ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is reflecting on the legacy of Kevin Rudd.  He is not impressed.




So much for free speech! Right-wing anti-feminist Milo Yiannopoulous BANNED by the Western Australian government ahead of nationwide tour

Controversial far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned from appearing at government owned venues in Western Australia.

Ahead of Yiannopoulos's Australian tour, WA premier Mark McGowan said he was not welcome in the state. 'I don't think he's welcome in WA… so we will make sure that all government venues are not available to him,' Mr McGowan told 9 News on Monday.

The 'anti-feminist' and 'outrage troll' will begin his Australian tour in November.

The so-called 'internet supervillain' shot to fame after he was banned from Twitter when he was blamed for a campaign of abuse directed at Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.

He has likened feminism to cancer, Islam to AIDS and he was sacked as Tech Editor at Breitbart News after audio surfaced of him appearing to condone sexual relationships between teenage boys and older men.

'Anyone who defends pedophiles and associates with Nazis, I don't think is a rational person, we shouldn't have them delivering lectures and performances to West Australians,' Mr McGowan said.

A petition demanding Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton deny Yiannopoulos a visa has attracted just over 1,000 signatures as of Monday.

A counter-petition, set up by political commentator Mark Latham, has been signed well over 11,000 times.

Daily Mail Australia understands that his visa will not be cancelled and his tour will go ahead.

'Aren't they sweet? The best they could do was marshal 900 people to sign that petition,' Yiannopoulos said.

'There was about 10,000 who signed the counter-petition to let me in. 'I just find it sweet, adorable and charming when people get so upset about a gay man having the wrong opinions and telling the wrong jokes.'

Yiannopolous will bring his Troll Academy Tour to Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and the Gold Coast from December 1.

'The response had been absolutely amazing. We've just announced a second show in Sydney - the first one sold out in a couple of weeks,' he said.

'And then my book comes out in Australia in November. So it's going to be a whole Christmas of Milo Down Under.'

SOURCE





High costs revealed in new NBN data

MALCOLM Turnbull has opened up on the NBN’s biggest downfalls, blaming Labor for billions of dollars wasted during the troubled rollout.

In a candid press conference, the Prime Minister said Australia should have learned from New Zealand’s example when setting up the NBN and that it was a “mistake” to go about it the way they did.

“Setting up a new government company to do it was a big mistake,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“If you want to look at a country that did this exercise better, it’s New Zealand, and what they did there was ensure the incumbent telco, the Telstra equivalent, split network operations from retail operations and that network company became, in effect, the NBN.

“The virtue of that was you had a business that knew what it was doing, that was up and running and had 100 years of experience getting on with the job and the Kiwis have done this at much less cost.”

“So the way Labor set it up was hugely expensive ... I’ve said this many times, it’s a fact of life that we can’t recover,” he said.

“So having been left in a bad place by Labor, what we are doing is ensuring we deliver it as quickly and cost effectively as possible but I have to say to you, again — one complaint is one complaint too many.”

His comments came as the man responsible for the national rollout blamed a “land grab” by internet retailers for the one-in-four Australians unhappy with the speed of their fast broadband connection.

NBN Co chief executive Bill Morrow says because retailers are aggressively competing for market share, they’re unable to charge consumers what he believes they should to pay to provide increased bandwidth.

As a result, some households and businesses are unable to access the high speeds they expect or led to believe to expect by retailers.

The number one NBN consumer issue with was broadband speeds between 7pm and 11pm — which Mr Morrow dubs the “Netflix hours”.

Consumers were led to believe they could access broadband speeds of between 12-25 megabits a second for the same price they were paying for a pre-NBN service (5 megabits a second).

About 85 per cent of premises were signing up to speeds of 25 megabits or less, and market studies showed of those, three out four were “quite satisfied” with what they were paying and the service they’re getting, Mr Morrow said. “The reality is ... about one-in-four people are unhappy with the way their service is being produced.”

Mr Morrow said what consumers were paying retailers and the money retailers were paying NBN Co was not enough to even to recover the $49 billion cost of rolling out the network.

“If the (retail service providers) RSPs cannot get the consumers to pay more, then we have a problem.” But it was too early to say whether that meant additional taxpayer support. Mr Turnbull admitted the NBN’s return of three per cent was not enough for it to be deemed a government asset or make it a commercial return for the stock market.

On another front, Mr Morrow believes his company may struggle to compete with mobile networks.

Low-cost city connections were subsidising the more difficult-to-wire homes, but margins would be squeezed if city customers turn to ultra-fast mobile networks for their internet connections.

“We are kind of fighting the competitive fight with one hand tied behind our back,” Mr Morrow said.

SOURCE





Labor’s energy policy to deliver $200 bill shock

Labor’s policy of a 50 per cent ­renewable energy target by 2030 would require the closure of 75 per cent of existing coal-fired power in Australia and add almost $200 a year to the average household ­energy bill, according to analysis of modelling commissioned by the Climate Change Authority.

In the first indication of the cost of Labor’s stated energy policy, ­including a 45 per cent emissions reduction target, the modelling ­reveals that to achieve such a goal, 17,000 megawatts of coal-fired power would have to be taken out of the National Electricity Market.

This would correspond to 75 per cent of the existing coal-fired generation, or 10 coal-fired power stations of equivalent size to ­Hazelwood, reducing the current 16 coal-fired power stations in the market to only one or two.

The data analysis drawn from modelling provided to the Climate Change Authority for its 2016 Policy Options for Australia’s Electricity Supply Sector — Special Review Research Report, contained in a government briefing note provided to The Australian, also reveals that it would increase energy bills by $1921 over 10 years from 2020 to 2030.

The modelling was based on an emissions intensity scheme that sought to achieve a 52 per cent renewable energy target by 2030 — the closest model to Labor’s stated policy of a 50 per cent RET. Labor has previously signalled that an emissions intensity scheme was its preferred option to achieve that.

The annual rise in annual electricity bills to realise its policy, ­according to data contained in spreadsheets attached to the report, would start at about $100 a year in 2020 and peak at $285 a year in 2027. A further data sheet contained in the modelling appendices, under chapter three of the report relating to an EIS, shows that this would also entail taking an extra 17,000 megawatts of black and brown coal-fired generation out of the market by 2030. This would be on top of the 1600MW taken out with the closure of Hazelwood in Victoria.

Bill Shorten has refused to release modelling of the opposition’s energy policy, claiming more details on the 45 per cent emissions reduction target would be ­released before the next election.

The CCA modelling will strengthen the Turnbull government’s case for its national ­energy guarantee — and its promise of a $115 annual saving for households — which the opposition has continued to ridicule as being a saving of only 50c a day.

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Labor would rather service misery than solve it

Malcolm Turnbull and his mates are cuddling up to One Nation and attacking poor people, thundered senator Doug Cameron.

“They are shovelling $65 billion out to the big end of town and screwing ordinary working families in this country,” he told the Senate last week, indignation rising like steam

Not for the first time, it was hard to reconcile the senator’s hyperbolic rhetoric with the prudent and pragmatic legislation under debate.

Christian Porter’s welfare reform bill will make welfare simpler to claim, cheaper to administer and harder to rort. It simplifies a welfare system so complicated no one fully understands it, not the bureaucrats charged with administering it, the minister or, one presumes, the good senator ­himself.

It also insists that recipients ­adhere to obligations, such as staying off the funny fags, for example, or other psychoactive substances that would render them useless or dangerous employees.

Labor, blinded by sentimentality, reckons it is unreasonable to make junkies accountable for the illegal substances they consume, inhale or inject. We must listen to the experts, they tell us; drugs are not something one chooses to take or from which one can choose to abstain. They are, says Labor’s Sharon Claydon, “complex public health problems, and they require a public health policy response”.

Drug addiction is “a medical issue that needs to be tackled properly in a medical way”, agreed her colleague Amanda Rishworth.

Framing drug-taking as a disease over which the user — sorry, victim — has no control is an intellectual delusion common among progressives. Drug takers can’t be blamed; their condition is biologically, neurologically, genetically and environmentally determined. Like the punks in West Side Story seeking Officer Krupke’s forbearance, they are sociologically sick and psychologically disturbed.

Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that every child oughta get.
We ain’t no delinquents,
We’re misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!

Dole junkies have been added to the growing list of victims by progressive MPs who are forever on the lookout for new outlets for their compassion.

Drug use cannot be stopped “by punishing those who are caught up in this illness”, Anne Aly informed the house. It was a job, she said, for “the treatment sector”.

It is a measure of the growth in the availability of state-funded assistance for the drug-addled that we can talk of “the treatment sector” with a straight face. This quasi-medical, quasi-sociological, quasi-psychological industry barely existed a quarter of a century ago. Today it turns over hundreds of millions a year of our money.

The treatment sector, as one would expect, is opposed to drug tests and anything else that encourages drug users to kick their habit. Its business model requires customers to remain hopeless and helpless. Let’s not confuse these poor people by suggesting they could do something to help themselves. Fighting drug addiction is a job for the experts.

The treatment sector’s track record is woeful, of course. The proportion of Australians who admit to using psychoactive substances — about 15 per cent — is the same as it was a decade ago. The social impact of drug use has grown with the spread of methamphetamines.

Please don’t suggest that drug treatment strategy is failing, however. It is simply underfunded. More money is needed to relieve pressure on an already overstretched system, to make mollycoddling more widely available, introduce frontline victim ser­vices, and so it goes. We’ve heard it all before.

The success of some of the more diligent charities in relieving the distress of some addicts by providing food, accommodation and counselling should not lead us to imagine the problem is being solved.

The pathologisation of misfortune is widespread in the caring industry.

It leads to a philosophy, practice and business strategy focused on servicing misery rather than ending it. It delivers short-term comfort at the expense of long-term resilience, dignity and empowerment.

The susceptibility of successive governments to fall for the welfare industry’s spin has increased the country’s welfare budget by billions of dollars.

Too much of it has been channelled into servicing misery rather than ending it through rehabilitation and empowerment. A welfare habit, like a drug habit, is much harder to crack once we succumb to the argument that biology, genetics or society is to blame for personal misfortune.

The poor have been casually re-categorised as the vulnerable. Vulnerability, unlike poverty, is never self-created; it is never the result of making poor choices and cannot be corrected by making good ones; vulnerability is simply visited upon you.

Compassion for the vulnerable has played havoc with public finances. In 2007 when John Howard left office the state and federal welfare bill was equivalent to 29.3 per cent of tax collected; under the Rudd and Gillard governments it increased to 35 per cent, even before the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The Coalition’s ability to reduce the growth in welfare spending with little if any help from welfare professionals is nothing short of remarkable. Jobseeker support payments increased by 10.3 per cent in real terms between 2007-8 and 2013-14. The growth has been slowed to 1.3 per cent. Income support for carers increased by 10.9 per cent under Labor; the growth has been slowed by the Coalition to 3.9 per cent.

Most impressive of all is the reduction in the number of people on the Disability Support Pension, a welfare payment given to people assumed to be incapable of work. The number of DSP recipients has fallen by almost 10 per cent from 830,000 in June 2014 to 758,900 in June this year.

DSP payments increased by 6.9 per cent a year in real terms under Labor; under the Coalition they have been falling by an average of 2.3 per cent a year.

The soft-headed notion of compassion has become so embedded in civic conversation that the Turnbull government is nervous about trumpeting these achievements, fearing it may be accused of stealing from the poor.

The truth is the unconditional commitment to welfare under Labor robbed recipients of a resource much more important than money.

By outsourcing responsibility for their future to the treatment sector, it robs them of dignity and the power to control their lives for better or worse.

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