, whose economic costs are completely opaque, the difference between the amount taxpayers had paid for the gas and the receipts from its sale would transparently indicate the subsidy that was being provided.
In the end, if the current crisis is as deep as it is, and the prospects so alarming, it is because our gas market has been comprehensively distorted by ill-conceived policies.
Governments have stymied gas supply by prohibiting onshore development – while greatly increasing gas demand, both by encouraging the massive deployment of renewables (which, being highly intermittent, had to be matched by quick-start, gas-fuelled capacity) and by accelerating the decommissioning of coal-fired plants.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the lights are now flickering – nor that when they’re on, they are scarcely affordable. With year after year of failed interventions finally coming home to roost, squaring the error would be the greatest folly of all.
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Wishful thinking about wind and solar is going to come up against reality soon ... and there will be a world of pain in the awakening
This time last year one bitcoin was worth more than $98,000. Today it is worth just more than $32,000, a 60 per cent decrease in 12 months. If you were around or were involved with cryptocurrency communities a year ago, it was common to see and hear vainglorious claims about the potential of bitcoin to replace the US dollar, revolutionise the financial industry and save the world.
Much of that rhetoric has quietened after this year’s crash, which has wiped nearly $US2 trillion ($3.14 trillion) off the cryptocurrency market. But the pain felt by everyday retail investors who bought into the hype and risked (and lost) their savings remains real. Go online to Reddit forums and one can read stories posted by real people describing their investment in crypto as the biggest mistake of their life.
Story after story shows ordinary people glimpsing financial freedom, only for it all to vanish in a matter of hours during the crash. At one point during the market collapse this year, the top-voted post in the Reddit cryptocurrency forum was a link to a suicide prevention hotline.
In a recent podcast with psychologist Steven Pinker, respected 98-year-old investor Charlie Munger says the biggest mistakes he has made in his long career were born out of wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is the bias we succumb to when we are unable to separate what we want to be true from what actually is true and what is rational according to the evidence we have in front of us. At its core, wishful thinking is an inability to deal with reality as it is and an unwillingness to update our beliefs when new evidence emerges.
In financial bubbles, the wishful thinking of a single investor multiplies. When we invest in an asset or industry with all of our friends, and we all want the same investment to succeed, wishful thinking dovetails with conformity, creating what I call “wishful groupthink”. When wishful groupthink is infused with politics and ideology, it becomes cult-like, impervious to reason and impervious to new evidence.
The cryptocurrency bubble is one of many examples of wishful groupthink. Another is the overwhelming hype associated with renewable energy technologies, specifically wind and solar. While the scaling up of such projects in Australia is remarkable – and the increasing output of clean energy impressive – much of the ideological rhetoric remains overcooked, overhyped and downright irresponsible.
It is claimed by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and the teal independent MPs that renewable energies will a) reduce emissions and b) make Australia a “renewable energy superpower” while c) creating jobs and d) lowering power bills – all at the same time. It would be nice if this were true. And it is understandable that many people want this to be true. But reality has a way of making itself known, and much of this hype eventually will lead to pain.
The claim that the renewable energy industry will create a surplus of jobs (notwithstanding those jobs that will be lost when coalmines shut) lacks specificity. The assumption seems to be that once coalmines close, miners who may be used to living in one location, with families and community connections, suddenly will want to move from place to place as itinerant construction workers. Of course, this might happen. But it is by no means guaranteed. In reality, this is a risky bet. But our government presents it as a sure thing.
While the claims about job creation seem overhyped, the assertions that solar and wind will lower our electricity prices are far more irresponsible. It is true that renewable energy is cheap on sunny and windy days. But it is also true that on such days wind farms and solar panels deliver excess energy that stresses the electricity grid.
The 2016 blackout in South Australia was found to be caused partially by the shutdown of the state’s wind farms due to volatile weather, in particular excessive wind. So while solar and wind can deliver abundant energy at certain times, and while this abundant energy may be cheap, the mistake is to assume this translates into cheaper energy bills. It doesn’t because when the overall system is stressed, more intervention is needed, and more intervention naturally leads to higher prices. How could it not?
But what about batteries? Batteries are great, but they need to be built before we can use them and almost every country is scrambling to build batteries at the same time. This demand drives up prices. The idea that such costs will never be passed on to the consumer is fanciful.
Many claims about renewables, as with cryptocurrencies, sound grand in theory. String a few abstract concepts together, sprinkle with jargon, marinate in ideology and boom, a claim can sound plausible to the untrained listener. And while it may be true that we need to transition to renewables to meet our net-zero obligations, and that we can scale up solar and wind rapidly with enough government subsidy, this by no means guarantees cheaper power prices for consumers or ensures jobs for those bearing the brunt of the transition.
It would be better if our leaders, and the Energy Minister in particular, were honest with Australians about the pain and hardship our energy transition will bring. Given that the public is overwhelmingly supportive of action on climate change, this would be real leadership, which might be rewarded by the electorate. But concealing the difficulty and engaging in wishful thinking will lead only to more shock and anger down the track when promised outcomes fail to materialise.
As Munger says, to be rational we need to “recognise reality even when you don’t like it – especially when you don’t like it”.
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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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Thursday, November 03, 2022
Childcare sector ramps up calls for higher wages as pre-schools forced to turn kids away
There is an alternative to hitting the taxpayer over this. There are ferocious regulations governing childcare. Reduced regulation would allow more people to enter the field and reduce the numbers required to run a childcare service
More Australian parents could soon be forced to stay at home and not go to work as childcare centres face staff shortages.
Childcare operators fear the situation will get worse next year when the government's new childcare subsidies begin.
Community Early Learning Australia CEO Michele Carnegie said the policy, which she supports, will make more parents want child care and put pressure on an already struggling system.
"If [job] vacancies continue to grow at this rate, we estimate that there will be over 10,000 vacancies by July 2023," she said.
"This [the new childcare subsidies] will see an increase in demand for child care that simply will not be matched by workforce supply."
The government says the subsidies will ease cost of living pressures and help the economy, because cheaper child care will allow an extra 37,000 parents to take on a full-time job.
However Ms Carneige asked how that figure could be reached with the childcare worker shortage.
"The risk is that parents are going to be subjected to really long waiting lists, they're going to be subjected to the vulnerability of not knowing whether or not today's the day when their child is going to be able to access early education and care," she said.
"This is absolutely going to be impacting their ability to fully participate in the workforce."
Goodstart Early Learning, which is Australia's largest provider of early learning and care, has been struggling to recruit staff in recent years.
Its advocacy manager John Cherry said a lack of workers stops parents from being able to hold down full-time jobs.
"Every [staff] vacancy that we have is up to 15 families effected. The flow on economic consequences is profound," he said.
'Leaky bucket'
Narelle Myers is the director of Bermagui Preschool on the far south coast of New South Wales. She said the sector has dramatically changed over the past few years. "I've been there for over 20 years, we have always had long term staff," she said.
"But that all changed in 2020, we were impacted by bushfires, then COVID… also the housing crisis… we have actually had a turnover of about 36 staff in the last two years."
Mr Cherry said his centres were turning away children because they do not have enough workers to care for them.
"This has never happened before in Goodstart's history," he told a parliamentary inquiry earlier this week.
"Over the last two years up to 80 and 100 centres each week are enrolment capped because we can't find enough staff.
"It is mad and crazy for an organisation like ours, desperate to increase our occupancy, that we can't increase our occupancy because we can't find enough staff," he said.
United Workers Union executive director of early education Helen Gibbons said these stories were all too familiar.
"We have a leaky bucket in early education," she said. "We are struggling to attract people to work in the sector, but we're also having people leave daily."
Wages a key problem
Early childhood educators have long citied low pay as a reason for leaving the sector. Ms Gibbons said wages must be addressed to attract and keep more workers. "The elephant in the room is the wages of early educators, they're appallingly low."
Ms Myers said she pays her staff above award rates but still can't compete with other industries.
"We have lost so many staff who have gone to work in the primary school system… a lot of our staff have left to care for clients on the NDIS and they are getting paid over $60 an hour to work with one client," she said. "We can't compete with that."
Ms Gibbons said the government's proposed changes to multi-employer bargaining could be game-changing.
"I think the sector is really embracing the idea of multi-employer bargaining and I've heard a number of providers talk really positively about it," she said.
"The only question mark is, how quickly can we get it done because we want to see educators' wages lift as quickly as possible."
Both Goodstart and Community Early Learning Australia want the government to provide a wage subsidy in the short term.
Ms Carnegie said better pay is needed before the new childcare subsidies are introduced in July to avoid more workforce shortages.
"This will impact on retention of our existing qualified workforce and encourage more people to choose to be part of an incredibly rewarding career in early education," she said.
"An increase in remuneration will need to be funded by government, otherwise the cost will be passed on to parents through increased fees.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-03/child-care-is-cheaper-but-the-workers-arent-there/101608292
*******************************************************The naked authoritarianoism of the pandemic response is unforgiveable
Forgiveness is now officially on the Covid menu. The left-leaning Atlantic magazine in the US has called for a ‘pandemic amnesty’ in which people ‘forgive one another for what we did and said’ during Covid. At issue is the question of school closures and other restrictions and mandates now deemed excessive. The Atlantic is something of a mouthpiece for Joe Biden’s hopeless Democrats, but in this instance the article is actually worth paying attention to. Not because of any particular insights but because of the distinct whiff of fear that oozes out of every other sentence.
‘But the thing is: We didn’t know,’ the author whines (in italics!), claiming ignorance as a defence against implementing erroneous Covid polices because she was operating under conditions of ‘tremendous uncertainty.’ ‘We lacked definitive data.’ ‘It wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.’ ‘Obviously some people intended to mislead…’. As well as this bizarre post-rationalisation: ‘In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck.’
Well, no. In some instances the right people were right for the right reasons. At The Spectator Australia in particular, where a veritable army of writers including Rebecca Weisser, Ramesh Thakur, James Allan, David Flint, David Adler, Rocco Loiacono, Augusto Zimmerman, Alexandra Marshall and many others risked opprobrium and worse for writing for the correct reasons – out of principle, out of conviction and out of sound research.
Indeed, a recent (much-appreciated) letter to the editor of this magazine spelled out the rewards of such an approach;
‘You and your team were like a light shining through the darkness of Covid hysteria. It meant a lot to my wife and I that we were not the only ones saying “what the hell…?” I am a former journalist (what has happened to our profession?) and I look forward to The Spectator Australia every week. The quality of writing is first rate but it is the fearless pursuit of truth which is truly outstanding. Your work is critical for public discourse in Australia as our political class, big business, media, bureaucracy and educational system all seem to have been captured by nonsense and wokeism.’
It is because of ‘uncertainty’ that in a democracy we supposedly seek a plurality of views on difficult issues, and we insist on accountability. By ensuring that as many people as possible get exposed to as many ideas as possible we hopefully avoid compounding bad thinking, and we trust the public – rather than the authorities – to make those final decisions that affect our lives and livelihoods.
It is utterly disingenuous for those who made such catastrophic and reckless mistakes during Covid to now say that ‘they didn’t know’ about such-and-such an outcome because of the ‘fog of uncertainty’ and that the alternative to their authoritarian overreach and draconian measures was ‘millions of dead bodies’. These same individuals deliberately and ruthlessly suppressed anyone who did try to shed some light on potential risks, problems or alternatives to the orthodoxy.
Many people were horrified by the police brutality, by the obfuscation and lies surrounding vaccine mandates, and were repelled by the QR codes and having their kids being forced to stay home or wear worthless masks all day long. But the censoring of them and the humiliation meted out to them was merciless. Dr Jay Battacharya was just one of many brave experts who spoke out early and loudly warning that lockdowns would not only fail but would cause more deaths than they could ever possibly save, not to mention doing untold economic damage.
Yet for speaking out he was demonised and hounded out of the public square. For merely asking questions, the Greens in the Australian Senate smeared and vilified the editor of this magazine in his role at Sky News along with Rita Panahi and Alan Jones. Gideon Rozner at the IPA cut a solitary figure in Melbourne when he did a video pleading for lockdowns to end in Melbourne and was vilified and demonised remorselessly.
So let’s skip the ‘fog of uncertainty’ nonsense. There were plenty of voices warning against nearly all of the policies that were being enacted, often brutally so, but rather than such plurality of opinion being encouraged, those voices were viciously silenced, humiliated, denigrated and demonised. It’s called wilful ignorance and it is no defence under the law.
But get used to hearing this argument that nobody knew any better. That it was all so confusing and we all did our very best. Plenty of people did know better and did try and speak up.
The Atlantic author claims that ‘dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop…. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty…’.
No. Let’s have a royal commission into the abuse of power during Covid, and a Senate inquiry, too, for good measure. To ensure this never happens again.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/covid-amnesty-anyone/
*****************************************************Perfect storm of weather events sees coral bleached at Abrolhos Islands off West Australian coast
Nice to see a coral bleaching event that is NOT being attributed to global warming. Why are similar processes not at work on the other side of Australia? Why are similar processes not at work on both the East and West coasts
In what's been described as an important natural process, thousands of hectares of coral at the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast have been bleached after a combination of weather conditions repeatedly exposed the coral to strong cold winds.
Fisher and pearl farmer Jane Liddon has watched the ocean around her fall over the past few days from her home at Post Office Island in the southern group of the Abrolhos.
She said water levels had fallen to an unusually low level due to a combination of strong winds, a high-pressure system and new moon tides.
"When the coral first came out [of the water], it was bright and beautiful … the second day, the water was even lower and still very windy and cold. By the third day it was completely white," Ms Liddon said.
"The tops were bright white. It was like new islands have formed everywhere here."
Ms Liddon, who has spent her life at the Abrolhos, said in 50-odd years, she had often seen events where a low tide had exposed some stag coral, but this was unusual.
"It's a coincidence of having these weather events all come together that has made it extreme, this time of year you do get low tides in the middle of the day, that's common, but not as low as this event," she said. "The low tide is like a lawnmower on the coral.
"For three days we haven't been able to take our dingy off our jetty because our jetty was not in the water anymore, so we are marooned by low tide, which is very rare."
Murdoch University PhD student Jo Buckee is studying coral mortality events and the role that they play in determining coral cover on shallow reef platforms.
She said a similar coral bleaching event at Abrolhos Island due to low tide in 2018 impacted the 7,000-hectare area of shallow reefs and saw about 30 per cent of the coral die.
However, Ms Buckee said the coral was able to regenerate and recover relatively quickly and had re-established itself back to pre-2018 levels.
"The bulk of the corals that you'll see sticking out of the water are the fast-growing Acropora corals, branching and plating corals, and they are capable of fast growth rates," she said.
"This trimming off of the tops is a natural event, it looks very dramatic but it is a naturally occurring process. "It's important for keeping up with sea level rise, for providing the material for reef and island building."
Ms Buckee said sea level variability along with coral growth and mortality over thousands of years had formed the coral reefs and the Abrolhos Islands themselves and allowed them to remain in position.
"That is the material that you're walking on when you're walking on the islands, it's from previous periods when the sea level was slightly higher than it is now, but also fragments washed up from reef flats that surround the islands," she said.
"In order for the reef to keep up with sea level rise over time, it requires fragments of coral to be produced so that the overall height of the reef is able to change.
"These environments are very dynamic with a mixture of seaweed and coral, a reflection of the Abrolhos's position in the transition zone between tropical and temperate ecosystems."
Ms Buckee said with the diversification of land and water activities at the Abrolhos, leading to year-round visitation, previously unwitnessed coral bleaching events were now attracting interest and attention.
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Climate change could make some Queensland fruit crops unprofitable to grow
Big deal. What does it matter if strawberry growing has to move South into New South Wales or up onto the Darling Downs
Cropping expert Paul Gauthier told ABC Radio Brisbane Breakfast host Craig Zonca that rising temperatures meant the popular fruit could become a thing of the past.
"There's something about strawberries that if you reach a temperature above 26 degrees Celsius, they stop flowering, and that's kind of why in Queensland we tend to grow them in the winter," he said.
"And what we have seen when we project it to the future, by 2050 the temperature will increase by 3 degrees, maybe 4 degrees.
"And the problem is that the season is going to be shorter and shorter, and because strawberries take a long time to develop, to get the fruits, it's possible that we may not get strawberries in Queensland anymore."
It is one example of many crops — including apples and cherries — that could become unprofitable to grow in Queensland as temperatures continue to warm.
"We've seen that all over the place. In the US it's a major problem because most of the food is grown in California and we've seen the temperature growing, growing very high," Mr Gauthier said.
"And the other issue is drought — drought is a big problem and water scarcity has been a problem for a long time in Australia."
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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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Wednesday, November 02, 2022
Politics in sport is destructive
Once upon a time, sport was an international language. A child kicking a soccer ball in Argentina could communicate in the same terms as an Italian or Swedish junior – even one from Japan.
The language is one of sport: the love of the game. The universal code. The language applies to all religions, all people, all sports.
The language speaks of the challenge. The goal. The team unity. The individual strength. The soaring heights of victory. The lows of defeat. The hope. The possibilities. The dreams. The fans.
It is the international language where no words are needed to understand everything.
Sport raises us up.
But introduce politics, and the splendour fades. How have we allowed it to happen? Why have we allowed it?
Partisan politics and sport do not mix. Ideological politics and sport divide. Politics is the antithesis to sport.
The easiest example of that came to us with the Essendon Football Club saga. It appointed a CEO one day, and by the next, he was driven to resign. Andrew Thorburn’s Christianity was too much for the politically ‘correct’, the social elites who get to decide who and what is good.
It is a simple formula: someone is good if they agree with the virtue signallers and their beliefs – someone is bad if they disagree.
The tribe has spoken at Essendon. The Premier, Daniel Andrews, was part of that tribe, continuing his talent to represent some, but not all. When it comes to believers, Daniel Andrews is a religion of his own.
But the Essendon matter is wholly unsurprising: we had it coming. Supported by Woke boardrooms, the AFL has become both Creator and Guardian Angel of political intrusion and interference in sport.
Netball Australia and Cricket Australia have caught the bug. Their elite athletes cough and splutter with business-class hypocrisy.
In Netball Australia’s case, Gina Rinehart had every right to call an end to her $15 million gift. There are others who will respect her company’s brand, its bankrolling of the nation, job creation, and its extraordinary effort to fund the global dreams of our nation’s best young athletes including Olympic swimmers and rowers.
Tennis champion and Greatest Of All Time, Margaret Court, understands the dangers of expressing private thoughts publicly, thoughts deemed politically incorrect.
Who needs to watch a thrilling game of tennis when we now clap and revere according to how they vote in a referendum? Perhaps a quiet note to the marketing department: tickets might be harder to sell.
Diversity officers abound. Politically correct deeds flourish.
For the AFL, there was once a time when people simply went to watch the sport: a magnificent game with plenty enough happening not to require political sideshows or overtones.
But these days, there seems barely a round that isn’t dedicated to an approved cause.
There is nothing wrong with either the Pride or Indigenous rounds for example, but why pull them out of the hat that’s deep with a thousand good causes? Where is the round for CFA volunteers? Or the round for those who couldn’t attend funerals during lockdown? Or a weekend dedicated to maths and science teachers? Or for people with awful kitchens? For freedom of speech?
There are rounds dedicated to promoting health awareness – the most prominent being Motor Neurone Disease and Breast Cancer. Great causes each and deserving of attention and support.
These are the good things sport enables: the sentiments that unite and do not divide. Non-political.
But add politics, and all of a sudden, it’s not so much fun anymore.
The average Australian can sniff hypocrisy before they see it. They smelled it over Essendon’s Thorburn meltdown, the man who, as NAB Group Chief Executive Officer, introduced the Pride Round to the AFL in March 2015 to celebrate ‘…diversity and the LGBTQ+ community’.
No one has riled about that, or the NAB’s support of Climate Change legislation or sustainability awareness. It is only Thorburn’s religious associations that were trapped in the social jury’s snare.
But where were Premier Andrews’ words – his holier-than-thou indignation – for AFLW player and Muslim, Haneen Zreika, over her withdrawal from the round eight Pride match for religious reasons, and not for the first time? Crickets. Or as Richard Flanagan might put it, the sound of one hand clapping.
The Pride Round is political. The Australians I know don’t particularly care what someone’s sexuality is. They care that the person is happy and healthy. But by singling out the rainbow warriors, they are signalling a demarcation. Creating categories, division.
Similarly, why single out the Indigenous Round, when players on the field come from many corners and cultures of the world? Are the Italian or Irish players less suitable to celebrate? Every player has a history, a place, a culture. Celebrate them all by not singling one out. That’s real unity. That’s sport.
Sport is losing its ability to speak all languages.
I yearn for the days where we just cheer on outstanding athletes without wondering what they think in private.
Sport is great enough on its own. It doesn’t need politics.
But maybe politics needs sport.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/the-tribe-has-spoken/ ?
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Unreasonable war on anti-vaxxers
For the past two and a half years, Jack the Insider (Peter Hoysted), through his columns in the Australian, has waged a war on ‘anti-vaxxers’. Of course, he conveniently lumps into that category anyone who dared to point out the fact that the Covid vaccines, far from being the panacea he believes them to be, actually do very little, even when it comes to personal protection.
On October 27, he wrote a piece which so stood out for its lack of rigour that it has to be called out.
He started off with this statement:
When Covid-19 vaccines first became available in the summer of 2021, I argued that this was the end game for anti-vaxxers. The science and the data that followed would be irrefutable. I was right about the data. But I was wrong to think this shameless movement would put its cue in the rack.
Let’s leave aside the emotion about this ‘shameless movement’, who he says ‘are joined by a larger group of disaffected people who don’t read enough and listen too often’. Jack the Insider is the one who is not right about the data because he doesn’t read enough or listen properly.
He cites in his piece a string of US government data that supports the lie that Covid became ‘a pandemic of the unvaccinated’. Jack is a stickler. He even cites a study of prisoners (people who, unlike the vast majority of us, are confined and cannot move out and about in society as they please) to demonstrate ‘what we have now overwhelmingly shows that unvaccinated individuals are more infectious and for longer’.
Unlike Jack, let’s be honest and do the job properly.
If Jack wanted to do his job properly, he could have done far worse than read regular contributor to these pages and The Australian, Ramesh Thakur’s column in the latter on August 20 this year, and he would realise to his argument there is a very strong counter-argument, published by none other than NSW Health:
The Covid report from NSW Health for the week of July 10-16 says: “The minority of the overall population who have not been vaccinated are significantly over-represented among patients in hospitals and ICUs with Covid-19.” Just two pages later the same report gives the number of unvaccinated people admitted to hospital and intensive care units as zero. The sentence is repeated verbatim in the latest weekly report for July 31-August 6, with the number of unvaccinated people admitted to hospital at zero and to ICU just one.
Even by the standards of public health authorities across the world gaslighting the people to nudge them into docile – and often performative – compliance with official edicts, this level of internal contradiction of narrative with data is breathtaking.
Not a single Covid death under 40 was reported in the week to August 6. The total number of boosted people who died with Covid was 71.3 per cent of the 1,281 Covid deaths whose vaccination status was known, slightly above the “more than 68 per cent” of eligible people who have been boosted.
Thus the effectiveness of boosters in preventing death lasts only a short time.
People who have received two to four doses made up over 95 per cent of the over-16s and 98.1, 95.8, and 82.6 per cent of Covid hospital admissions, ICU admissions and deaths, respectively.
In the 11 weeks from May 22 to August 6, the unvaccinated comprised 0.2, 1.8 and 13.1 per cent of all NSW Covid-related hospital admissions, ICU admissions and deaths, respectively.
The double vaccinated and boosted made up 98.1, 95.4 and 85 per cent of the same respective totals. Just the boosted added up to 73.3, 73.4 and 69.9 per cent.
We are no longer in the realm of a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Despite major protective benefits, Covid vaccines are undeniably leaky. Their real-world effectiveness lasts a disappointingly short time.
Strike one.
Then our Jack goes on a tirade against Rob Roos, whitewashing the anger over Pfizer executive Janine Small’s admission that there was never any testing done to demonstrate that the jab prevented transmission because ‘we had to move at the speed of science’. Jack dismisses the outrage at this as ‘shrieking’, and refers to, among other things, ‘peer-reviewed modelling’ (which he doesn’t reference) that suggested we couldn’t wait the usual five to ten years to produce a safe vaccine because ‘we would have to wear 14 million excess deaths a year if we waited’.
As we knew reasonably early in the piece, the modelling could never be trusted. Here are the undisputed facts about Covid from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare from November 2021, published in these pages. The average lifespan of an Australian is 82.6 years. The average age of Covid fatalities in Australia is 85. Since the pandemic began, the Covid fatality rate for Australians under 50 is four in 12,000. Sixty-six per cent of Covid deaths have been in nursing homes. Seventy-three per cent of Covid deaths involved pre-existing chronic health conditions and a higher number involved non-chronic but somewhat serious health complications. It would be difficult, therefore, to justify discrimination on the basis of vaccine status, especially if one has no pre-existing conditions, or is not in a vulnerable category.
Strike two.
Mr Hoysted, continuing his crusade against the ‘shrieking’ states that we always knew the vaccines would never prevent transmission – noting an FDA study – and that this was taken over by ‘political hyperbole’ about ‘protecting grandma’. He even cites an Israeli peer-reviewed study which showed ‘the ability of the vaccine to prevent transmission waned with time and with the advent of the Delta variant’. Well, I, among many other in this publication and elsewhere, were saying that as far back as April 2021. To then, as our Jack does, gloss over the way politicians and health bureaucrats promised to make lives miserable for people on the basis that they saw no point in getting a jab because not only did it not prevent transmission, but that, based on their own age and health circumstances, they believed it wasn’t necessary, is, in the view of this correspondent, inexcusable.
However, our Jack doesn’t give up. He uses the same study to insist that those who were unvaccinated for Covid would be more infectious and infectious for longer. As we know, that has been shown to be wrong. Remember when two doses were enough, then three, now four? Maybe that is why Denmark halted its Covid vaccine program back in April. Even before then, Lancet published this article noting the futility of vaccine mandates in the face of transmissibility (I’ll refer to it again below).
But our Jack still insists that he is right and has ‘indisputable evidence’ to prove it. He writes:
In the Oxford Academic Open Forum on Infectious Diseases, three infectious diseases doctors, two from the US and one from Scotland, examined three randomised trials and found that “receipt of the vaccine was associated with a 70 per cent reduction in all SARS-CoV-2 infections 21 days after the first dose and 85 per cent reduction seven days after the second dose. A similar cohort study of 3,975 health care workers, first responders, and other frontline workers in the United States who were tested weekly found a 91 per cend reduction in infection risk after full vaccination by an mRNA vaccine and an 81 per cent reduction after partial vaccination.”
Jack goes on:
While vaccine mandates may have been excessively applied across a range of industries (I never quite understood why they were imposed on footballers or construction workers), that analysis provides hard evidence as to why vaccine mandates continue to be necessary for frontline health workers, emergency response workers and even more obviously, for those working in aged care.
Well, that Lancet study I cited above directly contradicts this assertion, when it found that triple vaccinated Israeli doctors and nurses were getting Covid and passing it on to their patients: ‘[T]he demonstration of Covid-19 breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers (HCW) in Israel, who in turn may transmit this infection to their patients, requires a reassessment of compulsory vaccination policies leading to the job dismissal of unvaccinated HCW in the USA,’ it argued.
So much for ‘hard evidence’. Strike three.
A suggestion for our Jack. Since he has all the ‘hard evidence’ that the Covid vaccine is safe and effective, he might want to ask his ALP friends in the federal government why it is that the Budget, handed down last week, is warning that Covid vaccine injury payouts could reach $77 million. He might want to investigate why the CDC, which he places so much faith in, fought tooth and nail to prevent this data from being released.
Maybe then our Jack might put his cue in the rack.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/jack-the-insider-is-out-of-bounds/
****************************************************Engineering disaster: Remaking the power grid to fail
Europe may be in the midst of a power crisis and memories of the chaos on the Australian grid in June still fresh, but that has not stopped billionaire activist Mike Cannon-Brookes and the state governments of Queensland and Victoria sowing the seeds of a major power disaster.
These players are engineering the closure of the bulk of the reliable coal-fired power supply of the eastern half of the continent within 13 years with nothing but intermittent renewable energy projects, most of which have yet to be built, to replace them.
To add to the air of fantasy which now pervades any decision involving energy in Australia, the Queensland and Victorian governments acknowledged that there has to be some means of storing energy for the changes to work, but then made proposals that were either completely inadequate (Queensland) or contained no details (Victoria).
To make matters worse the entire effort, including the many billions to be spent trying to replace coal power plants with wind and solar generators will have no benefit for Australia. As is widely known (except by Australian activists) few countries are paying much attention to their obligations under the Paris Agreement. Even those countries that have proved willing to undertake the major pain required to make real cuts in emissions (the UK and Germany) have backtracked in the past few months, thanks to the power crisis.
That means the sole result of all the money and effort spent on decarbonising the grid will be to make it more erratic and unreliable, and push power prices through the roof.
As was known before the announcements in September and October AGL’s 1.8-gigawatt Liddell power station in NSW will close in 2023, and its 2.6-gigawatt Bayswater plant will cease operations between 2030 and 2033. In addition, Origin Energy will shut the 2.8-gigawatt Eraring coal-fired power station in 2025, and Victoria’s Yallourn power station (1.48 GW, brown coal) is scheduled to close in 2028.
After a sustained campaign by Cannon-Brookes, who became AGL’s largest shareholder with the express purpose of getting the energy giant to accelerate closure of its coal plants, AGL has also announced they will shut the shut the 2.2-gigawatt Loy Yang A power station in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley in 2035, a decade earlier than planned.
At about the same time as the AGL announcement, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declared that her government would end the use of coal power in the state by 2035. There are eight coal-fired plants in the state, the newest of which is the 30-year-old 1.4-gigawatt Tarong station, which will now close more than a decade ahead of schedule.
Then in October, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews declared that if he is re-elected in the looming state election he will introduce tough new emission targets that are likely to end coal-powered electricity generation in the state by 2035.
To replace this gaping hole in generating capacity, the Palaszczuk government has announced that it will develop a $62 billion renewable energy ‘super grid’ which includes a new transmission line and two new pumped-hydro projects. About half of that investment is expected to be public money, including $9 billion from the state government and (hopefully) the rest from the federal government.
The plan commits to two new pumped-hydro power stations. The Borumba project, near Gympie, in south-east Queensland and the Pioneer-Burdekin project near Mackay. Borumba is expected to store the equivalent of 48 GWh but the only figure available for the Pioneer-Burdekin is the output figure of 7 GW (a facility which generates 7 GW for seven hours produces 49 GWh – commentators, activists and even government press releases routinely confuse GW and GWh).
Assuming the combined total storage will add up to 100 GWh, however, it is still equivalent to perhaps ten hours worth of operation by the coal plants the Palaszczuk government wants to close down. The Snowy Hydro 2.0 project, which is proving a ridiculously expensive white elephant, may add another 300 GWh, but these are all still inadequate amounts especially given the growing evidence of a weather phenomenon known as a wind drought.
As previously noted in this publication (‘Transition loses traction’, 9 July, 2022) there is evidence that wind can die across the whole of the National Energy Market (the east coast grid) for up to 33 hours – as far as anyone knows – meaning that it will require at least twice the amount of storage now either being built or in proposal documents to get through a wind drought period, and ideally several times that. Proper grid planning should also take into account major wind droughts occurring during periods of cloudy days and during rain droughts where there will not be much fresh water to fill the pumped-storage facilities.
In October, the Victorian government announced that it would revive the old State Electricity Commission but this time as a renewable energy agency with $1 billion to develop 4.5 GW worth of renewable energy projects. In late September the Victorian government had also announced that it would increase its renewable energy storage capacity target ‘to 6.3GW by 2035’, although it’s not clear from the announcement or any of the breathless media stories generated by it just how this target will be achieved, or even what it means. Does the Victorian government mean gigawatts or gigawatt hours? If it means gigawatt hours, it does not help very much. Three battery projects in various stages of development amounting to about one GWh are mentioned, and the state government is tipping in $167 million of taxpayer money, although it is not clear what the money is to be spent on. Otherwise, the announcement seems to be a statement of intentions.
While governments make muddled announcements about what they may be going to do, the power grid with its collection of aging fossil-fuel plants continues to stagger along somehow, and probably will until the Liddell plant ceases operation in 2023.
However, the June crisis in the power grid was in part due to the simultaneous failure of major coal-fired units. As the coal power stations are aging it is not surprising that they are off the grid, for one reason or another, more often. The forced closures will make such crises more likely and more frequent.
Instead of acknowledging this point, commentators descend into fantasy about how more renewables and extensive use of hydrogen will fix the problem. It seems that consumers must wait until they are left in the dark in freezing homes for extended periods until policy makers finally concede that renewables might not be the answer to everything.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/engineering-disaster/
******************************************************Victoria’s infrastructure con job
I like to think I’m pretty good at spotting a con, but not always. Just days before the Federal election Labor’s Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Catherine King, made what the media called a ‘$4 billion power play’.
She announced that an elected Albanese government would keep the $4 billion the Liberals had set aside for the East West Link. Very reasonably, she said that money would be used towards projects backed by the state government of the day – Labor or Liberal.
This is wonderful, I thought. I wrote to Minister King on her very first day in the job, thanking her for her bipartisanship and seeking an opportunity to meet, so we could work together.
Turns out it was a con. On just her second day as Minister, King ripped away that $4 billion in infrastructure funding from Victoria. Perhaps naively, I didn’t see it coming. I also didn’t see the $900 million of other Victorian road and rail cuts by the new federal government.
Instead, through the budget Labor is committing $2.2 billion towards the Andrews government’s pet project: the Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) – a massive rail tunnel through Melbourne’s middle suburbs. Stripped of the obvious political overlay (helping your Labor mates down here in Victoria) this was an odd decision.
Mr Albanese did some good things when he was Kevin Rudd’s Infrastructure Minister. One of the best was setting up Infrastructure Australia (IA). The idea was to take the politics out of infrastructure spending by appointing an independent, expert group to scrutinise proposals and their business cases.
Sounds good. So, what does IA have to say about the business case for the SRL? In short, nothing. That’s because even though the project was announced on Daniel Andrews’ Facebook page – naturally – four years ago, his government has never asked IA to carry out an assessment of the business case.
Curious. Well, not really. Other experts bodies have scrutinised the SRL and what they’ve found isn’t pretty.
Firstly, the independent, apolitical Parliamentary Budget Office popped the bonnet. It found that the loop – well, just the first two thirds actually – will cost $125 billion to construct, a lazy $75 billion more than Andrews said the whole loop would cost. Whoops.
At a time when Victoria has more debt that New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania combined, and with interest rates rising further still, such reckless spending would be mad as a bag of bees.
Then Victoria’s Auditor General had a look as well. He found that the project will be staggeringly expensive and that, as a result, its Benefit-Cost Ratio is 51. That means the Victorian taxpayers’ return on investment will be 50 cents in the dollar – a catastrophic rate.
Given it is crystal clear the SRL doesn’t stack up, it’s odd that the federal government wants to sink over $2 billion into it – to say the least, all the while cutting $1 billion from other Victorian infrastructure projects.
But, for the SRL, that’s where the money will stop. Andrews and co. want a further $10 billion from the Feds. Yet Minister King – quite sensibly this time – has said she’ll only cough up more if Infrastructure Australia gives its seal of approval. Unless Albanese stacks out the board of IA (always a possibility, I suppose) this is never going to happen.
As a result, Victoria’s budget has a new $10 billion black hole. We’ve become rather desensitised to waste here in Victoria. The Andrews Labor government has already wasted over $30 billion of taxpayers’ money on blowouts on major projects.
That’s over $20,000 for every Victoria family; more when you factor in the, rapidly rising, interest bill. That will look like small beer if Andrews wins next month’s election and starts constructing the SRL.
It’s interesting – over the last decade or so we’ve all started to care much less about debt and budget deficits. The recession of the 1990s and double-digit interest rates are a distant memory. Australia sailed through the Global Financial Crisis in much better shape than comparable countries, and many economists confidently predicted that the good times would just roll on.
But things have changed. Interest rates are rising and Victoria’s debt is so big, so unsustainable, that many people are rightly starting to worry. In my role as Shadow Minister for Youth I speak with groups of young people all the time.
I often hear about the need to address climate change and deliver better mental health support. But more than anything I hear about the state of the economy, the budget, and what this means for their futures.
They haven’t been conned. And nor should we be.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/victorias-infrastructure-con-job/
************************************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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Tuesday, November 01, 2022
Why do few people have positive views of Aborigines?
Noel Pearson says that few do and he is undoubtedly right. Helen Trinca below reinforces that point and tries to explain it. Her explnation is however a work of desperation. She mimics American blacks in saying it is all due to the past -- to the bad treatment of their ancestors. She appears unaware that NOBODY has had ancestors as badly treated as the Jews -- 4,000 years of persecution! -- and yet present-day Jews flourish mightily. Blaming the past is rubbish. It is the present that counts.
Psychological research has repeatedly shown that impressions we have of others are highly malleable. We are strongly influenced by what we have most recently seen. It even has a name: "The recency effect". Our views rapidly move towards what we ourseves have recently experienced. Expectations and stereotypes rapidly give way to actual experience. Some of the academic research findings to that effect is summarized here and here
So whatever view we have of Aborigines will be strongly founded in our experience of them. And we DO have some experiences of them, even in the cities. And if I can summarize that experiences briefly: We see them mainly as drunks and beggars and layabouts. We do not like WHITE drunks and beggars and layabouts so there is no likelihood that we would like that in blacks.
So why are so many blacks like that? No mystery. They are the victims of their separate development (Yes. I know of another usage of that phrase). For 60,000 years, they have evolved in geographical isolation as superb hunter gatherers and have some quite eeries abilities in consequence of that. But they have NOT evolved the abilities that allow them to fit in easily with the differently evolved people of the Eurasian continent. They are like fish out of water in a modern Western society. Many thousands of years of fierce competition among the many people of Eurasia has enforced an adaptive evolution in them that very few Aborigines can easily co-exist with. They don't "fit in".
Just a final and relatively minor point: Trinca mentions the hard time that football fans gave Aboriginal player Adam Goodes and blames it on racial prejudice. She omits much in that. See here and here
Noel Pearson opened a new front in the story of Indigenous Australia when he used his first ABC Radio National Boyer Lecture to talk about the unpopularity of First Nations people.
It was a shocking statement that came early in Pearson’s impressive opener to the four-lecture series delivered first on television on October 27 and repeated on radio on Sunday, and it’s worth quoting at length
“We are a much unloved people,” Pearson said. “We are perhaps the ethnic group Australians feel least connected to. We are not popular and we are not personally known to many Australians. Few have met us and a small minority count us as friends. And despite never having met any of us and knowing very little about us other than what is in the media and what WEH Stanner, whose 1968 Boyer Lectures loom large over my lectures, called ‘folklore’ about us, Australians hold and express strong views about us, the great proportion of which is negative and unfriendly.
“It has ever been thus. Worse in the past but still true today. If success in the forthcoming referendum is predicated on our popularity as a people, then it is doubtful we will succeed. It does not and will not take much to mobilise antipathy against Aboriginal people and to conjure the worst imaginings about us and the recognition we seek. For those who wish to oppose our recognition it will be like shooting fish in a barrel. An inane thing to do – but easy. A heartless thing to do – but easy.”
Many non-Indigenous Australians would have felt a stab of recognition on hearing those words but, worse still, despair for the future. Pearson was calling it as it is, not in anger but with a profoundly sad pragmatism that reminds us that he is not just good at rhetoric, he’s also a good thinker.
Pearson is urging us to go beyond the truth that racism has in various ways helped shape many views of Indigenous people to a more subtle but perhaps more damaging truth – that lack of familiarity and friendship with First Peoples could determine votes in the referendum on the advisory body, the voice to parliament.
The 2022 Boyer lecturer drew on the horrible sledging of former AFL great Adam Goodes to make his point. What happened to the footballer reminded Pearson of the trouble people had with Indigenous Australians, trouble that could readily be called racism and “certainly racism is much to do with it, but the reality is not that simple”.
“Unlike same-sex marriage there is not the requisite empathy of love to break through the prejudice, contempt and, yes, violence of the past. Australians simply do not have Aboriginal people within their circles of family and friendship with whom they can share fellow feeling.” It does not detract from the truth of Pearson’s comments to see this as an inspired tactic – sidelining the unhelpful argument about what is or is not racially motivated behaviour and staking out far less threatening ground for a conversation with opponents of the voice. Yet it has rarely, if ever, been articulated.
Most non-Indigenous Australians – even those committed to the voice and a treaty, those who value the deep culture of Aboriginal people; those who want in every way to atone for the wrongs of the past – know Pearson is right when he says Aboriginal people are simply not in the friendship and family groups of the overwhelming number of Australians.
It is difficult for many non-Indigenous Australians to even meet an Aboriginal person, given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comprise less than 4 per cent of the population. Many Australians will never see an Indigenous Australian other than in a media photograph or on television. Views are formed through news stories or cultural products such as paintings, dance, literature, film and music or exhibitions or books. There’s sport of course, the great Australian equaliser, which allows for largely positive recognition – except in cases such as that of Goodes. In country areas, First Nations people are more visible, but again class, economic differences and the social problems in many Indigenous communities mean the distances between the groups can be even more pronounced. The reality is unless you work in the arts, universities, the public service, or you are an elite sports person, you may have little chance of finding an Indigenous friend. It’s very different when it comes to homosexual people, for example.
A colleague reminds me that more than a decade ago we were at an election event at Rooty Hill in outer suburban Sydney when a woman got to her feet and asked Julia Gillard, the prime minister at the time, why she could not marry her same-sex partner. The crowd erupted with clapping and one knew then the experience of many families was dramatically shifting attitudes. Legislating for same-sex marriage is not the same as amending the Constitution, but Pearson’s point is well made.
Time, then, to come to terms with the reasons behind this “enduring antipathy against my people” – in short, that the colonial project required the first settlers to deny the rights of Aboriginal people to succeed. There are other reasons why Indigenous Australians may not be popular, but terra nullius underpins them all. That original denial and its tragic consequences are well documented yet still so little understood by many Australians offered little or inadequate history across so many decades. Australians need to accept and absorb this if we are to have any chance of exercising good judgment in the forthcoming referendum.
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Greenie fanaticism in the schools is hurting kids
The Age of Anxiety has dawned. While this may be easy to dismiss as a natural corollary of the recent pandemic, when one looks a little closer, it’s not hard to see where this phenomenon manifested and where it is sustained.
In 2021, The Lancet published a global survey of responses from 10,000 young people, aged 16–25 years from Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and America.
The survey found that 84 per cent of young people aged between 16-25 were ‘moderately to extremely worried’ about climate change. More than 50 per cent of respondents reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.
Over 75 per cent said that they think the future is ‘frightening’. Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government response and associated feelings of betrayal.
Yet despite decades of technological and medical advances and the raising of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, the natural question that arises is, where did this anxiety come from?
You need look no further than our education system and what is being taught to students of all ages on a daily basis.
For years the University of Sydney’s Environment Institute (SEI) has been at the forefront of Woke ideology and radical climate activism. According to the SEI’s worldview, radical climate activism is an antidote to falling education standards and eco-related mental health problems.
Ultimately, activism-driven anxiety is a product of the left-wing vanity project to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050.
It’s a dream being fuelled by Australia’s oldest and most prestigious sandstone university and its treatment of the climate debate.
Who cares about numeracy and literacy? We have a global apocalypse on our hands! This is the mantra repeated by the Greta Thunbergs of the world and supported by SEI research.
The upshot: schools should be replaced with climate activism camps.
According to SEI Postdoctoral Fellow Blanche Verlie and Melbourne University’s Alicia Flynn, ‘ecocidal global socio-economic systems’ can be blamed for most problems in the modern world.
Verlie and Flynn ask, ‘What if education is not the solution, but part of the problem?’
They question whether education has ‘young people’s best interests at heart’ and claim schools constrain ‘cultural and political agency and effect’.
‘The transformative response is to reorient educational structures, practices, and relations towards those that sustain life on Earth. It is time for education to reckon with its role in the climate crisis and its entanglement within colonial-capitalist extractivism.’
In other words, the likes of Verlie and Flynn believe schools should be turned into centres where future social justice warriors can be trained the transform the ‘ecocidal’ structures from within.
Verlie and Flynn also remain stubbornly attached to the notion that there is ‘insufficient climate change education in schools’.
Perhaps they have not read the latest version of the National Curriculum, which is liberally littered with environmental content, thanks to the presence of ideologically driven cross-curriculum priorities like ‘sustainability’.
The criticism doesn’t just stop at schools, it extends to universities as well.
‘Our ecocidal global socio-economic systems (namely colonial-capitalism) are largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs,’ Verlie and Flynn claim. ‘The transformative response is to reorient educational structures, practices, and relations towards those that sustain life on Earth.’
Well then, out with the old and in with the new!
Such extreme rejection of the Western intellectual tradition also undermines the SEI’s role as a department of research, but we cannot be surprised. After all, it was the University of Sydney that promoted the Unlearn campaign encouraging students to ‘demolish social norms and rebuild new ones in their place’.
To promote research and innovation, the University of Sydney said that preconceived ideas about ‘truth’, ‘love’, ‘medicine’, and ‘criminal’ must be questioned. Calling for students to ‘unlearn’ basic fundamental ideas of knowledge will leave young and impressionable Australians unaware of the basic principles which built our way of knowing and way of life.
Similarly, advising students – terrified that the end of the world is nigh – to attend climate rallies, is a recipe for disaster.
More activism is the last thing that Australian children need at school right now. The most recent report from the OECD Program for International Student Assessment confirmed that Australia has continued its 20-year decline in education standards.
Throwing education out the window entirely and replacing it with more climate activism is not the answer. Neither is it the answer to the growing mental health crisis among younger generations.
The educated SEI elite, living in a world of ideas, rather than reality, must start to present real solutions to the problems they identify.
Obliterating the entire ‘ecocidal’ system which includes Western literature, culture, education, morals, values, institutions – to make way for a green new world – is a fine example of Einstein’s observation of infinite ‘human stupidity’, not progress.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-kids-arent-alright-2/ ?
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Is Mt Warning closure anything other than reverse racism?
Another small slice of Australia was roped off the other day, reserved for the enjoyment of a few and off-limits to the community at large.
It occurred just across the border in the Tweed Valley with the permanent closure of the National Parks and Wildlife Service’s Mt Warning hiking trail following a claim by a group of Indigenous people that it was not “culturally appropriate” for non-Indigenous Australians to walk the trail or climb the mountain.
World heritage-listed Mt Warning is the first point in Australia to catch the day’s sunrise and has been popular with hikers for decades.
But according to the self-named Indigenous Wollumbin Consultative Group, “public access is not culturally appropriate or culturally safe”.
“Wollumbin should not be a recreational space for the public to visit or use for tourism, including use of the image of Wollumbin for advertising purposes,” it declared, demanding the immediate closure of the site.
Predictably, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, which has been denying rumours of a proposed closure for the past year, rolled over and shut the gates.
No case had to be made. Just a demand by an unelected body to lock out all non-Indigenous people.
Local Indigenous leader Fiona Noble has questioned the processes of the WCG and the lack of consultation and says that “false naming and false stories” are being used to ban access to the region’s natural attractions.
Local businesswoman Peggy Lemaire says up to 90 per cent of the area’s national parks could not be accessed and that locals had rarely been informed in advance of a series of arbitrary site closures over the past three years.
Meanwhile, over on North Stradbroke Island, Queensland Parks and Wildlife has stipulated that part of a popular camping and fishing spot about 10km south of Dunwich be reserved for the exclusive use of local Indigenous people.
QPWS has said that the new rules provided “an opportunity for all Queenslanders, including the Quandamooka People, to immerse themselves in this unique natural and cultural setting.” It is difficult to see how it is an opportunity for “all Queenslanders” when the site is divided along racial lines.
Were a caravan or camping park operator to divide their property into White and Non-White sections, there would be justifiable outrage.
But when the reverse occurs, everyone looks the other way.
Some, including former local federal MP Andrew Laming, have called the move reverse racism. “If we’re really serious about reconciliation, why wouldn’t you share the site and camp together?” he asks.
In Victoria, the trend is the same as large areas of national parkland popular with hikers and rock climbers are gradually been closed to non-Indigenous people on cultural grounds.
In Queensland, it’s only a matter of time before Mt Tibrogargan, just north of Brisbane in the Glass House Mountains National Park, is closed to anyone who can’t claim Aboriginal heritage and it would naive to think that what is happening on North Stradbroke Island will not spread to Moreton Island and Fraser Island.
No one is in the business of denying the embrace and celebration of culture but it’s a strange thing when a particular group declares that the only way it can preserve its culture is by erecting racial borders.
The debate surrounding the referendum seeking approval or disapproval of the establishment of an Indigenous-only voice to parliament is gathering momentum.
If approved, it seems that it will only add to the Them and Us attitude that is becoming pervasive and which creates division while preaching inclusion.
The creation of a publicly funded body elected only by non-Indigenous voters in 2022 is unthinkable, yet we are told by some that the reverse, creating two classes of Australians, would be a good outcome.
Many years ago, as a callow youth wandering wide-eyed around the US on my first trip overseas, I walked into a cafe in the main street of a town in Mississippi. The black American man behind the cafe counter took one look at me and said: “Boy, ya’all got y’self in the wrong place.”
He was right. I’d unknowingly walked into the Blacks Only eatery. The Whites Only one was a little further down the street, past the Whites Only park bench and the Whites Only water fountain.
I remember thinking back then that you would never see Australia allow divisions to be put in place which were decided by race.
How wrong I was.
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‘Cheaper childcare’ to get more Qld mums, dads back to work
More than 7000 Queenslanders will be able to get back into workforce, amid a labour shortage, off the back of Labor’s childcare reforms, the federal Treasurer claims
Positive predictions by politicians are usually to be viewed skeptically and this one is no exception. Cheaper care will mean more demand and, under existing regulations, that will require more staff to be hired. So the new measures will both expand and reduce the available workforce. Which number will be greatest? Who knows?
More than 7000 Queenslanders will be able to get back into workforce, amid a labour shortage, off the back of Labor’s childcare reforms according to new data from Treasury.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers seized on that data as he began his post-budget sales pitch.
He started a budget roadshow in Brisbane on Monday, as he prepared to hit five cities in four days.
Dr Chalmers is seeking to sell a “family-friendly budget”, after the nation’s finances last week revealed gloomy economic figures and rising inflation preventing the Albanese government from using cash handouts to ease growing cost-of-living pressures.
Labor’s policy to increase the maximum childcare subsidy to 90 per cent, while increasing the subsidy rate for all families earning up to $530,000 a year, will benefit up to 280,000 Queensland families, according to the data.
But Dr Chalmers said it meant more Queensland mums and dads would be able to get back to work sooner or do more hours – the equivalent of 7000 full-time staff across a range of fields.
“With high and rising inflation and rising interest rates, we know that Queensland families are doing it incredibly tough right now, which is why our family-friendly budget is focused on responsible cost-of-living relief that doesn’t make our inflationary challenge worse,” he said.
“Cheaper childcare is cost-of-living relief with an economic dividend – easing pressures on families while unlocking thousands of workers for Queensland businesses.”
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said young families, self-funded retirees and pensioners were feeling real pressure at the moment.
“A lot of people heard the Prime Minister on many occasions – in fact, 97 occasions – say before the election that power prices would go down by $275,” Mr Dutton said.
“Now, the problem is that the Prime Minister has never mentioned that figure since the election.
“I think there is a level of growing disenchantment of people who are really dismayed that the Prime Minister was so adamant that he was able to deliver this promise, and people voted for him on that basis, and now, it really becomes a question of trust.”
Dr Chalmers also revealed money in the budget meant there would be 2811 additional places at Queensland universities.
This includes 932 places at Southern Cross University, 780 at the Queensland University of Technology, 379 at the University of Queensland, 364 at Central Queensland University, 123 at James Cook University, 120 at the University of the Sunshine Coast and 113 at the University of Southern Queensland.
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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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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
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My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
