Australian Politics
Inner city residents vote for changing date of Australia Day - but the PM slaps down the move
Some moronic political correctness from Albanese below. How is the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of traditional Aborigines "the oldest continuous civilisation on earth". Civilization is when people ABANDON the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That's its definition. Civilization features CITIES. The Aborigines had none. They did not even have writing
The City of Melbourne is set to push the Federal Government to move the date of Australia Day after a clear majority of locals voted for the date to be changed in a recent survey.
Almost 60 per cent of 1,609 Melbourne residents and businesses said they support celebrating Australia Day on a date other than January 26, That was twice the number of people who don't want a change.
Of those polled, 59.8 per cent supported changing the date of Australia Day, compared with 31.6 per cent who did not.
Even more, 59.9 per cent, said they believe Australia Day would be moved from 26 January within the next 10 years.
The five traditional owner organisations that make up the Eastern Kulin nation also unanimously supported changing the date.
If the council endorses the vote, it would commit to still issuing permits for Australia Day activities by the state government and other organisations.
It would also support activities that acknowledged the First Nations perspectives of January 26, and citizenship ceremonies would continue to be held.
But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rejected calls to change Australia Day on Sunrise, saying his focus was on recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the constitution.
'Let's focus on recognising the fact that our nation's birth certificate should proudly recognise that we did not begin in 1788, which is what the 26th of January commemorates, it began at least 60,000 years ago with the oldest continuous civilisation on earth. 'That should be a source of pride.'
Other polls, especially national ones, have been far less enthusiastic about changing the date. A poll by IPSOS in 2021 found only 28 per cent supported the change.
About 90 per cent of the respondents to the Melbourne council's phone survey, done by Redbridge from August 4 to 7, were residents aged over the age of 18. The poll had an even gender split.
The City of Melbourne has just under 170,000 residents and politically is strongly left-leaning.
In the 2022 Federal Election Greens leader won Melbourne in a cakewalk, with 49.6 per cent of the vote.
Changing the date has been a Greens policy for many years but dropped off the party's election policy platform with its First Nations focus instead on the creation of a Treaty.
In 2017 the City of Yarra voted to stop referring to January 26 as Australia Day. It was stripped of the right to hold citizenship ceremonies by the then-Federal government.
Melbourne isn't a Greens-dominated council, with only two if its 11 councillors Greens - Rohan Leppert and Olivia Ball. Its mayor is independent Sally Capp, a former Liberal, who formally asked the council to review its approach to Australia Day in July. She acknowledged January 26 was a 'divisive' date.
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Turnbull slams ‘fascism’ after protesters shout him out of university speech
Turnbull gets that one right
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has decried “fascism” and challenged Sydney’s oldest university to protect free speech on campus after he was yelled and sworn at by student protesters during a function and escorted out by police.
Turnbull left the Sydney University Law Society event on Thursday without speaking, following the boycott by members of the Student Representative Council and student body, who called him “ruling class scum” who “wouldn’t listen to anyone below” him.
He said it was a “dreadful state of affairs” and “a very sad day” for his alma mater and argued free speech no longer existed on campus if it was in the hands of protesters with loudspeakers.
“It’s just complete fascism. Just extraordinary,” Turnbull told the Herald. “One of the things they accused me of being was anti-queer, which didn’t seem to match the fact that I legalised same-sex marriage. It was literally a litany of objections.”
In video clips posted online, students can be seen yelling into microphones and loudspeakers as Turnbull stands at the front of the room.
“Can I just ask, how many of you would like me to speak today, or how many of you would like me to leave?” Turnbull asked the room of students.
“How many of you would like to pay $100,000 for university?” retorted a young man who was part of the protest. “F--- back off to Mosman, F--- back off to Wentworth.”
A young woman with a megaphone accused Turnbull and successive federal governments of destroying young people’s ability to access welfare payments, and said the Law Society had invited the former prime minister to speak under the guise of free speech.
“The Law Society, which is a student group, is inviting someone on campus under the guise of free speech, when this man and his party have literally been one of the single most damaging forces to higher education, to climate change, to refugee policy,” one protester said.
Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit identified some of the protesters as SRC officers.
Turnbull said it was for the university to explain whether it would be run by protesters, whom he described as “a very noisy, aggressive minority of people with loudhailers”.
“There’s no free speech at Sydney University unless the people with the loudhailers allow it to happen,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re paying the Senate and officials at the university for if they’re not in charge of their own campus.”
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Major Aussie city makes an embarrassing backflip on cycling lanes after motorists erupt in fury: 'This is a victory for common sense'
Brisbane mayor Jim Soorley tried this in Fortitude Valley a few years ago. It was abandoned after causing big traffic jams
An Aussie city has scrapped a controversial bike lane program after huge protests from local motorist who were furious about their commute times blowing out.
The City of Port Philip in Victoria introduced a pop-up bike lane trial, alongside speed humps, bollards, concrete blocks and yellow markings on local streets.
However, residents of suburbs including Port Melbourne and St Kilda blasted the plans as a 'desecration' of roads.
Now, the state government has agreed to change the plans, with one critic branding the change a 'victory for common sense'.
The plans were the latest example of Australia's cities seemingly waging a war on drivers, after Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth all introduced 30km/h speed limits to discourage cars from the inner city.
In Port Phillip, Department of Transport executive director inner, Alan Fedda, said the council had listened to community feedback over the cycle lane.
'The changes we are proposing will help to strike a balance between community needs, and improving bike rider safety in the City of Port Phillip,' he said.
Port Phillip councillor Andrew Bond praised the decision to scale back the cycling lanes.
'This is a victory for common sense,' he said. 'But there are many other areas in our municipality, aside from these ones, that are also of concern to our residents. 'I look forward to these being addressed in the near future.'
A council meeting in July was hit with complaints from residents who said the bike lanes were ill-considered, unsafe and a blight on bayside suburbs.
The program is part of a wider scheme by the government to roll out lanes in inner municipalities.
Now, the changes will see the trial ending in Port Melbourne, with concrete blocks and bollards also set to be removed.
The department has held regular meetings with the council throughout the project, and is working in partnership on the pop-up bike routes.
Last week, a controversial push to reduce speed limits to 30km/h throughout residential areas in Brisbane was met with outrage from workers in outer suburbs, fearing it will see their daily commute to work blow out.
Greens councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan put forward the motion to discourage motorists claiming it will promote 'vibrant public spaces and hubs of social activity'.
Identical schemes have also been trialled across other Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
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The debt horror that will cripple Australian Federal government spending
A big chunk of tax money will go to pay banks and bond-holders
Although in office for a little more than 100 days, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has already been criticised in some quarters for laying blame for Australia’s economic troubles at the feet of the former Coalition government. He is not entirely wrong to do so.
The period the Coalition was in office, even allowing for pandemic-related spending, could hardly be characterised as the golden years of fiscal restraint. Nor too, could the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years in which Chalmers was Wayne Swan’s chief of staff.
Examples are growing daily of where rising inflation and interest rates are already causing serious stress for mortgage holders throughout the country. Worse still, the pain for households will only be multiplied when energy bills rising rapidly thanks to net zero are also factored in.
But the federal government, which has run up close to $1 trillion debt since the Howard years, is perhaps most exposed. It naturally follows, as rates go up, so too will the borrowing cost on debt, both for new debt accrued and existing debt being rolled over.
Recently, Chalmers correctly identified, ‘when interest rates are rising, it actually costs more and more to service that debt…the fastest-growing area of government spending in the budget is actually servicing the debt that we’ve inherited because as interest rates rise, it becomes more expensive to pay that back.’
With Treasury revising its inflation rate estimate to 7.75 per cent, the RBA cash rate has nowhere to go but up, and fast. As the cash rate has typically followed the inflation rate, Australia faces dramatic rises in our government debt servicing costs.
Recent research released by the Institute of Public Affairs identified the scale of the challenge. Should the cash rate rise to 7 per cent by 2030, a fair assumption given current inflation trajectory, it is estimated that the annual cost of the nation’s interest bill would more than quadruple from $20 billion today to $89 billion by 2030.
This will make the annual cost of debt servicing the third largest spending item in the federal budget behind only welfare and social services, and health.
By way of context, this would see our nation’s debt servicing cost exceed double that of current annual federal government spending on defence and is the equivalent to the cost of purchasing a fleet of six new nuclear submarines. It is also three times more than the current NDIS budget.
Moreover, approximately half of all federal government debt is held overseas, including by the Chinese government, providing potential adversaries with not insignificant financial and economic leverage.
Aside from the Abbott government’s first budget in 2014, which made a strong start on the politically difficult task of budget repair, the former Coalition government oversaw a substantial deterioration to the federal government’s balance sheet.
Under the Coalition, gross federal debt more than doubled from $420 billion in 2015 to $980 billion today, taking debt from 25 per cent of GDP to approximately 45 per cent. This is more than the peak of government debt piled up by Whitlam, which reached just over 20 per cent of GDP in 1975.
Yes, it is true that much of this debt was run up as a result of the pandemic. And it is also true that the Morrison government did not choose for the pandemic to happen. But it did choose how to respond to it.
It was forgivable, and perhaps inevitable, that there be a wage subsidy program like JobKeeper. What was not forgivable is how it was administered. The program was based on giving eligible businesses a wage subsidy of $750 per week per employee, regardless of if that employee was working full time or part time. A more fiscally disciplined approach would have been to at least provide a smaller payment for those working part-time, as occurred in New Zealand.
It was also unclear why the Morrison government chose to direct billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to states that kept locking its citizens down, especially Victoria, other than they thought it would be popular or, at the very least, politically expedient.
At no time did the Morrison government think it was wise to administer the tough love needed to ween states off soul-destroying lockdowns by refusing to subsidise them.
Yet, at no point did any senior federal Coalition figure even attempt to provide leadership through using the considerable resources of government to communicate the significant economic and social costs of lockdowns.
It is an open question as to whether Labor would have done any better, recent history suggests they more than likely would not have.
When John Howard left office in 2007 gross debt was just $55 billion, which was less than five per cent of GDP. By the time Labor left office in 2013, debt had increased six-fold to approximately $300 billion.
Worse still, both the Gillard and Rudd governments left several budget time-bombs by committing to extra spending outside of the budget forward estimates, which meant the true state of the financial situation was hidden from voters until it was too late.
There is no way around it – any government wanting to pay down debt must cut spending.
This great political challenge is exacerbated by the fact that there is never any shortage of sectional interests demanding more government money from Canberra.
And it is always easier for ministers, who these days seem to be there for a good time, not a long time, to appease those interests by giving into their demands. Whether Chalmers will be a Treasurer more like Keating/Costello than Crean/Morrison remains to be seen.
Still, credit where it is due. So far Chalmers is making the right noises on fiscal discipline and has shown he is perhaps willing to take unpopular decisions in the name of strengthening the budget bottom line, which he did by recently ruling out an extension to the petrol excise cut.
Let’s hope his ambition does not run out of fuel.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/running-on-empty-4/
******************************************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)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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