The Green/Left panicked by Pauline Hanson

Chronically angry Liz Conor is anyway.  And her elitism pops out quickly too.  She says below of Pauline:  "And why does Hanson even have an opinion on climate science?".  The obvious riposte:  "And why does Liz Conor have an opinion on climate science?" 

The rest of her rant is just one wild accusation after another.  I have noted some in the body of her text.  I actually wonder if she is serious.  I think she just enjoys being a dramatist.  But is she right in thinking that Pauline is bad for the Greenies? 

Her offsider in Queensland, Malcolm Roberts, is a ferociously well-informed climate skeptic so she will have real intellectual firepower behind her.  Nobody will be able to bluff her with phony statistics etc.  So it is highly probable that Greenie policies will come under heavy challenge from her.  And she is not alone in climate skepticism.  About half the Liberal party are closet climate skeptics so if she demands anti-Warmist measures as her price for supporting the conservatives in crucial votes, there will be a real willingness to give that to her


Fellow Austraiyans. If you are reading me now it means that I have become murderous. Murderously, apoplectically incensed.

Pauline Hanson appears to have picked up a spot in our Senate at the time of writing, possibly even two or more. She will represent Queensland in our House of Review, where our nation’s proposed laws are rejected or amended. And it’s not a three-year term. Unless Turnbull (potentially newly rolled into Prime Minister Morrison out of revenge for the LNP’s slashed majority) finds some other spurious reason to call a double dissolution, Hanson’s term is Six. Six. Six.

Hanson will make extravagant use of the Senate’s committee system, already proposing royal commissions into Islam and climate science. How in chrissname do you conduct an inquiry into one of the three major world religions? Imagine the terms of reference. Are there too many believers? Should they perform the pilgrimage to Mecca? Are Humans superior to Angels? Will the Australian Royal commission into erm, Islam require the seventh-century originals of its foundational documents be tendered – the Qur’an, hadith and tafsir?

And why does Hanson even have an opinion on climate science? Why are racists climate deniers? Does Hanson have doubts about enlightenment empiricism? Logical positivism? The verification of Authentic Knowledge? Or has she, like most climate deniers and obstructers, featherbedded her campaign with undeclared funds from fossil fuel conglomerates?

And this from the state where a few short weeks ago 69,000 jobs were unceremoniously scuppered from tourism on our ghostly white Great Barrier Reef. 5.2 billion in revenue sank without trace with the ‘jobs and growth’ shipwreck of LNP sloganeering. [That job loss was a Greenie prediction -- amid actual thriving of reef tourism]

The reef grief and reef rage many of us felt was bad enough. I mean it’s nice to banner hope for the unbleached 7 per cent and ‘recovering’ 65 per cent with a donate button but let’s be honest, the waters aren’t going to get cooler in the long-term, there will be more frequent El Niño events, worsening storms and Crown of Thorn starfish outbreaks. ["frequent El Niño events"?  They are reasonably predictable but they are not frequent]

The reef is terminal. [The head of the GBRMPA doesn't think so and it's his job to know] We have five years to save what little remains but instead the two parties that oversaw this catastrophe now hang in the balance, continuing to accept party donations of $3.7 million from the corporations responsible. While still in unfettered power the Libs demanded UNESCO whitewash any mention of the reef from its report into risks to world heritage sites and tourism.

So. Once you’ve taken out the largest living organism on the planet how precisely do you top that? It seems their ecocidal mania knows no bounds. Both parties can lay claim to the dubious distinction of perpetrating the only environmental catastrophe visible from space.

These people are not in jail where they belong. Instead they spent the last eight weeks fronting up to Australians asking to be entrusted again. We are not in safe hands.

As the 350.org Nemo who intercepted Turnbull might reasonably protest to humans, ‘I’m fed up with being told, this is our reef. Well, where the hell do I go? I draw the line when told I must pay and continue paying for something that happened over 20 years ago,’ namely early and credible warnings of global warming.

What kind of electoral dissonance are One Nation Voters suffering? As we of the Greens voting variety have been instructed, the workers of Australia have been so cowed by threats to Medicare they simply cannot spare a thought for refugees. Apparently the capacity for workers to run more than one thought process in their heads at any time is somewhat limited. Only the left commentariat can multitask, it seems.

But how can we fathom the thinking of One Nation voters, many of them jumping ship from the Palmer United Party.

I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Caucasians, tax evasions and Australasians. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos, and do not assimilate.

We are bringing in people from Oxley at the moment. There was a huge amount coming to our polling booths, and they’ve got diseases, they’ve got BIAS.

Either Blind Freddy or Rip Van Winkel would have to vote for a candidate who did time for electoral fraud. Even if her conviction was overturned it shows a hair-raising lack of judgement in whom she entrusts the basics of organisational governance.

Where will Hanson-voters’ intolerance for Halal snackpacks take us? What other food allergies are they intending to force on the rest of us? Battered Islamophobia? Deep-fried homophobia? Queue-jumping dimsims?

Hanson will find a way to jumble racism with climate obstruction. As Naomi Klein presciently argues they already go hand in glove. She writes, “there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.”

But let’s give Pauline the last word on facing imminent destruction: “Do not let my passing distract you for even a moment … For the sake of our children and our children’s children, you must fight on.”

Thanks for the tip Pauline. You can bet we will.

SOURCE






How Australian voters are ‘raging against the machine’

THERE’S a revolution happening.  It’s the rise of the “up yours vote”, the protest movement that brought Britain to its political knees and continues to fuel the Trump campaign in America.

That movement, simmering away for almost 20 years in Australia, finally bubbled over at the weekend when voters thumbed their noses at the political establishment, en masse.

An unprecedented quarter of Australians have given their first preference to parties other than the Labor and the Coalition — the highest primary vote for minor parties and independents in the country’s history — resulting in what is shaping up to be another hung parliament.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten told reporters yesterday that Turnbull had “Brexited” himself, choosing to ignore the fact that such a result doesn’t make Labor look great either.  While the ALP improved its primary vote from the 2013 poll, it was still the party’s second-lowest in 70 years.

“It’s the rage against the machine that is Canberra,” says Craig Emerson, adjunct professor at Victoria University and a former cabinet minister in the Gillard government.

“People believe the system doesn’t work for them; it might for business and the wealthy but it doesn’t work for the young people. If people see the system isn’t working and is completely irrelevant to them, then they are going to vote for the minorities.

“There is some speculation that Turnbull will cobble together another election in a year. If he does, he’ll get the same result. You know that saying about the definition of insanity? The definition of insanity of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

After the hung parliament in 2013, veteran political journalist Michelle Grattan compared Australia’s democratic system to a healthy person suffering from the flu. “It’s not seriously ill, but somewhat off colour. Citizens feel disillusioned, cynical and discontented with how this system is working,” she wrote in the foreword of a Democratic Governance Institute report.

“Three years of a federal hung parliament has probably made them more jaded than usual.”

Considering we have endured six changes in prime minister in just nine years, Australians have been incredibly patient, always wanting to give the benefit of the doubt, to believe our leaders have our best interests at heart.

Ironically, it’s the much maligned millennials who have taken us by the shoulders and bitch-slapped us out of our complacency. After all, they’re the ones who are going to have to survive this unaffordable, unforgiving world we have allowed to be created.

They — and increasingly their parents — are the behind the rise of the “up yours vote”.

“There’s a post-war unwritten agreement in Western countries which said it was OK for the rich to get richer as long as the poor and the middle got richer too,” Dr Emerson told news.com.au.  “But that agreement has been broken — the rich are getting richer and the poor are going nowhere and that’s why Donald Trump has emerged as a candidate.

“There’s another agreement, an intergenerational agreement in which we ensure that future generations will at least be able to afford their own home. But that agreement has been broken by Baby Boomers who are saying, ‘It’s all mine and I want more’.

“Our national pastime is whingeing. By voting, we earn the right to complain and moan all we want, even if we only earned it by drawing a cock and balls on our ballot paper in protest.”

Yep, it looks like the wind of change has finally arrived. Or has it?

“While a hung parliament might seen like a relatively common phenomenon in recent times, historically, they’re more unusual,” Adelaide law lecturer Adam Webster wrote in The Conversation. “The 2010 election result was the first hung parliament since 1940.”

So, only our third hung parliament since 1940 but unlikely to be our last.

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TEFLON COATED: Nothing bad is sticking to the Australian dollar

Despite the predictions of doom

The Australian dollar might as well be Teflon coated at present. No matter what bad news is thrown at its way, it simply refuses to stick.

This was no better demonstrated that the price action witnessed on Monday.

After gapping lower on the open following an incredibly tight election outcome over the weekend, the Aussie ground higher over the course of the Asian session, finding strength as Chinese stocks and commodity futures ripped higher.

From a low of .7444, the AUD/USD eventually closed Monday trade buying .7534, up 0.55% for the session.

It has now rallied for five straight sessions, extending its gains from the low of June 28 to 3%. The winning streak is now the longest seen since mid-March.

Brexit. Prospect of a hung parliament in Australia. Potential AAA ratings downgrade. Not enough to stop the Teflon-coated Aussie

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More education funding is no guarantee of better schools

We live in a time when reductions in government spending – and increases in taxes – will have to be made if our children and grandchildren are not to face much bigger funding cuts and tax hikes when lenders cease being willing to roll over (let alone increase) government debt at its present low interest rates.

Kicking the fiscal can down the road, which was the preferred approach by every party in the latest federal election, shows a preference for the current population to live better at the expense of our descendants, who will live worse as a result of our unwillingness to bring government budgets into better balance and start reducing debt now.

Big-ticket items in commonwealth and state budgets must come under heavy pressure when the inevitable spending cuts begin, because it is impossible to prune budgets severely while leaving major expenditure items untouched.

Health, pensions and/or education cannot escape the scythe, in due course, whatever the eventual result from Saturday’s election.

It may seem unthinkable that government spending on education be substantially reduced. But just how bad would the effects be on the quality of the education that our young will receive?

Many of my readers will have watched Revolution School (ABC2, Tuesdays, 8.30pm). If not, I recommend you catch up with it on ABC iView. It is about the turnaround in student outcomes at Kambrya College in Berwick, an outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne.

When principal Michael Muscat took over in 2008, the school was chaotic and its academic results were very poor. Now, within seven years, Kambrya has become one of the most improved schools in Victoria in terms of Year 12 results. And not because of any preferential expenditure increase compared with other Victorian schools.

Kambrya has achieved its turnaround simply by working with the University of Melbourne to implement better teacher training and classroom practices.

Professor John Hattie, director of Melbourne University’s Education Research Institute, says improving the quality of feedback students receive and ensuring positive teacher-student interaction leads to the best outcomes. Class size, homework and public or private schooling are not nearly so important as the quality of individual teachers, Professor Hattie says.

Schools don’t make much difference – it’s the teachers. When I look at Kambrya’s achievements, the major message we should take home is that relentless focus on the quality of teaching can truly make a difference to the lives of students and that can happen in any school in the nation.

We have known this for a long time but have been side-tracked by vested political interests into supposing that spending more money on schools means the quality of teaching will rise as well. It hasn’t and it doesn’t.

SOURCE

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