‘Too pretty to be Aboriginal’: Meet the model who wants to abolish our beauty ‘paradigm’

Fat chance. Her looks are just average by normal Western standards. The Nordic ideal is heavily entrenched in Western minds: Narrow face and nose, fair skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. She has none of that. Her lips are rather fashionable, though.

As I move around the shopping centres, nearly every young woman I see is wearing her hair long, straight and blonde. And few naturally have that hair colour. That is very clear evidence of how entrenched the Nordic ideal is. I can think of nothing that is likely to change it

Sasha Kutabah Sarago has been a model, a magazine editor, a documentary maker and a writer: now, she describes herself as an abolisher of paradigms.

The Wadjanbarra Yidinji, Jirrbal and African-American woman wants us to reject the idea of beauty perpetuated by corporations and across pop culture, and in her just released memoir, Gigorou, she details her mission for change.

Through the book she traces her life as being surrounded by beauty, from her first job as an assistant at her mother’s salon to the revelation of seeing the black supermodels of the 1990s, then becoming a model herself. In reaction to that experience, she launched the first digital magazine for women of colour, Ascension, in 2011.

“When I look at beauty... I look at it more through sovereign beauty,” she says. “What I was born into: how my community embraces me and nurtures me. If we all looked at where we come from and the beauty in who we are, the lineage, the bloodlines ... that’s where you abolish paradigms, or make the change.”

To her mind, things have changed for the better since the Black Lives Matter movement and that informs her belief that change will only come from the individual, “Putting the onus on the government or the beauty industry, we set ourselves up to fail. You just have to look at how the system was built and then you’ll find your answer.”

She questions what we’ve been fed by popular culture, folklore and the multi-billion-dollar Australian beauty industry - particularly how women of colour were told they were not beautiful for so long. “If you’ve ever dimmed your light or hated how you looked or searched for beauty in all the wrong places, this is the book for you,” she says.

As a child of 11, she was told “you’re too pretty to be Aboriginal”. In those days, she says, “we internalised our shame and tried to reconcile it as best we could”. That ugly comment inspired her 2019 documentary of the same name.

Researching the film, she spent time in the State Library of Victoria, going through shocking and offensive material about Indigenous women in articles from The Bulletin, People and even this newspaper, as well as in films, music, literature and advertising. “There seemed no limits to the colonial perversion that sullied our women; there was no room for her dignity,” she writes.

Sarago writes as she speaks and although the book deals with many big and confronting issues, it is also very funny. When her aunt, who often travels alone in the bush, speaks of the ‘little man that travels with her and protects her’, she quips: “That’s where I draw the line. I don’t do spirits.”

There’s also the experience she had dropping $1500 on a Louis Vuitton bag only to find it was completely impractical: handcream tarnished the leather handles, “finding clean surfaces for Louis to sit on, checking the weather to see if Louis could join me for the day... and where were the goddamn compartments?”

At the opposite end of the spectrum are warnings about men with fetishes for Black women, and Harvey Weinstein-types who she says you’ll inevitably find in any industry that involves women and money.

In Gigorou, Sarago reflects on her experience modelling and then a magazine editor. Those insights inform her firm belief that the system is inherently flawed. “Working for government in the past and in the corporate world to the fashion and beauty industry, I see how the machine works and I see how the game is played. So for me to thrive and to be able to make change, I have to extract myself from them. That’s why I talk about decolonising beauty. I talk about it with a First Nations perspective - after going through the mainstream and then trying to find my beauty or my self-worth through those systems, I’ve always failed.”

“You’re working within a system that is designed to serve a certain group, so why would I go and play in that space again? And get burnt? It’s insanity, doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

Her vision is bigger than just beauty - she underlines how much would be gained by Australian society if we were to embrace the world’s oldest living culture. Sarago speaks proudly about how her people operated before colonisation.

“We had women’s business and men’s business... the symbiotic relationship and connectedness that everything had. There was a system of lore that would govern if things were out of discord, if there were boundaries that were stepped over. It was written over 60,000 years ago [and operated] until colonisation.”

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/culture/books/too-pretty-to-be-aboriginal-meet-the-model-who-wants-to-abolish-our-beauty-paradigm-20230307-p5cq42.html

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African attitudes come to Sydney



A Sydney woman [from Sudan] who murdered a former boyfriend by crushing him against a wall with a car, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for what a judge called a "fatal explosion of emotion".

Jackline Sabana Bona Musa, 47, was found guilty by a jury last year after a trial in the NSW Supreme Court over the June 2020 death of Payman "Paul" Thagipur.

The court heard Musa received no response to a heartfelt text message one morning and drove around looking for Mr Thagipur, before going to his Wentworth Point apartment.

There, she found another woman in his bed, spat in his face and left.

In the building's car park, Musa fatally pinned Mr Thagipur against a wall after driving at him in a Toyota Kluger.

Justice Richard Button on Friday said Musa and the victim had been in a romantic relationship, but its true nature was somewhat unclear.

What was clear, he said, was that Musa's feelings for Mr Thagipur were much stronger than his.

The judge found she "spontaneously" formed an intention to inflict serious harm in a matter of seconds. "His final ordeal was short, but terrifying, and he surely died in enormous pain," Justice Button said in sentencing. "What occurred was a deeply self-centred imposition of violence on a fellow human being."

Musa was handed a maximum term of 20 years in prison, with a non-parole period of 14 years.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/jackline-musa-jailed-for-20-years-for-crushing-ex-partner-with-car-after-finding-him-with-another-woman/ar-AA18rQvO

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Dramatic scenes as anti-transgender groups and LGBTQI campaigners clash in a park where controversial UK 'transphobe' Kellie-Jay Keen started her speaking tour of Australia

There should be no special rights or privileges for sexual minorities

Anti-trans rights groups clashed with LGBTQ+ activists as hundreds of protestors descended on Sydney's Victoria Park on Saturday.

UK-based activist Kellie-Jay Keen, who also goes by the name Posie Parker online, has travelled to Australia for a series of anti-trans rallies.

Her presence in Sydney is being protested by trans advocacy groups with loud chants of: 'Posie Parker you cant hide, you've got Nazis on your side' and 'TERFS go home' as she took the stage.

Ms Keen, a self-described transphobe, believes it's impossible to change gender and campaigns to exclude trans women from female-only spaces.

She also argues that trans people should be "dead named" and not have the right to chose their own pronouns.

Tensions threatened to boil over towards the end of rally but a strong police presence including mounted cops stopped it.

Chants of 'bigots gone and anti-queer TERFS are not welcome here' were shouted by LGBTQ+ groups while Ms Keen spoke to crowds.

TERF is an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist and describes those whose views on gender identity are hostile to transgender people and who oppose social and political policies designed to be inclusive of transgender people.

Speaking at the rally, Ms Keen, dressed in a white jumpsuit with 'WOMAN' emblazoned across it, described trans women as 'men' and said they are 'upset they can't wear dresses because they've never been told no before'.

She added that when people say they 'believe in trans rights' what they are actually saying is 'men should be in girls spaces and play girls sports'.

The campaigner added that trans people are trying to take 'every tiny little bit of the world that women have carved for ourselves' and described trans men as 'human shields for the fetishisers'.

She also sang to crowds, saying it was a 'wonderful day to be a TERF' and said that the LGBTQ+ groups made 'even menopausal women look sane'.

The right-wing speaker added the 'pornifcation of society' is making 'AGP people breed like rabbits'.

AGP is a term used by anti-trans groups referring to autogynephilia, a pseudoscientific concept describing a man's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female.

After her speech, Ms Keen gave the microphone to other protesters, with one claiming her teenage granddaughter 'is depressed' because her 'teachers are trying to convince her she is a trans man'.

Australian TERF groups were there in support of Ms Keen, including divisive Liberal candidate Katherine Deves who told crowds: 'We will not be silenced. We will stand our ground. I am still fighting the fight.

She added that trans groups 'deny women and girls the right to language' and 'male free spaces'.

'We see them coming for the children. We see them coming for families. We now have state intrusion into our home and our families. 'And parents have been told they will be criminalised if I try to defend their children.

'Race in our education system that is trying to indoctrinate our children into this way of thinking.'

Ms Keen has come under fierce criticism from many groups in the past, including for allegedly posing with a campaigner who celebrated Winnie Mandela's death and called the anti-apartheid fighter 'a whore' and 'white farmer murdering c***'.

She has also been slammed by a British MP for saying access to abortion and contraceptives need to be rolled back for children and teenagers.

Ms Keen raised eyebrows recently after she criticised British MP Jess Phillips for reading out the name of a teenage trans murder victim Brianna Ghey in the House of Commons during an International Women's Day speech.

She has also spoken alongside a number of figures in far-right groups, including Christopher Barcenas, a member of the Proud Boys, who was deposed by the US government due to his presence at the January 6 Capitol riots.

Pride in Protest activists as well as National Union of Students were among the counter protesters in the inner Sydney park.

The National Union of Students has also called for a series of counter-protests against Ms Keen.

Speaking on 2GB with breakfast host Ben Fordham on Friday , Ms Keen described herself as a 'transphobe' but argued that she's 'not scary' because she's 'really small'.

She argued people had 'attempted to cancel her' and that she 'does nothing to invite controversy' but she's 'so influential, trouble follows her'.

When asked by Fordham why people were scared of her, Ms Keen said: 'It's my ability to speak directly and speak the truth.

'I think that's quite frightening for some people. We've lost the ability both in the UK and Australia and elsewhere, to just speak plainly, just just to speak the truth.'

'In today's money, because being transphobic means that you say "a woman doesn't have a penis", and probably I am a transphobic.'

When asked if she's an anti-trans activist, she replied: 'I am a woman's right activist' and that she defines a woman as an 'adult human female'.

'Because so many people are complete cowards, social media has been able to manifest into a mass silencing tool,' Ms Keen added.

'There's a weird social currency of acceptance. And I think underpinning that is really not caring at all about women.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11846879/Anti-trans-groups-clash-LGBTQ-campaigners-Sydney.html

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Why the gender pay gap theory just doesn’t add up

JUDITH SLOAN

As International Women’s Day approaches each year, there is the usual flood of commentary on how badly women are doing in the workforce and the persistent gender pay gap. I tend to take as little notice as possible because most of the material is highly misleading.

Consider the inevitable press release of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. We are told “the national gender pay gap is 13.3 per cent … and this means women earn $253.50 less than men every single week as a result of gender”. Take it from me, this does not mean that at all: women do not earn less than men just because they are women.

The staff at the agency should really know better than to put out such a deceptive release. To be sure, there is grudging recognition by the agency that the gender pay gap is actually the lowest it has ever been. But I guess if you want to maintain relevance, such an admission needs to be well-hidden.

The gender-pay gap between full-time working women and men is at… its lowest ratio “it’s ever been” according to figures from the “insidious sounding” Workplace Gender Equality Agency, says The Australian’s Contributing Economics Editor Judith Sloan. “We know what affects earnings – things like industry, occupation, qualifications, job tenure,” More
Recall here that it is a legal requirement in Australia that equal pay applies to the same job. This has been the case for decades. What it means is that it doesn’t matter whether the worker is male or female, the same rate of pay applies to the job.

If you really want to understand why the gross gender pay gap is what it is – and at least the WGEA uses full-time earnings, which avoids hours of work, at least to a degree, contaminating the result – it is necessary to account for the factors known to affect earnings. These include industry, occupation, qualifications and job tenure. Economists undertake this sort of multivariate analysis all the time.

When this is done, the gender pay gap almost disappears. And rather than industry and occupation contributing to women earning less than men, in Australia’s case, the impact of regulated wages is actually to inflate the earnings of women relative to men.

What is often forgotten in the debate is that many men have low-paid jobs – think here delivery drivers and labourers – where wages are low and not well-regulated.

Research by University of Sydney economics professor Deborah Cobb-Clark has demonstrated that the occupational/industry gender segmentation actually lifts the relative pay of women in Australia, with all the gender pay action occurring at higher earnings.

Of course, industry and occupational gender segmentation – some industries/occupations are female-dominated, others male-dominated – may offend feminists who would rather see a more even spread of the sexes. It is interesting that the degree of segmentation has changed little across time and, in some cases, has become more extreme – teaching is an example that has become more feminised.

But this is a different issue to the gender pay gap. Care also needs to be paid to directing – or even attempting to direct – women into occupations or industries that may not be their first preference just because this is seen as progress by policy-oriented feminists. Let’s face it, it doesn’t suit everyone to have a fly-in, fly-out job in the Pilbara. The pay may be great but the sacrifices to family life may be too high for some women (and men) to contemplate.

The overseas literature on the gender pay gap is fairly conclusive: notwithstanding the narrowing of the pay gap in many countries, its persistence is essentially the result of women’s dislike of jobs that involve long and unpredictable hours as well as work travel. This is the firm conclusion of Harvard University economics professor Claudia Goldin, who is the standout researcher in this field.

A recent Swedish study has shown that women’s pay in that country is still not 100 per cent of men’s notwithstanding the vast array of pro-women arrangements, including extended paid parental leave schemes for both parents, flexible working arrangements and highly subsidised childcare. Again the issue is the preference for women to have work arrangements that suit their family situations and to drive work-life balance.

One of the issues that has been in the news lately is the much lower superannuation balances of women relative to men, including on retirement. This, of course, follows from the earnings-related nature of superannuation and the lower lifetime earnings that many women earn compared with men.

By law, however, superannuation is a joint asset of a marriage/partnership and in the event of divorce/separation, the asset is split on a 50-50 basis unless otherwise agreed. In fact, when John Howard was prime minister, consideration was given as to whether couples could set up joint accounts into which employer contributions would be made. It was decided at that time that taxation and other complications made it too difficult.

The reality is that many decisions are made by couples to balance their family and financial needs. Across time, many men have become much more involved in household and child-rearing duties than was once the case. It’s fine for advocates to recommend even more involvement, including men making more use of paid parental leave. But at the end of the day, these are private decisions.

Would adding superannuation contributions to paid parental leave make much difference? Some private firms already do this. In fact, it would make only a slight difference to the final superannuation balances achieved by women – this was demonstrated in the 2020 Callaghan retirement income review. Subject to fiscal pressures, it could still be worth doing.

There is a lot to celebrate in terms of women’s role in the labour market. Female workforce participation is at a historic high and the gender pay gap is at a historic low. Those two facts alone could make eating a cupcake worthwhile.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/why-the-gender-pay-gap-theory-just-doesnt-add-up/news-story/d6779529872c1f23bd527a76fd408c5c

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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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Greens off on another planet: Today’s Greens make their predecessors look sensible

Judith Sloan

It was the formidable Labor finance minister, Peter Walsh, who first described the Greens as akin to fairies at the bottom on the garden. He held their idealistic and unrealistic ideas in complete contempt. In his view, the Greens’ way was a highway to penury, particularly for those on the lowest incomes.

He was also suspicious of their environmental methods, claiming, for instance, that the failure to maintain national parks by clearing, weeding and regular burn-offs would simply lead to devastating bushfires and an extraordinary loss of environmental benefits.

Fast-forward through the intervening decades and it would seem that the Greens have moved on from the bottom of the garden and are now flying in an entirely parallel universe where the practicalities of running a government completely elude them. Indeed, from today’s perspective, former Greens leader, Bob Brown, appears almost sensible; OK, at least he was living on Planet Earth when he was in parliament – at least most of the time.

Today’s cohort of Greens parliamentarians has less connection with the environmental movement – saving forests and endangered species, etc, (although they are obsessed with climate change) – and more connection with hard-left political stances. They support big government, high taxation, anti-capitalism and favourable treatment for all minority groups. Sadly, most of them can’t even spell freedom.

The Greens are now led by the unappealing Adam Bandt who comfortably holds the seat of Melbourne, home to woke types, students and some doctors’ wives. There is no prospect of Labor wresting this seat from the Greens and the adjoining ones are always at risk of being lost to some former teacher turned climate activist.

Of course, it’s been great sport watching the antics of Lidia Thorpe, former Greens senator for Victoria. For those in the Greens party room, it must have been like having a rabid dog running around, incapable of being controlled. Even though Bandt assures us he did everything he could to keep her in the party, one suspects that there were a few sighs of relief when she decided to quit and become an independent senator.

Even so, she probably continues to inflict damage on her former party through her opposition to the Voice on the basis it doesn’t go far enough – truth-telling and treaties are the only road for her – and her antics at the recent Pride March in Sydney.

What is the point of lying on the road and stopping the procession of a float? It escapes me, although she was evidently making a point about the brutal and discriminatory behaviour of the police force. Luckily, the attending police officers had no hesitation moving her on.

Thorpe has zero chance of being re-elected to the Senate as an independent, but she will be in office for some time still, creating mayhem and damaging the Greens – maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

But let me get back to the chasm that the Greens deliberately create by advocating much higher government spending while calling for all sorts of perverse measures, up to and including the banning of coal and gas projects. Without these projects, there is no prospect there will be sufficient revenue to fund their over-the-top spending aspirations.

The Greens’ wish list is close to endless: free childcare, free TAFE and university, free dental care, higher dole, higher rental assistance, more public housing, more public transport, more spending on government schools, more foreign aid and on and on it goes.

Unless you believe that government spending is costless and never-ending – OK, for a while the crazy advocates of Modern Monetary Theory held sway until the ugly face of inflation reared its head and the interest payable on government debt began to rise – the Greens cannot escape that perennial political question: how are you going to pay for it?

But here’s the thing: the main reason Australia is not completely in the fiscal dog-house is the surging company tax revenues from mining companies and high commodity prices. Now I know some Speccie readers are a little bit allergic to numbers, but bear with me if I point out a few simple facts.

Take iron ore, which is a mainstay of our budget. For every $US10 increase in the price of iron ore per tonne, there is a lift of $600 million in company tax receipts. The high prices of coal, both thermal and coking, as well as liquefied natural gas, have similarly led to rapid growth in company tax receipts.

At the time of the election last year, the Treasury expected company tax revenue for 2022-23 to come in at a tad over $90 billion. It now expects it to be $127 billion – a jump of nearly one third. Company tax revenue is now at an historic high which, in turn, is mainly because of the surging tax being paid by the mining companies so reviled by the Greens.

Talk about contradictory: it’s not just having your cake and eating it too; it’s about having the whole bakery. This underscores my conclusion that the Greens are now living on a different planet rather than partying at the bottom of the garden. They want to shut down most of the resource sector but think that government spending can be jacked up big-time.

And let’s not forget here that federal Labor already has substantial spending plans. Next financial year, it expects to spend $666 billion and in 2025-26, the figure is $729 billion, an increase of over 9 per cent in real terms. The Greens’ ambitions are in addition to this increase.

Don’t get me onto some of the other proposals from the Greens. The geniuses in the party think that imposing national rental controls is the answer to our housing rental crisis. The fact that the attractiveness of residential real estate for investors has declined is regarded as neither here nor there by them. And this is before the full impact of the higher cost of investment loans.

They also want to achieve net zero by 2035, think that the ambition of B1(Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen) to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 is woefully inadequate and want 100-per-cent renewable energy by the end of the decade. In Bernie Sanders’ style, they think that ‘taxing the billionaires and big corporations’ will release oceans of revenue and a 6 per cent annual wealth tax is the way to go.

Walshy must be spinning in his grave; he would surely conclude that the dotty Greens of his era were sensible pragmatists compared to today’s loopy lot.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/greens-off-on-another-planet/

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Pervasive greenwashing apparent

A quick look on the websites of some of Australia's largest companies — from fossil fuel and electricity providers, to telecommunications and banks — shows many are "certified carbon neutral".

National Australia Bank (NAB) claims to be the country's "first carbon-neutral bank", Cooper Energy claims to be "Australia's first carbon-neutral domestic gas supplier", and Telstra is certified for its "business operations, and its retail electricity and gas products".

Their carbon-neutral credentials come from Climate Active — a government-backed program that started life as the National Carbon Offset Standard in 2010, and as "Greenhouse Friendly" before that.

Climate Active claims to oversee one of the world's "most rigorous" carbon neutral certifications.

According to its website, the program assists businesses in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, and that by "supporting businesses with the Climate Active trademark, you are supporting climate action".

But critics say the government-backed body is engaging in "greenwashing" — providing environmentally friendly cover for polluting industries to carry on with business as usual, while giving the impression they're taking meaningful action on climate change.

The devil in the details

On NAB's website, there's a page dedicated to the company's track record on, and ambitions for, climate action.

"In 2010, we became the first Australian-owned bank to achieve carbon neutrality under the Climate Active (then National Carbon Offset Standard (NCOS)) Carbon Neutral Program," reads a description on the bank's Environment and Climate Change page.

But Polly Hemming of the Australia Institute says what the bank is referring to, and what the average person on the street might interpret their statement to mean, aren't necessarily the same thing.

In February, lawyers acting for the Australia Institute lodged a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), asking the ACCC to investigate whether the Climate Active trademark program, including its use by companies involved with the program, was misleading or deceptive under Australian Consumer Law.

Melbourne Law School economist and former chair of the ACCC Allan Fels says some of the complaints made by the Australia Institute against Climate Active, and potentially some of the companies using their accreditation, will be looked at seriously by the ACCC.

"One of the claims about deceptive conduct looks fairly persuasive," he says.

Against Climate Active in particular, Professor Fels says it must be established whether they're engaged in trade or commerce, and therefore covered by Australian consumer law.

"Climate Active receives significant income from certificates and other things. Is that enough to constitute trade or commerce?

"In a sense, it's a good test case for that."

Part of the Australia Institute's criticism stems from what, under the Climate Active certification system, is termed "emissions boundaries" — things that are inside or outside of consideration, depending on the type of certification being granted.

In the case of NAB, their certification type is listed under "organisation". Inside their emissions boundary are things like office electricity use, vehicle fuel and office paper.

But outside their boundary are international emissions, emissions from the use of the products they sell, from downstream leased assets, capital goods, investments and lending — including to fossil fuel expansion projects.

A report from Market Forces in 2021 estimated that the lifetime emissions from fossil fuel projects funded by NAB between 2016 and 2020 will run into the billions of tonnes.

In short, only a part of NAB's total operations are carbon neutral. And it's a similar story for many other Climate Active-certified banks.

Gas exploration and development (mining) company Cooper Energy also displays its carbon-neutral certification prominently on its website and in sustainability reports, and claims to be Australia's first carbon-neutral domestic gas supplier.

Again though, that's carbon neutrality for the organisation and doesn't include "downstream processing of products by customers, downstream transmission and distribution of products by customers, or downstream combustion of products by customers and consumers".

In other words, it doesn't include the burning of their gas, which they produce "exclusively for Australia's east coast market".

The things outside these companies' emissions boundaries mostly fall under what are termed scope 3 emissions — emissions outside the direct control of the company.

They often add up to a much larger footprint than the direct emissions of a business, which are known as scope 1 and 2.

Scope 3 emissions are also generally the hardest to get down.

Most certified brands acknowledge, though sometimes in finer print, the limitations of their certification, and Climate Active details the emissions boundaries for each of its certified brands in annual reports.

And Climate Active's classifications, including for organisational carbon neutral certification, are based on Australian and international standards, such as the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting scheme and the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

But Climate Active also claims to be helping consumers make informed, climate-friendly choices.

Ms Hemming says instead, the carbon neutral certification is potentially misleading consumers.

"You really have to go quite deep into the certification. You have to understand different terminology in relation to carbon accounting — scopes, supply chains, downstream emissions.

"That's a pretty unreasonable ask of a consumer."

According to polling by the Australia Institute last month, nearly 60 per cent of the 1,012 people surveyed said that all emissions from a business's "operations, products and services" should be included in claims of carbon neutrality.

"A majority of people said a carbon-neutral organisation is an organisation that has offset its products, processes and investments," Ms Hemming said.

Professor Fels says Australian law about greenwashing covers claims that are "misleading or deceptive in the mind of the consumer".

"It doesn't matter what the intention of the person issuing the statement is, it's how an ordinary consumer would interpret it.

"The ordinary consumer doesn't have a great technical knowledge, and you would take that into account."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-10/carbon-neutral-emissions-climate-active-greenwashing-companies/101991904

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British rail expert backs push for upgrades to 'rather decayed' Canberra to Sydney train line

A British rail expert has described the train line from Sydney to Canberra as "rather decayed" and thrown his support behind calls to upgrade it to cut travel times between the two cities.

The train journey between the national capital and Sydney currently takes more than four hours, making it far slower than travelling by bus, car or plane.

Three years ago, Infrastructure Australia estimated only 1 per cent of people making the trip used rail.

Professor Andrew McNaughton, the chair of the authority that manages Britain's high-speed rail line, recently examined the route as part of a yet-to-be-released fast rail strategy delivered to the New South Wales government.

He said basic improvements to the track, such as straightening out bends, could reduce the journey to roughly three hours, which would be comparable to travelling by road.

Professor McNaughton said he believed this would lead to increased demand and more frequent trains, taking cars off the Federal and Hume highways and helping build the case for a new high-speed rail line in coming decades.

"Most of it is just about basic infrastructure management to get a decent railway out of what you've got," Professor McNaughton said.

"Traffic will build up. More people will elect to go by rail, particularly if it's a decent quality service."

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr has long urged the NSW and federal governments to fund improvements to the 320-kilometre-long track, which winds around hills and was built to 19th-century freight train requirements.

In 2017, Mr Barr took the train to Sydney to illustrate his point, and his journey took even longer when his service got stuck behind a freight train.

"[The track] is like a canal, it goes all over the place to keep gradients down," Professor McNaughton said.

"If you want serious journey time you need something pretty straight that goes up and down the hills."

In 2020, the line was added to Infrastructure Australia's priority list for upgrades, including potential straightening and duplication.

NSW Transport says about 18,900 passengers per month travelled on the route over the past year, which was roughly in line with pre-COVID levels.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-10/british-rail-expert-back-push-upgrade-canberra-sydney-train-line/102076296

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More control over your electricity usage coming

The Albanese government and the Greens have a hidden agenda and it’s not good for you. Why you might ask did the Greens demand as their trade-off for supporting the government imposing price caps on gas, that the government provide tax-payer funded subsidies to get households to get rid of their gas appliances and go all electric. You might also wonder just why there is such a rush for electric cars. The two are connected.

AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) publishes information that provides some answers but it never gets publicly discussed. The fact is that part of the government’s plan involves use of devices owned by you. The plan is called the Distributed Energy Resources Program or simply DER and it’s designed to suck up your stored energy. That is the energy stored in for example your car battery, your solar panels and your domestic battery storage system. The plan is to allow AEMO to fill shortages of electricity in the grid with your stored energy and ration your use of electricity by turning off your hot water system or air-conditioner through your smart meter which you will be required to have.

The push for electric cars is about making more battery storage available – not to improve your driving experience. As long as your car battery is charged up at home, it’s ready to have its stored energy siphoned off. All of this is known to the cognoscenti but totally unknown to everyday Australians being fed a constant diet of propaganda as to how cheap and simple renewable energy is.

And then there is the inevitable new database ready to hack – and thereby compromise – all of your DER devices so they can source your stored energy.

AEMO describes DERs as, ‘consumer-owned devices that as individual units can generate or store electricity or have the “smarts” to actively manage energy demand’. It then lists examples of DERs as rooftop solar photovoltaic units, wind generating units – residential or commercial, battery storage systems, pool pumps and air-conditioners, smart appliances and electric vehicles.

AEMO describes its desired two-way energy system stating ‘DER devices are “plugged in” to the energy grid with the objective of secure and reliable power for all’. In other words, it is admitting the grid needs a base-load energy resource and how your car battery and other devices will provide it.

This is where the Greens demand for subsidies to get people out of their gas appliances fits in. You cannot plug in gas-powered devices so they want people to have electric devices that are available for their stored energy to be fed into the grid. This cannot be done with gas hot water systems, nor can this happen with a car with an internal combustion engine but it certainly can with an electric car battery.

Much is speculated about the importance and potential success of big batteries termed BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) or ‘grid-scale’ batteries, a term which might cause one to believe they are something large and special but they are not. In the words of AEMO they ‘consist of rows of domestic or lithium batteries installed together’.

In their grand plan, these systems are seen as essential to the wish to move off fossil fuels, but the language is aspirational and hopeful for the future, not concrete or factual. Quotes from AEMO clearly show this:

‘New innovations in technology are overcoming limitations… as technical innovation expands storage capacity, batteries will be able to deliver power for longer periods of time’. ‘The 300 MW battery to be completed in Geelong will have the theoretical capacity to service the average needs of 400,000 household for one hour’. ‘System strength and system restart are two key services provided by coal/synchronous generations that are not currently provided by batteries. However, as technology improves, and with sufficient batteries installed they may be able to take on this role with the potential to operate as a vertical synchronous machine’.

This they hope will take on some of the role of coal-fired power stations which provide over 60 per cent of our power needs.

All this just confirms the technology to get rid of base-load power provided by coal and gas does not exist. There are hopes and aspirations that it might in the future but at what cost, inconvenience and risks to households and businesses alike? AEMO’s forecast demand for 2030 and 2050 is that maximum demand is for 44 gigawatts for 2030 and 55 gigawatts by 2050. The cost estimates for achieving this through a grid powered by renewables are eye-watering and estimated in the trillions – and in the words of Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute ‘is just an exercise in magical thinking’.

Having access to capacity to store energy in individually owned personal devices is essential to the government and Greens dream to rid Australia of fossil fuels which we will continue to export as it pays our nation’s bills.

The estimated capacity is 69 gigawatts of power from rooftop solar panels and 31 gigawatts from domestic and electric vehicles with charged-up batteries ready to be siphoned off by a government agency. DER scenarios require the owners of these devices to foot the bill and the more batteries that are cycled the more they wear out.

The DER program is designed to try and fill the gaps in the dream or fantasy of having Australia’s homes and businesses powered by wind and solar. Thousands of square meters covered by panels (which, along with the thousands of windmills, have a limited life-span and are thus all destined for landfill) will not give households and businesses all the power that is needed. Even the addition of hugely expensive grid-connected power generators, 13,200 km of new transmission lines, Snowy Hydro 2.0, new pumped storage schemes, grid stabilisation controls, cost of property leasing, and transmission line rights of way still won’t keep the lights on.

By closing coal-fired power stations prematurely, restricting gas exploration and generation, and refusing to entertain nuclear solutions, the politicians forcing this upon the nation without telling the truth of what is entailed place individuals and the nation at great risk.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/now-albo-wants-your-electricity-too/

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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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Super funds add to ‘too high’ fees by using expensive external managers

This is precisely why I manage my own retirement investments. A small percentage in fees every year can soon wipe out any gains.

Super funds are spending more than $2.5 billion of members’ money annually on top end of town fund managers, adding to fees that experts say are too high by world standards.

Official statistics show that over the eight years to 2022, super funds streamed $18.2bn from retirement savers to fund managers, part of a $45.3bn bonanza enjoyed by an army of administrators, consultants, lawyers and other service providers hired by the sector.

Last year just one investment manager, IFM Investors, which is owned by union and employer-controlled industry super funds, collected $412m in fees from its hundreds of clients.

Experts question whether super funds are getting value for members’ money when they pay external fund managers to direct investments rather than taking care of it in house.

They say reducing fees, which currently average about 1 per cent of super balances, is more urgent than the Albanese government’s proposal to enshrine a purpose for super in legislation – something Treasurer Jim Chalmers last month said would enable more investment in nation building projects.

Xavier O’Halloran, the head of Super Consumers Australia, said that while it was important to have a debate about what superannuation was for “in terms of the here and now and what the trustees are delivering, this focus on fees is really important”.

“It will put more money in the savings accounts of people, ultimately, which is going to lift the performance of the system overall.”

Disclosure documents show that the country’s top three super funds – AustralianSuper, Australian Retirement Trust (ART) and Aware Super – use dozens of external investment advisers including Seek co-founder Paul Bassat’s tech group, Square Peg, investment bank Macquarie Group – dubbed the “millionaire’s factory” due to its high executive pay – and IFM Investors, which is itself owned by a group of industry super funds.

The biggest fund, AustralianSuper, paid $669m in investment expenses last year, while ART paid $350m and Aware paid $479m.

According to Canstar data, the highest-fee fund in Australia is Perpetual Select, which charges $1024, or 2.05 per cent, to manage $50,000 in super savings, and last year lost members 6.1 per cent.

For the same balance the lowest-fee option, REST Super, charged just $133, or 0.27 per cent, but performance was worse with the fund shedding 8.5 per cent of its value.

Canstar executive Steve Mickenberger said it was questionable whether external investment managers were doing a better job picking stocks than index funds that simply track the market at large.

“When you look at the returns from some funds, you’ve got to scratch your head and say, ‘Are they doing better than the index over an extended period’,” he said.

“And now we’ve published the five-year returns and you can see that there are some index funds that are performing pretty well.”

He said funds that invested directly in property and infrastructure, such as toll roads, tended to do well. Funds with lower fees also generally did better because taking out fees reduces the amount available to invest.

Canstar’s data shows that average fees for mainstream MySuper funds fell from 1.27 per cent in January 2019 to 1.06 per cent in January this year.

The fall follows the introduction of performance tests in 2021 as part of the Morrison government’s Your Future Your Super package that have forced funds with sub par returns to merge with better operators.

However, Mr O’Halloran said fees should be further reduced. “If you look at the tens of billions of dollars it’s costing to run Australia’s superannuation system, I think there’s still more value to be had,” he said. “Any of that value goes directly back into people’s retirement balances.”

Fund performance tests currently only cover the simpler MySuper funds, which hold about half Australia’s $3.3tn super nest egg, and exclude so-called “choice” funds, which hold the rest and typically offer retirement savers a long list of investment options.

Mr O’Halloran said this meant choice funds have been “able to get away with charging exorbitant fees without any real proper checks and balances in place”.

“We know the government is reviewing right now whether and how to expand the performance says to the choice segment – we’re really encouraging them to get on with the job because we know there are significant cost savings that will flow from that,” he said.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/super-funds-add-to-too-high-fees-by-using-expensive-external-managers/news-story/e54effe2b946840385f13023ee6f3400

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Changing climate change: debunking the global colossus

Mark Imisides

In a previous article, I discussed how climate science has grown from an obscure theory in the late 80s to a worldwide colossus that will soon overtake the oil and gas industry in terms of its size.

How is it that despite the scientific case for a climate apocalypse comprehensively collapsing some 20 years ago, we have seen a 16-year-old girl (at the time) being invited to address the United Nations, weeping children marching in our streets, and a federal election outcome in which this issue dominated the political landscape?

Where did we go wrong? And by ‘we’ I’m referring to those of us termed sceptics – people who understand the science, and the house of cards that comprises the notion of Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Mainly, we have fallen into the trap of thinking that just because the evidence is on our side, people will come around to our way of thinking. Or to put it another way, we naively assume that everyone is as interested in evidence as we are.

They are not. The Climate Change industry is a massive global entity with unimaginably large financial and political interests. There is too much at stake for those involved to sully themselves with things like evidence…

The time is ripe for a major political party to take up the cudgels and go to the next election on the ‘cost of living’ platform by tossing every initiative or program with ‘eco’, ‘green’, and particularly ‘renewable’ in the bin. Peter Dutton, I’m looking at you.

How do we do it?

Put simply, we must learn the art of the polemic. The art of rhetoric. We must recognise that there’s no point in having evidence on our side if we don’t know how to use it.

We begin with this proposition. There is no case for reducing our carbon footprint unless all four of these statements are true:

The world is warming.

We are causing it.

It’s a bad thing.

We can do something about it.

No rational person can have any problem with this, and if they do, we need to find out why.

Here’s where we have to decide which of these points we want to contest. Remember, you only have to falsify one of them for the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.

Most sceptics, in my view, pick the wrong fight. They do this by attempting to prosecute the case based on one of the first two points. This is a mistake.

Here’s why.

Arguments about whether the world is warming revolve around competing graphs: ‘My graph shows it’s warming. If your graph shows it isn’t, then it’s wrong – no it isn’t – yes it is – no it isn’t…’

This argument also looks at Urban Heat Island Effects, and examines manipulation of data by government agencies.

This is a poor approach to take because:

You’re never going to prove your graph is right.

You can be very easily and quickly discredited as a conspiracy theorist (Brian Cox did this to Malcolm Roberts on Q&A a few years ago).

People just do not believe that government agencies would manipulate data.

We should not fear a warming world. Records began at the end of the last ice age, so it’s only natural that the world is warming. And the current temperatures are well within historical averages.

As for arguments about whether we are causing the warming, this is even more problematic. The various contributions to global temperatures are extremely complex, involving a deep understanding of atmospheric physics and thermodynamics. With a PhD in Chemistry, this is much closer to my area of expertise than Joe Public, but I am very quickly out of my depth. I recognise most of the terms and concepts involved, but know just enough to know how little I know.

Sadly, many people on both sides of the debate don’t understand how little they know, nor how complex the subject of atmospheric physics is, and it is nothing short of comical seeing two people debating about a subject of which both of them are blissfully ignorant.

This approach is taken simply because it is so tempting. We can point to the Vladivostok ice cores that prove that CO2 follows temperature changes. We can ask why the cooling period from 1940-75 coincided with the greatest increase in CO2 production the world has ever seen. It’s very tempting. But, I’m sorry to say, it is simply a futile approach.

The bottom line is this – they simply don’t change anyone’s minds – ever. Having seen these arguments used for years, and having used them myself, I cannot point to a single person that has said, ‘Oh yes! I see it now…’ The whole point of arguing, or debating, is to change someone’s mind (including, at times, your own). If that isn’t happening, then it’s futile to continue with the same approach.

I think the reason both these approaches fail that most people do not believe that all these experts, and the government, can be wrong. You say the world isn’t warming? Oh, I’m sure you have the wrong graph. You say that CO2 is not responsible? Oh, I’m sure the government scientists know more than you do.

This then brings us to the third point. Why is a warmer world a bad thing?

This is even more tempting than the first two points, as it’s so easy to prove that a warming world, so far from being a crisis, is actually a good thing. The reason for this is that, unlike with the first two points, they don’t have to look at a complex scientific argument. They just have to look at the weather. Are cyclones and hurricanes increasing? Are droughts increasing? Are flooding events increasing?

Regretfully, it is impossible to get people to even look at this. Even worse, they seem oblivious to the simple concept of cause and effect. We see this in that they simply can’t see that droughts and floods are opposites, and the same cause cannot produce exactly opposite effects. Astonishingly, they somehow think that charts that plot these extreme events are somehow manipulated, even when they come from a primary source such as the BOM, and that there really is a ‘climate crisis’.

Where does that leave us? Well, before we adopt Catweazle’s mantra of ‘nothing works’, there is one more point – point 4 (can we do anything about it?).

Most people will have seen the address of Konstantin Kisin at an Oxford Union debate, where he prosecuted this case to great effect. He pointed out, in simple terms, that as the UK only contributes 2 per cent to the global CO2 budget, anything they did will have negligible effect, and that global CO2 levels will be determined by people in Africa and Asia. He then pointed out that people in these countries ‘didn’t give a sh*t’ about climate change, as all they want to do is feed and clothe their children, and they don’t care how much CO2 that produces.

Finally, he pointed out that Xi Jinping knows that the way to ensure that he isn’t rolled in a revolution, as happened to so many other leaders in former communist regimes, is to ensure prosperity for the Chinese people. And indispensable to that goal is cheap, reliable, power, which is the reason that China is now building lots more coal-fired power plants – in 2021 alone they built 25 GW of capacity – equivalent to 25 x 1000MW plants.

By all accounts, his speech was well-received, with many people turning to his side. The beauty of prosecuting this case, as opposed to the other three, is that people don’t have to look at any evidence. They don’t even have to look at the weather.

The argument is at the same time simple, compelling, and irresistible. The question is this: will we see a major political party with the courage to take it on?

That part remains to be seen. But what is certain is this – the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. If, for twenty years we’ve been telling people either that the world isn’t warming, or if it is we aren’t causing it, or if it is warmer but there’s no climate crisis, and not a single person has been persuaded by our arguments, then we have the brains of a tomato if we think anything is going to change.

Konstantin Kisin’s talk, and in particular the way it was received, fill me with hope that I haven’t had in years. It fills me with hope that if the case is prosecuted wisely, the climate change colossus can be brought to a grinding halt, politicians will unashamedly take on energy security as a political mantra, and the notion of climate change will at last be exposed as the unscientific, anti-human, regressive, apocalyptic cult that it is.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/changing-climate-change-debunking-the-global-colossus

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The Left’s aversion to teacher quality is harming our kids

The Productivity Commission has recently thrown down the gauntlet on teacher quality, and its importance to the nation’s economic health. Despite the difficulties and complexities, we should pick it up and finally embrace the challenge.

Australia’s educational woes are well documented, with student learning outcomes in free-fall over the last two decades. But a recent report by the Productivity Commission has provided a ray of light.

Its report into Australia’s education system found the largest single factor in student success, and their ability to go on and make a meaningful economic contribution, is teacher quality. As a former teacher myself, I would say: quelle surprise!

The commission determined that students taught by above-average teachers will earn almost $500,000 more over their lifetimes than those taught by average teachers. Not exactly loose change. So, we need to have an overdue and difficult conversation about teacher quality.

Let’s get one thing straight: the majority of our teachers are amazing. They care for the students they teach. They’re dedicated and expert. Before entering Parliament, I was the head of a large secondary school in my electorate, so I know this first-hand.

Nonetheless, as is the case in any profession, some teachers are not currently up to scratch. Do you know someone who, as a result of struggling to get a job elsewhere, ultimately fell into teaching?

I do. And recently, I’ve been really concerned to find out that one in 10 new teachers can’t meet the necessary standard in critical learning areas like numeracy and literacy. Moves are afoot to change this.

Back in 2016 a Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students was introduced. I’m hopeful that it will ultimately become a valuable tool. It’s also good that universities are lifting the ATAR scores required for admission to teaching degrees.

I’ll concede that not every teacher has to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist. Yet mastery of their chosen subject area is essential. Teaching requires significant intellectual grunt.

There’s a lot more to do at the front end, but here’s a much trickier question: how do we support the 300,000 Australian teachers – currently plying their craft – to be their very best?

One response must be to put in place meaningful and rigorous systems of teacher appraisal.

I commenced my teaching journey fifteen years ago. As a 24-year-old, entirely new to the profession, I could not believe the amount of autonomy I had. There was certainly no appraisal. What’s more, there were no key performance indicators. Indeed, there was very little oversight of any kind.

This meant that I could teach whatever I wanted, however I wanted. Coming from the fishbowl of politics, as a staffer, I loved my newfound freedom.

Teacher autonomy is hard-wired into the culture of our school systems which we borrowed from the British public school model. After a hundred and fifty years, that’s no easy thing to change. But it’s certainly not conducive to best-practice, or personal growth.

Change has started, albeit slowly, in the best private schools. A small proportion of schools have excellent models in place.

These involve regular lesson observations by a school leader and targeted feedback; student surveys about teacher performance; professional development informed by a mentor; and goal setting with ongoing reviews to assess progress.

Of course, powerful public sector unions are stridently opposed to processes such as these. Yet, in my personal experience, they can be enacted in a way that is highly supportive of staff.

I’ve been appraised myself on many occasions. It’s nerve-wracking, sure. But what I’ve seen is that the many fantastic teachers are affirmed, while those who are struggling are supported to get better, or find a job that better fits their skills.

These conversations are difficult. As a (biased) former teacher I have a high regard for those still in the profession. Yet facts are facts. Our students have never performed worse in the crucial areas of literacy, numeracy, and science – at least not since the Program for International Student Assessment commenced publishing its reports in 2000.

Of course, the quality of teaching is not entirely to blame for this. But it can play a huge part in arresting Australia’s learning decline. That, says the Productivity Commission, will pay real dividends for us all.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-lefts-aversion-to-teacher-quality-is-harming-our-kids/ ?

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The feminists have won

International Women’s Day is a day when women of the chattering classes parade their virtue and moral superiority to the rest of us. If you were listening to the ABC last Thursday and expected your favourite male presenter, tough. And if you wanted a provocative, balanced read from the Age’s opinion pages, you were greeted instead by woman polemicists including ex-ABC broadcaster Virginia Hausegger and Fairfax’s resident feminist, Clementine ‘Fight Like a Girl’ Ford.

‘Are you done with women yet? Sick of hearing about them?’ were the first words of Hausegger’s Age piece. Her argument, however, boiled down to warning like-minded readers to beware ‘the brewing whiff of backlash’. ‘As women continue to push for progress’, she wrote, ‘men are clearly disoriented by the demands for change’.

The premise of International Women’s Day is that women need to be empowered, to lead, to shatter the glass ceiling. So Peta Credlin, herself a very powerful woman before she found her voice at Sky News, writes in the Australian decrying the Liberal party for not changing as fast as she wants. Tanya Plibersek and other grandstanding progressive politicians, male and female, brand feminism as a progressive Left triumph. Labor talks 50:50 gender quotas for its MPs; Credlin and other Liberals talk affirmative action and mentoring within the party’s preselection processes.

Credlin and Plibersek make a surreal unity ticket, but on one thing they’re indeed very much united: the final triumph of the feminist revolution in politics isn’t coming quickly enough for their liking. Yet they overlook the fear of a feminist backlash helps keep poor political performers who happen to be women, like Michaelia Cash, in post where men who blunder as royally would be sent packing. It means the sisterhood not condemning the bad examples of female politicians already in leadership, like Tasmanian Labor leader Rebecca White, whose petulant and deluded concession speech on election night made Turnbull’s ugly and spiteful 2016 effort look tame.

Labor’s much-touted seat quotas are tokenistic. That they simply guarantee more mediocrities enter parliamentary ranks under the guise of gender equality doesn’t matter to Emily’s Listers. And the Liberals mentoring women candidates is pointless when factional and personal loyalties now count more than ability in picking MPs of either gender.

But feminist polemicists and Q&A panellists should be honest about just who’s on top. Every day is now International Women’s Day. Feminist issues, feminist values now shape and frame what’s appropriate and what’s not in public discourse, especially in politics and the media. Public and business figures who once would have got away with louche personal behaviour towards women are now called out and broken. Not that some men in power don’t deserve what comes: Barnaby Joyce’s selfish disregard for his wife, daughters, mistress and even unborn child makes middle-aged white blokes look more pathetic and ludicrous than even Clementine Ford could assert in a fire-snorting Fairfax column.

Thus the #timesup and #metoo movements enthusiastically call out male sexual harassers and predators, their starting premise that every man is by nature a predator on women, and preternaturally disposed to aggression and violence. Thomas Hobbes’s dark vision of men’s natures is as nothing to that of Hollywood virtue-signallers and their political allies.

Consequently in politics, business and the media, men are being denounced and rooted out, and the ideology of the gender revolution benchmarks public life. Middle-aged white men in authority positions and ‘traditional’ male occupations particularly are fair game: we are a generation of Calibans to be tossed aside for fair, enlightened Mirandas. The progressive media, not just the ABC and Fairfax, are willing arbiters of what’s acceptable in this brave, new world. Ever-angry feminist pundits like Ford and Hausegger rage as if the struggle’s all before them, when it absolutely is not. They deny what straight middle-aged white bloke dinosaurs like me already know: the gender revolution is not a work in progress, but already won.

The social and cultural norms of 10,000 years of Western civilisation, that always have presumed men, with our physical strength, are the hunter-gatherers, warriors and natural leaders and protectors of families and communities, have been overturned in not quite two generations. That’s astonishing, but in this age of technology manpower counts for little. Brain is the new brawn and it’s not gender-specific: men’s natural advantage over women is obsolete. Women now have the upper hand and set the gender agenda. What is happening now is not, therefore, the feminist revolution, but its mopping-up operation. High-profile naming and shaming like #metoo is the revolutionaries consolidating victory, the new regime denouncing and purging pre-revolutionary leaders and hate figures, and all they represent. The vile behaviour of ogres like Harvey Weinstein simply makes their task easier.

Revolutions happen because the evils of what they replace can no longer be ignored or tolerated. Endemic sexual harassment and one person’s abusing personal power over another rightly deserve calling out. But in correcting the perceived excesses of millennia, and in the heady thrill of toppling the likes of Weinstein, Don Burke and now Robert Doyle, revolutionary zeal and a desire for vengeance can create dictatorships potentially as bad, even worse, than the regimes they topple. Think Jacobin France, Soviet Russia and post-Shah Iran.

For feminist elites, International Women’s Day is their May Day in Moscow, showcasing themselves and consolidating their revolution. Establishment acts of solidarity like the ABC’s unnecessarily ostentatious, all-female International Women’s Day ensured the rest of us got the message.

Instead of securing their equality goal, the media and political Revolutionary Guards of Australian feminism are creating a new, permanent gender imbalance. The new matriarchy is here. We men have lost.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/03/australian-notes-160

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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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Baby boomers warm to casual sex after ‘following the social norm’

Interesting that Australia is by far the most accepting country when it comes to casual sex. I am actually (just) a PRE-baby boomer but I have had sex with many women over the years. I stopped counting when I got to 50. So I guess I am simply a good Australian. But I DID come of age in the free-wheeling '60s

A one-night stand, fling, tryst or even a dalliance – whatever the name – casual sex is often seen as the preserve of the young.

Yet nearly a third of baby boomers now approve of no-strings-attached sex, according to a new academic study.

Data from The Policy Institute at King’s College London show that UK attitudes on casual sex has changed not just over time but also between the generations, with researchers concluding that, when it comes to casual intimacy, “the social norm has changed and the boomers have just followed that.”

The researchers collated data from an international survey conducted across the past four decades and found that in 2009, just eight per cent of baby boomers (who are born between 1946 and 1964) found casual sex was “justifiable”. But by 2022, this had jumped to 30 per cent.

However, younger cohorts such as Gen Z, which captures anyone born between 1997 and 2012, and millennials, who are born between 1981 and 1996, are still far more likely to hold this view at 67 per cent and 55 per cent respectively.

The researchers also found that in 1999, overall, one in 10 Britons thought having casual sex was justifiable.

However, more than four times as many (42 per cent) held this view in 2022, with a considerable rise from as recently as 2018 (27 per cent).

This shift means the UK is now the fourth most accepting country when it comes to casual sex, ahead of France (26 per cent) and Norway (33 per cent) – and not far off Australia (48 per cent), which tops the list.

‘Moral concerns’ now ‘simple facts’

Professor Bobby Duffy, director of The Policy Institute, said: “It’s easy to lose sight of just how much more liberal the UK has become over a relatively short period of time, and how liberal we are relative to many other nations.

“What were once pressing moral concerns – things like homosexuality, divorce and casual sex – have become simple facts of life for much of the public, and we now rank as one of the most accepting countries internationally.

“This mostly isn’t just driven by younger generations replacing older generations. All generations have changed their views significantly, although the oldest pre-war cohort now often stand out as quite different, and on some issues, like casual sex, there is a clear generational hierarchy, with the youngest much more accepting.”

The researchers also surveyed attitudes around other subjects and found that increased support for euthanasia and divorce marks the UK as one of the most socially liberal countries overall.

Attitudes towards assisted dying in Britain have changed gradually since data was first collected in 1981, but there was a clear acceleration in acceptance between 2009 and 2022, when the proportion of the British public who found it justifiable rose by around 20 per cent.

This attitude shift comes alongside a rise in the number of British members of Dignitas. The assisted dying association reported that there had been an 80 per cent rise in British members in the past decade, from 821 in 2012, to 1,528 by the end of 2022.

The UK had the second highest proportion of people who believed euthanasia was justifiable, just below France, at 19 per cent. Other European countries ranked much lower on this issue, with Italy at nine per cent, and Greece at two per cent.

The UK also ranked highly for acceptance towards divorce, as 68 per cent of Britons said it is “justifiable”.

However, Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said while it is “encouraging to see the British public becoming more libertarian over time among all age groups … I suspect that if it was extended to ask about free speech and lifestyle issues such as smoking and obesity we would find that tolerance is on the wane.”

https://www.inkl.com/newsletters/morning-edition/news/baby-boomers-warm-to-casual-sex-after-following-the-social-norm?utm_campaign=2023-03-08&utm_content=body&utm_medium=morning-edition&utm_source=inkl

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The Australian education system is woefully outdated

Achievement within it is a poor reflection of abiity

The education system in Australia is slow to adapt to the changing needs of society. The Department of Education claims that the opportunities their system provides is central to what students achieve and yet it has failed to provide what I believe is true equal opportunity through the outdated nature of the system.

Naturally, the grades of a student in Australia at all ages are crucial to their opportunity to progress further in the education system. The lowest-performing students in high schools don’t have access to ATAR studies which even then only the highest-scoring ATAR students have access to a university education studying the course that they would like. To study a postgraduate education at university you need to be achieving higher scores than many of your fellow students.

A university degree has become a common requirement for many jobs and positions in society, with year 12 grades an absolute minimum. The further a student is able to travel along the education system, the greater access to and chance of getting better jobs. The education system claims to put the smartest and therefore most appropriate people into the most skilled jobs, jobs which in turn earn the most occupational reward as a reflection of their higher level of intelligence and education. This is shown by the fact that to achieve the most skilled and highest-paying jobs, you need to progress further than many other people along the education system.

However, it does not appear that, in practice, the education system worldwide is putting the most skilled and appropriate people in the most lucrative occupational positions in society. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple (a company whose success is incontestable), claimed in 2019 that over half of his workforce did not have a college degree.

You are also able to read many stories of college dropouts going on to become huge successes. Many companies will hire dropouts from some of the most prestigious universities in the world because the value is in the acceptance letter and not the actual degree. Universities such as Harvard and Yale only accept the brightest students in the world. Employers know they are getting the smartest young minds and, as Tim Cook says, the years spent at university could be spent shaping these obviously capable students into top employees instead of learning a lot of information at university which he claims is by a large part irrelevant to the actual roles of the job.

We can claim that the education system is not putting the most skilled and most appropriate people into the best jobs in society because it is a fact that your intelligence does not equal your occupational reward. If you were to take 100 people of 100 IQ, they would all be earning different occupational rewards. The system cannot claim that the most intelligent students are the ones able to progress further and therefore achieve the incentive of the better-paid jobs because the grading systems of modern education simply do not rely on intelligence.

The façade of the education system is present in the league table system used to rank schools on their performance. The position of a school on the table is determined by the grades of its pupils with the ‘better’ performing schools at the top of table. The league tables are not a true reflection of the performance of a school. For example, the table could compare school Y and school Z, with school Y producing mostly grade A students and boasting a lucrative position at the top of the table, and school Z sitting in a modest position on the table as this school on average produces grade C students. The league table would suggest that school Y far outperforms school Z based on their student’s grades. However, the tables fail to mention any context. If we were to say that school Y only accepts students who are already at a grade A level and school Z accepts students of a grade E or grade D level, we could argue that in reality school Z is a better-performing school as it shows the greater actual improvement amongst performance of students.

The same logic can be applied to all areas of Australian schooling. University students are denied postgraduate study if their grades aren’t high enough in a condition the universities impose to make sure only the most intelligent students can progress the furthest.

However, your grade point average and unit scores which determine your ability to progress further are not an accurate representation of your ability or your intelligence. The Australian education system needs to move on from its heavily quantifiable way of ranking students. A non-working student living with their parents scoring an average of 75 per cent will be considered more favourably for opportunity than a student living alone working full-time hours to survive who is scoring 72 per cent. This is a backwards way of thinking as modern living has changed many factors such as an increased number of international students as well as driven up costs of living. Many students do not have the ability to perform their studies as well as other students so why are we offering opportunity on the sole basis of a student’s ability to perform their studies?

Obviously, we do not want people in university who won’t put in the effort and low scores can be reflective of this, but it is not always the case. The pandemic moved most study online and some students wouldn’t have had consistent access to computer facilities to make the most out of their studies, through no fault of their own. We need an education system that takes more into account of the situation of the individual student as opposed to just seeing them as a number and denying opportunity on the very basis of that number. It seems ironic that the opportunities that the education system aim to provide at ‘the very centre of what they do’ are restricted by the very same workings of that system.

Across all ages students are instinctively judged on their grades. We are judging people on their ability to perform as opposed to their intelligence which is what the education system claims. The capability to progress further in based solely on these test scores and numbers. We need more modern thinking and consideration to the individual situation of students as opposed to a system that is simply rewarded students who are in the most privileged positions of access to study.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-australian-education-system-is-woefully-outdated/

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The ‘anti-discrimination’ bandwagon – coming to a school near you

You have to hand it to the ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors – they are effective. Watch them go from city to city preaching ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’, the only catch being you must submit totally to their worldview.

This cottage industry has seen great success in Western Australia, Queensland, and the Northern Territory: jurisdictions that have all sought to curtail religious freedoms. Since taking the reins of power in Canberra, the Albanese government has similarly been only too happy to oblige – accepting calls for a review on religious exemptions for schools in federal law.

But the feel-good, anti-discrimination messaging of the review’s supporters disguises a radical agenda, one which strips schools of protections that allow them to operate according to a self-determined set of values.

The new provisions, released by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), fly in the face of religious freedom and parental rights. As it stands, political parties would be allowed to hire staff who share their ethos, while schools would not.

Most fair-minded individuals would be appalled by such blatant double standards.

The Institute of Public Affairs’ submission to the Commission’s inquiry found the proposed reforms would; curtail the right of parents to give their children an education consistent with their values; facilitate sectarianism by pushing religious disagreements into the courts; and give government bodies, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission, the power to control what faith-based schools can do, say, and teach.

The ALRC wants government agencies to enforce compliance with new restrictive standards. And yes, you read that right, the ALRC essentially wants to take parents out of the equation and disregard the values and beliefs they want instilled in their children.

It is something straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, except it’s likely to become reality in Australia.

Make no mistake, religious freedom is under direct attack in Australia, and the first formal steps towards new religious discrimination laws have been taken by the Albanese government.

Out with the old and in with the new. Freedom, choice, and Judaeo-Christian values are to be replaced with a rigid creed, which entrench radical ideologies on gender and sexuality.

Worse still, the ALRC wants its reforms extended to all religious bodies in due course, which is perhaps the most concerning part of the whole Consultation Paper. If the narrative that religious protections are harmful to certain marginalised groups takes hold, then the cottage industry of activists has won.

Left-wing activists have been working hard for years to normalise this very idea with little courage shown by religious groups, who have typically been desperate to accommodate the howls of activists at every turn.

The bottom line is that when harm is equated with hurt feelings and is used to put a stop to the dissemination of genuinely held beliefs, religious freedom is dead. The proposed changes will foster greater intolerance and, as such, impacts all people of faith: Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians alike.

By pushing for legislative change, the ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors have ensured their cottage industry will continue to thrive long after this debate fades from public discussion.

Advocates have praised the reforms as progressive, but ultimately the recommendations are in direct conflict with Australia’s long-standing tradition that upholds religious toleration and pluralism.

In the name of progress, ‘anti-discrimination’ warriors are determined to throw out the Western intellectual tradition and replace it with identity politics and Critical Race Theory. Here, the subjective feelings of the individual are elevated above basic freedoms of religion, association, and expression.

Fortunately, there has been some pushback from the Christian community on this issue. Two major Christian schooling associations that represent 150,000 students across the country, have pulled out of the consultation process with the ALRC. The groups claim to have ‘lost faith’ in the inquiry remaining ‘balanced’ in addressing the issue.

As one Catholic Bishop warned late last year, preventing religious schools from requiring staff to teach in line with the school’s faith would strip these schools of their religious essence, while ushering in a Woke quota system for hiring, rather than a system based on shared worldview.

The provisions, if enacted, will also do parents a disservice by taking away their choice to send their child to a school with a genuine religious ethos.

This move against religious freedom also highlights a deeper and more troubling phenomenon occurring across Australia, the detachment of the political class and inner-city elites from mainstream Australians who want their freedoms preserved and to get on with their life.

As you go about your busy day, you may ask yourself, why all the fuss? As former High Court Chief Justices Mason and Brennan once wrote in a joint judgment, freedom of religion is the ‘paradigm freedom of conscience’ and ‘the essence of a free society’.

Ultimately the proposed changes will foster greater intolerance and impact all people of faith – Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians alike. This is not only a serious problem for religious freedom, but also seriously problematic for free speech.

Never forget, many had to fight for the freedoms we enjoy today, we must ensure they are not surrendered in silence.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-anti-discrimination-bandwagon-coming-to-a-school-near-you/ ?

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'Living nightmare': Airline customers call for independent ombudsman

If our bulging mailbag of replies is anything to judge by, January’s column about the airline consumer advocate struck a nerve with readers.

One of them, Claire, has had a torrid time since she and her sick partner tried to check in for their flight home from London in September, only to discover her partner’s Doha-Perth leg hadn’t actually been ticketed.

The flight was operated by Qatar, but booked through Qantas. Qatar said it had informed Qantas of the issue two months previously, in July, but the couple was never told. (Qantas later apologised “for the oversight”.) The airline couldn’t offer them another flight before October and said her partner couldn’t fly home solo using her valid ticket. So, at great expense, they bought seats on Singapore Airlines. A call-centre operator assured them Qantas would refund their fares.

They made formal complaints to the airline after getting home, had no joy (it refused to reimburse them), and went to the airline customer advocate in October. At the time of writing, they’d had no reply. Now they’re waiting on a Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal date to hear their case. They’ve been told that could be six months away.

“I am appalled at the lack of airline regulation in Australia,” Claire wrote. “The blatant disregard for consumers… needs to be addressed by independent regulation.”

That was a common sentiment among our correspondents. “The airline customer advocate is useless,” wrote another aggrieved passenger, Peter Weyling. “Never did I feel confident that the ACA was right on top of my complaint… they did not keep me informed.

“ACA is merely a post office. How can it hold airlines to account if those very same airlines pay for its existence?”

Gleness Stiles wrote about the “living nightmare” she’s been through trying to get reimbursed $10,500 for two business-class flights to South America. The flights were cancelled by Qantas and, she says, the airline agreed she was eligible for a refund way back in April last year. It never came.

In July she forwarded her dispute to the ACA, which replied in August that it couldn’t help because she still had an open complaint with an airline. She’s had repeated assurances over several months from Qantas personnel that they’ve refunded her fares. But she still hasn’t received any money. Gleness and Claire’s ordeals sound like exactly the sorts of cases an independent ombudsman would resolve. If only we had one.

There were many more tales of woe. Jacob L flew to Hawaii with his partner last June where they had to holiday without their luggage – for eight days. The airline took three months to respond to their appeals, after which he lodged a request with the advocate’s office. He finally heard from Catherine Addison-Walsh (the advocate) at the end of January that she’s requested an update from the airline. Eight months have passed since the incident and he’s still waiting for a resolution.

Cathryn Stavert runs a “Jetstar Support Group” on Facebook that was formed in the Covid chaos of 2020. “People were just screaming out for help. Where do we go?” she says.

She’s had plenty of experience since then helping peeved passengers with complaints to the ACA. Many of those who contact her think the advocate is an impartial referee. She has to explain repeatedly that it’s not, that it’s funded by the country’s four main airlines.

There is one happy ending to this story. Phillip Carruthers used to work at the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman so knows his way around complaint-handling schemes. He had never heard of the advocate until a recent dispute with Virgin over a $3000 discrepancy.

“I contacted the advocate about a month after my travel. I (knew) there must be some kind of complaints body, but it wasn’t easy to find!” he wrote.

Barely a month later he received an email from the advocate confirming Virgin would pay him the outstanding $3000. A few weeks later the money was in his account.

“In summary, I was happy with the service but, really, I did all the work, using the right terms from my consumer protection background. All the advocate really had to do was send it on to an appropriate person.”

Stavert dismisses the advocate as “a complete waste of time”. “Why isn’t there an ombudsman for airlines, and the travel industry?” she asks, quite reasonably.

After the travel turmoil of recent years, now would seem a good time for the federal government to look at establishing just such an agency. A properly independent one.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/living-nightmare-airline-customers-call-for-independent-ombudsman/news-story/b89f27b88ee7586a6210411cbd672a05

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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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Australia stuck in reverse on energy, IR and tax: Productivity Commission chair Gary Banks

A very refreshing dose of cold logic

Inaugural Productivity Commission chair Gary Banks says Australia is going backwards on energy, industrial relations, taxation and government spending, with the public losing confidence in democracy and the nation facing new sovereign risk problems.

Professor Banks, the chair of the Productivity Commission ­between 1998 and 2013, said the nation was losing the ability to implement policies to properly “cope with change, to be competitive and support economic growth”.

In an interview with The Australian ahead of the release of a review into Australia’s productivity performance, Professor Banks said the nation had written off its comparative advantage in energy, failed to pursue lowest cost emissions cuts and electricity was ­becoming an unreliable luxury.

His intervention coincided with a pre-budget submission from BHP saying the government’s industrial relations agenda would harm productivity and any move to increase taxes in the resources sector would lead to “reduced investment, fewer jobs and ... lower living standards for ­Australians”.

Professor Banks said “the monumental bungling of the so-called ­energy transition” had seen ­multiple governments contrive to “maximise the cost to the nation of reducing emissions” while ­evidence-based policy had been abandoned in favour of “simple-minded belief”.

“We are in a situation where it’s become impossible to openly discuss the best way forward,” he said.

“Any attempt to use evidence or logic immediately brands you as a ‘denier’. In the Ukraine, power stations are destroyed by Russian missiles. In Australia, we blow them up ourselves.

“And we do this without having a way to replace the critical 24/7 service they provide ... As if that’s not bad enough, our governments are making it hard for gas to step into the breech – and is dismissing nuclear out of hand. Talk about daft.”

Professor Banks said decisions being taken by Labor were exacerbating the energy crisis, with a “U-turn” on workplace regulations saddling the nation with higher labour costs on top of the inflation of power bills caused by the “subsidised displacement of fossil fuels”.

“Historically, this country’s low-energy costs partly offset the high self-imposed burdens of our rigid labour market. That’s no longer the case. In fact we’ve brought about the opposite situation,” he said. “On the one hand, we have been busily eliminating our comparative advantage in ­energy, while on the other we are reviving our traditional disadvantage with respect to labour.”

Ahead of the release by Jim Chalmers of the Productivity Commission’s 1000-page, five-yearly review expected later this month, Professor Banks launched a withering assessment of the expansion in government, likened the NDIS to a “fiscal sinkhole” and lamented increased spending in education and health despite declining student attainment and a deterioration in key health performance indicators.

“The government position seems to be that most public spending is untouchable, even at the political cost of breaking its election promises on taxation,” he said. “While many private sector firms are under the pump, the public sector is flourishing. Employee numbers and salaries went up spectacularly during Covid.

“It would be great to mark this as a plus for the economy but government services tend to have low measured productivity and many involve waste – either through poor design or rorting. This has not improved with extra funding.

“While education spending has gone up a lot, student attainment has gone down, at least by OECD standards. Health spending has continued its upward trajectory, but indicators of performance continue to ­languish. Then there’s the fiscal sinkhole called the NDIS, a painful lesson about the unintended consequences of policy on the run.”

Professor Banks also took aim at a tax system geared more towards redistribution than growth, the return of subsidies for favoured industries that had been “greatly ramped up under the current government” and infrastructure policy being used for “short-term politics rather than long-term economic benefit”.

The combination of policy failures had seen Australia enter a “new phase in our democracy in which electorates can no longer trust what a political party says it will do or not do in office”.

“This erodes public trust in government and in democracy itself, as recent survey results illustrate. Moreover, when companies lose confidence in the rules, their propensity to invest, particularly in long-lived projects, is obviously impaired,” he said. “I never thought the sovereign risk issues prevalent in certain Third World or socialist countries would one day afflict my own.”

The Treasurer used an essay in The Monthly earlier this year to flag an overhaul of the Productivity Commission to “renew and revitalise” the economic body and ensure it focused on ­“prosperity and progress more broadly”.

In February, he also flagged the release of the Productivity Commission’s five-yearly review by the end of March, revealing it contained nine volumes and more than 70 recommendations.

“The government won’t pick up and run with every single recommendation from the Productivity Commission, but I think there will be areas of common ground,” Dr Chalmers said. "I hink there will be opportunities to align our economic plan with some of the directions put forward by the PC.”

Professor Banks urged Dr Chalmers to lead a national debate on the findings as “(Paul) Keating and (Peter) Costello did so effectively in the past” but was sceptical of the chances of major reform. He suspected only a few recommendations would be embraced.

The two policy areas of which Professor Banks was most critical were energy and industrial relations, with government legislation expanding access to multi- ­employer bargaining being singled out as a major mistake.

“Now we have another flurry of IR legislation designed to further boost union power, under the pretext of ‘getting wages moving’ and ‘job security’. Most of these so-called reforms will only succeed in further undermining the market ‘dynamism’ that Treasury sees as paramount to raising productivity growth,” he said.

“In the fashion of the times, the legislation that got rushed through parliament was called ‘secure jobs, higher wages’. I thought at the time that a more accurate title would have been ‘secure unions, fewer jobs’ And this has further to run.”

Professor Banks said the “truth that is no longer spoken out loud” was that Work Choices “actually made economic sense” but that its overturning by Kevin Rudd had resulted in every Coalition leader since John Howard being “gun-shy” about IR reform.

On climate and energy policy, Professor Banks said the 1990s Industry Commission had determined that “as a tiny contributor to a global phenomenon, Australia should only act in concert with other countries”.

“Without action by the big emitters like China and America, nothing could be gained,” he said. “Secondly, in order to minimise damage to the economy, we should make use of market-based instruments like taxes and tradable permits. That’s because in principle these enable emissions to be reduced where the costs of doing it are lowest.

“These and other findings went over pretty well with both sides of politics at the time, as I recall. So the policy outlook seemed hopeful ... How did we get to a situation in which electricity will not only become a luxury but an unreliable one?”

His comments come amid a political contest over the passage of the government’s safeguards mechanism aimed at slashing the emissions of big emitters by nearly 5 per cent a year out to 2030.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/australia-stuck-in-reverse-on-energy-ir-and-tax-productivity-commission-chair-gary-banks/news-story/72781db5eb8c40de7ab6f9429cdd0be0

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Pauline Hanson calls out Anthony Albanese as migration to Australia is set to soar past 300,000 despite the nation face a housing crisis

Where will they all live?

Pauline Hanson has called out Anthony Albanese over the estimated 300,000 migrants set to arrive in Australia this year as the country battles a severe housing crisis.

The One Nation senator took to social media to lambast the prime minster on immigration as she shared an image of a series of newspaper stories that illustrated Queensland's crippling rental crisis on Monday.

'Anthony Albanese's broken immigration election promise means Australia faces an influx of 300,000+ foreign arrivals this year alone!' she wrote.

'Meanwhile, many Aussie families are struggling to find a house to rent or buy and those that do are paying a huge price!'

She claimed it was 'more lies, more broken promises, and more pain for Aussies'.

Senator Hanson told Daily Mail Australia: 'The Albanese government stated it would increase immigration from 160,000 to 195,000 per year (not including refugees), primarily to address skills and labour shortages in Australia.' 'However, more than 300,000 are coming in. That is more than a 50% increase.

'Most Australians do not favour high immigration levels and One Nation wants a national plebiscite to be held on the question so the major parties can be unequivocally shown this and put in place immigration policies which reflect what the electorate wants, rather than what big retailers want.'

Mr Albanese had in fact agreed before last year's election to increase permanent migration from 160,000 to 195,000 places and to speed up visa processing for foreign workers.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers conceded back in January that Treasury had 'underestimated' immigration numbers. He explained that the higher figure was likely due to severe labour shortages and the return of international students. 'We've got serious skills and labour shortages that are acting as a handbrake,' he said.

'It's a reasonable assumption the number may be higher than the 235,000 printed in the Budget.'

Senator Hanson suggested that the miscalculation was a significant oversight by Treasury. 'The Treasurer is right on board with the big retailers and other big companies, and is ignoring the electorate - most of us simply do not want a big Australia,' she said.

'The underestimate to which he refers shows that immigration is out of control under Labor and they cannot be trusted.'

To remedy the housing crisis, One Nation has called for a ban on foreign ownership of all residential property, both new and established, and give foreign owners 12 months to 'get out of the market'.

Both New Zealand and Canada have already implemented similar measures to ban or heavily restrict foreign ownership.

'This would significantly increase the supply of housing for Australians to buy,' Senator Hanson said.

'Many foreigners who buy Australian residential properties come from countries which do not allow Australians to buy property there.'

The party wants immigration to be reduced to 'sustainable levels' to lower the demand for housing in Australia.

A 2018 housing affordability study by the Grattan Institute estimated that up to 550 new dwellings were needed in Australia for every 1,000 new immigrants.

One Nation has also called for planning reform at both the state and territory level, reducing or eliminating stamp duty and red tape at the local government level to fix the housing crisis.

The party says the government needs to train up a skilled home-grown workforce to fill labour shortages rather than outsourcing work.

'There are more than 920,000 Australians currently receiving unemployment benefits, and while many may be unemployable for a variety of reasons that cannot possibly be the case for all of them and probably isn’t the case for most of them,' she added.

The migration figures come just over a year after Mr Albanese refused to back the Morrison government's push to take on 160,000 new migrants when he was opposition leader.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11824633/Pauline-Hanson-slams-Anthony-Albanese-migration-set-soar-past-300-000-amidst-housing-crisis.html

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Labor makes dramatic coal policy backflip that's sure to infuriate the party's green left

NSW Labor leader Chris Minns has risked a serious rift within his party by flagging the possibility of buying back Australia's largest coal-fired power station in a bid to shore up the state's energy supply and bring down electricity bills.

The Australian Energy Market Operator last week warned the east coast could face rolling blackouts with renewable energy generation and gas unlikely to keep up with demand in the next few years.

Despite the impending threat of the lights going out, coupled with spiralling retail energy costs, there has been great reluctance from governments to pour money into the fossil fuel industry - fearing backlash from environmentally-conscious voters.

But Mr Minns appears to be positioning Labor for a major backflip in energy policy ahead of the March 25 election.

The Opposition leader said a government he leads may look to take control of the Eraring power station in Lake Macquarie, which is scheduled to close in 2025, seven years earlier than previously planned.

'I'm not going to let the power run out in NSW, and I'm not going to rule out (buying Eraring),' he told told 2GB's Ben Fordham. 'It might be a negotiation between the government and a private company and I acknowledge that before the election, I'm putting that out there.'

Mr Minns said Eraring provides 25 per cent of NSW's electricity needs. 'If it's taken offline, and there's not the firming power in place, we could have major shortages,' he said.

When its owner Origin Energy made the announcement last year that it would close in 2025, NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean said he was disappointed by the decision.

He promised the state would build what he described as the 'biggest battery in the southern hemisphere' to make up for the power production that would be lost. But, having sold the plant in 2013, the Coalition then tried to buy it back in 2021 for almost five times the selling price.

'This power station was sold for $50million, Matt Kean tried to buy it back for $240million,' Mr Minns said. 'When you sell off critical infrastructure that the state needs, it undermines industry, the economy and the budget position in the long run.'

The Labor leader's comments came after Mr Kean said the Coalition, if reelected, could intervene to keep Eraring open past 2025 to ease shortfalls and rising prices.

But as Labor flipped to a more pro-coal view of power supply, the Liberals flipped the other way and Mr Kean walked away from what he had said hours earlier.

Premier Dominic Perrottet, whose Liberal Party is facing strong challenges from pro-environment Teal candidates in several seats, said intervening to extend Eraring's lifespan was 'not part of our plans'.

'We have an energy roadmap that's delivering $32billion of private sector investment to ensure we have a long term reliable and clean energy future. That's our plan,' he said.

The Premier added that he and Mr Kean were 'on completely the same page' about the power station's future.

Mr Minns told Fordham that the Australian Energy Market Operator - the national regulator - 'released a report last week indicating that we do need to worry about shortfalls in supply in the energy markets over the next 24 months'.

He said one of the reasons Labor plans to set up a NSW Energy Security Corporation is because 'we're worried about exactly these things'.

'When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing we need to make sure we’ve got dispatchable power for the people of NSW,' Mr Minns said.

'At the moment that's not going to happen because Matt Kean has not done the work to make sure there's energy security within the network. 'I can't rule out further action in relation to Eraring.

The Coalition sold off all five NSW coal-fired power plants since it won power in 2011, while the previous Labor NSW government sold off energy suppliers, but Mr Minns has ruled out any further privatisation if Labor wins power.

In February, he said 'Privatisation does not work. It has been a disaster for NSW and under Labor it stops.'

If Labor bought Eraring back, it would be the opposite of privatisation, it would mean the state taking back control of a previously privatised asset.

If the buyback was about almost anything other than a coal-fired power station it would get the backing of Labor's left and the Greens.

But it does concern fossil fuels - and Mr Minns will have calculated that however many votes the switch loses to the Greens and minor parties the decision will come back in spades in the seats Labor needs to win in Western Sydney.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11825145/NSW-election-Labors-Chris-Minns-backflips-energy-policy-plans-buy-Eraring-power-station.html

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Anthony Albanese is accused of breaking ANOTHER election promise with two big tax changes

Anthony Albanese has been accused of breaking yet another election promise as his government pushes new franking credit tax laws that will affect Australian shareholders.

The Prime Minister has already copped political heat over his contentious new superannuation tax policy and now he's facing a new political battle over franking credits - a policy that arguably cost Labor the 2019 election.

The government introduced a bill last month that seeks to restrict the ability of companies to distribute franking credits to shareholders as part of a share buyback or capital raising.

Debate on the bill is resuming on Tuesday, with shadow treasurer Angus Taylor accusing Labor of breaking yet another election promise.

Franking credits are tax credits that prevent shareholders from being taxed twice. The scheme gives tax credits to shareholders on their dividends, taking into account how a corporation they have invested in has already paid the 30 per cent company tax.

Mr Albanese had previously ruled out major changes to both superannuation and franking credits.

But Labor's proposals would affected those aged over 75 and superannuation funds.

WHAT ARE FRANKING CREDITS?

Franking credits are tax credits that stop 'double taxation'.

Companies have already paid tax on their profits when they hand them out to shareholders as dividends.

Dividends, which are typically funded by profits, are then distributed to shareholders 'fully franked', with a 'franking credit' applying.

At tax time, shareholders get the value of the franking credit as a tax refund.

That means they don't pay tax on profits, because a company has already paid tax. This stops double taxation.

One major change the government is making would stop dividends from capital raisings being eligible for franking credits.

They would also give off-market share buy-backs the same treatment as on-market buy-backs.

On-market buybacks are when a company buys its shares through an exchange, such as the ASX, whereas off-market buybacks are when a company will offer to buy shares back directly from the shareholder.

The changes set to be announced on Tuesday would result in almost $600million in budget savings over the next five years.

Australians aged over 75, Australian super funds and companies, and charities have been found to benefit the most from franking credits, according to data released by the government last week.

Mr Taylor criticised the changes, arguing they would hurt those who lived off their dividends during a cost of living crisis. 'The Prime Minister and the Treasurer went to the election promising Australians that they 'wouldn't touch' franking credits and yet in 10 months they've added two tax grabs on Australian shareholders,' he said.

'This is just another tax on super. Another tax on Australians' retirement savings. And another broken promise on tax. 'Whether it is franking credits or superannuation, Labor can't control its spending and so it's going after the hard-earned dollars of Australians to pay for its pet projects.

'You can't trust Labor to keep promises and you can't trust Labor to run the economy.'

Bill Shorten brought a policy changing franking credit laws to the 2019 federal election, and later admitted that the plan contributed to his loss.

The Prime Minister promised weeks before the May 2022 election there would no changes to superannuation.

But late last month, he announced his Labor government would stop Australians with more than $3million in super from being able to make contributions and pay a concessional rate of just 15 per cent, from July 1, 2025.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11827759/Anthony-Albaneses-government-comes-fire-franking-credit-tweaks.html

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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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