Australian Politics
An Australian actor who has had relationships with many attractive women
Stories like the one below could be pretty damaging to many men. Many men have difficulties finding partners, to the point where there are many "incels". One cannot entirely blame incels for the diffuse anger that they sometimes feel. And that anger can be expressed in very destructive ways.
I have been married 4 times and have at the momnent a chic chick in my life so I am not at all upset or envious about the story below. But I think there needs to be some way for stories such as that below to be somehow contextualized by stories about the relationship failures celebrities sometimes have. In the meantime, incels should probably steer their reading away from celebrity sites
And while details of the couple's relationship remain a mystery, Dominic's colourful dating history is well-documented.
From a 90210 star to billionaire James Packer's ex, the burly Aussie star has managed to woo very well-known women around the world.
Dominic, 52, was previously married to Australian film producer Rebecca Williamson between 1998 and 2008. The couple welcomed four children during their decade-long marriage: sons Joseph and Augustus, and daughters Audrey Lily-Rose.
Dominic went on to briefly date Baywatch star Brooke Burns, 44, from April to June 2008.
In 2011, he started began dating 90210 actress AnnaLynne McCord, who was 17 years his junior.
AnnaLynne previously revealed how BDSM played a major role in their on-and-off relationship, describing Dominic as a 'big, strong, angry Aussie' in a 2021 interview with sexual health platform Giddy.
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Labor's disastrous jobs bill: At best, businesses will be hit with substantial bills from specialist lawyers and consultants. It will discourage productivity improvements and deter investment
Tweaking the definition of small business will do little to fix the inherent problems of Labor’s industrial relations amendments, Secure Jobs, Better Pay. This is the key message for independent senator David Pocock as he agrees to pass the government’s complex and poorly drafted bill.
Not only is there a lack of clarity in some of the provisions that will result in high levels of uncertainty, there is also the risk that businesses and workers will be badly affected. At best, businesses will be hit with substantial bills from specialist lawyers and consultants. The amended act will discourage productivity improvements and deter investment.
Steep costs for taxpayers are also likely in the context of ongoing budget deficits and rising government debt as a result of multi-employer bargaining for low-paid workers in feminised industries such as aged care, childcare and disability services.
But consider first the definition of a small business.
Notwithstanding the fact there are multiple definitions within government, the Fair Work Act defines a small business as one with 15 or fewer workers. That’s heads, not effective full-time workers. A relatively small cafe or service station could easily have more than 15 workers. What if a proprietor operates three small but separate outlets, each with six workers on the books? Would this mean that business is not considered small?
Increasing the number from 15 to 20, a concession made by Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke, will make little difference as it doesn’t sort out the problems outlined above. Permitting businesses with fewer than 50 workers to argue their case to be excluded from multi-employer agreements looks like an expensive, bureaucratic ruse.
Hapless Small Business Minister Julie Collins would have us believe more than two million, or 90 per cent, of businesses would be exempt from the provisions. What she fails to understand is most of these businesses don’t employ anyone apart from their owners and more than 60 per cent or about eight million employed people work for larger businesses.
In addition, what happens in large and medium-sized businesses affects small businesses. Small firms do business with larger ones as suppliers, or buyers, or both. They have an interest in the outcomes for larger businesses, too.
The principal flaw in Labor’s amendments is not the definition of small business but the incoherence of multi-employer bargaining pasted on to a system based on national employment standards, modern awards and enterprise-level bargaining.
It should not be overlooked that Object (f) of the Fair Work Act is “achieving productivity and fairness through an emphasis on enterprise-level collective bargaining underpinned by simple good-faith bargaining obligations and clear rules governing industrial action”.
What is often not understood is that for those employers who are not bound by enterprise agreements or have given them up, there is nothing preventing them from paying some or all of their workers more than the pay stipulated in the relevant awards and/or boosting conditions. In fact, the most common method of setting pay is individual arrangements; it’s not awards or enterprise agreements.
While the government claims its main aim is to “get wages moving”, it’s clear wages are starting to move. The latest figures on the Wage Price Index point to overall annual wage growth of more than 3 per cent, with private sector wage growth well ahead of wage growth in the public sector. (This latter feature is the result of earlier enterprise agreements locking in modest pay rises.) Other data sources point to even stronger wage growth as workers enjoy rapid promotion and other perquisites. A tight labour market is the surest way to lifting wages.
Where award rates of pay are close to market rates, there has always been less incentive for employers to bargain with their employees and/or representatives. This is because there is not much scope to increase wages to compensate workers for productivity gains that could be achieved. Most of the services industry fits into this category, as does retail and fast food.
By contrast, there are some other sectors where award rates of pay are fractions of the going rates. It is in these sectors, mainly highly unionised, where enterprise bargaining has found its natural home, even though the ability to secure productivity concessions in recent years has become difficult as the unions have dug in their heels. Some companies have also required the assurance of prohibited industrial action during the course of enterprise agreements in order to secure finance.
This background partly explains why enterprise bargaining under Labor’s Fair Work Act has been only partially successful. It was never really suited for companies for which the award rates of pay are close to market-related pay. Note here that award wages are adjusted annually through the national minimum wage review, with the latest increase between 4.6 and 5.2 per cent.
Add in the complexity of the bizarre interpretation of the better off overall test and the pedantic interpretation that members of the Fair Work Commission have placed on the required bargaining steps and agreement-making procedures and it was hardly surprising that enterprise agreements fell out of favour.
The preferred solution is to fix the rules governing enterprise bargaining rather than jumping to an unjustified and untested shift to widely available multi-employer bargaining. The case for an ill-defined “single interest” bargaining stream has never been made – apart from it being something demanded by the unions.
Not only is the shift potentially inflationary as all firms covered would lift prices simultaneously, it is also unlikely to lift productivity as workplace variations can never be covered by such agreements. Sector-wide strikes also would be highly damaging. There is no doubt that the Reserve Bank would take a keen interest in such developments when considering lifting the cash rate.
It was always a forlorn hope that Pocock would realise the bill shouldn’t be rushed through parliament this year.
The cliches of the government were always likely to carry the argument over careful analysis of the arcane features of our IR system and the damaging impact of the proposed changes.
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The Victorian election result highlights how wishy washy Australian conservatives have become
Remember these two analogies.
First one. At the start of the pandemic hysteria in Florida, the uncritical press had petrified the voters of Florida into big-scale support for lockdowns. Even the bulk of Fox News was in favour. But Governor Ron DeSantis read the data. He read the Great Barrington Declaration authored by three of the best epidemiologists in the world. After a very short lockdown he opened up his state of Florida. He fronted the press and answered questions. He stood for something. He directly took on the lockdownistas. Later on, he flat out refused to impose any sort of mandates, mask or vaccine. He was regularly labelled a ‘granny killer’. But he continued on to implement an anglosphere version of Sweden’s (now world’s best) response. Principled. With values. Prepared to take on a near uniformly left-wing press and the few righties who revelled in lockdowns. We now know that virtually every call he made was correct. Oh, and when Disney was pushing a bizarre ‘teach kids in kindergarten and years one and two sex education in the usual Woke way’ he took away the unique tax advantages this virtue-signalling corporation had enjoyed for decades. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars each year. In the recent midterm elections, Governor DeSantis won a massive victory with 60 per cent of the vote, compared to in 2018 when he had barely snuck home by a few thousand votes.
Second analogy. When Campbell Newman was Premier of Queensland, he took on every vested interest going. He reduced the size of the civil service. He went after the doctors. He took on the legal establishment (albeit in an incompetent way without seemingly asking any, you know, actual conservative legal types how to do it). His government was unashamedly for smaller government, non-Wokery, and fiscal responsibility. Sure, he probably opened too many fronts at once and when he went for re-election he lost. But this is what no one says. His government won 41.3 per cent of the primary votes in that losing effort. Since then, every LNP Opposition government has played the ‘let’s be a centimetre to the right of Labor’ game and has lost to Labor far far worse than that Campbell Newman losing effort. And this repeats itself in other states. Standing for something pays off. Occasionally you’ll die on your feet, but of late the Liberals have been dying on their knees everywhere, all the time, in the dire grip of Stockholm syndrome.
Right now the caste that advises Liberal politicians is uniformly in the Mark Textor mould of ‘conservatives have nowhere else to go so park yourselves way over there to the left beside Labor’. It’s a really bad strategy. It destroyed the Western Australian Liberal Party. It allowed the Coalition to lose again last night to Dan Andrews. I’d bet big money that Dominic Perrottet and the Libs will lose next year. The LNP and Crisafulli in Queensland are yet another iteration of this woeful strategy.
Look, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to put a piece of paper between my views and those of John F. Kennedy (save that I’d probably have fewer hookers in the White House each week). But those views are now categorised as ‘hard right’ or ‘extremely ideological’ not just by the ABC (which is wholly to be expected) but also by half of the MPs in a Coalition partyroom. This is the worst cohort of right-of-centre politicians in my lifetime. They stand for absolutely nothing, Mr Morrison being exhibit A in the case for the prosecution. There is nothing they’d fight for if it risked them losing the chauffeur and perks.
Frankly, it beggars belief that the Victorian Opposition under Matthew Guy could have been this wholly useless. Did they attack relentlessly on the world’s worst lockdowns? You know… The weaponised police. The destroyed small business sector. The brutal and ineffective vaccine mandates. No. No. No. Instead, Matthew Guy sounded as though he more or less agreed with the Andrews’ playbook. And don’t forget that Scott Morrison never once said one critical thing about how Dan Andrews imposed the world’s harshest, most thuggish pandemic response on Victoria.
I guarantee you that had Ron DeSantis been Victorian leader – even allowing for how many Victorians clearly must have no clue about the data surrounding how badly Australia has done (for instance, our cumulative excess deaths are worse than no-lockdown Sweden’s by some way) – that he would have made huge inroads on the Labor vote on that front alone.
Then there’s Victoria’s debt that is massive. Guy says a couple of trite things about this and then offers highly subsidised public transport. And what about the patent corruption? The imploding credit rating? The list goes on. Don’t tell me the press acts as Labor’s praetorian guard. Of course it does. Have you seen our universities and journalism schools? But they did in Florida too, even more so. Know your stuff and take them on. Fight and you can win.
The Libs aren’t offering a fighting Opposition. It’s more of a tame, complicit, ‘we agree with you Danny Boy’ affair. It pains me to say this, given that Dan Andrews behaved shockingly during the two and a half years of Covid. But the Libs were so awful and so lacking in any coherent values or beliefs that they deserved to lose. The NSW version of Team Liberal deserves to lose too. And so does the Queensland version. The party has been infiltrated by too many people who don’t hold any of the longstanding small government, pro-freedom values. They actually share much of a centre-left type ideology. They agree that those like me whose views line up perfectly with JFK’s really are ‘hard right’ or ‘ideological extremists’. Just look at the advisers who went on TV after it became clear Matthew Guy had been slaughtered. Their take? The Libs need quotas for women. Know what you morons? I will never, ever vote for any party that imposes quotas. I believe in merit. And I think there are a lot like me. The problem is advisers and value-free hack politicians with a focus group obsession that is premised on being hollow, value-free vacuums waiting to suck up what this poll or that poll indicates. Ron DeSantis ignored polls and went with principles. He won people over.
This party right now is an absolute disgrace. I like Peter Dutton. I’m really hoping he stands up to the appeasers in his partyroom and throughout the adviser class. Because it’s not going to be long before the only Liberals in government will be in Tasmania. Make of that what you will.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/dying-on-their-knees/ ?
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Barrier Reef in danger? The fight’s on again as Australian government prepares to lobby UN
Australia faces its second fight in less than two years to prevent the Great Barrier Reef from being declared “in danger” by the UN, as Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek prepares to lobby her global counterparts against the move and scientists say the reef is improving.
The expert panel of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee has released a report recommending the reef be placed on a list of World Heritage sites in danger as it faces risk from climate change and degrading water quality from agricultural run-off.
Farmers within the Great Barrier Reef catchment area have warned they will lobby hard against any extra regulations after the report recommended a reduction in run-off from banana and sugarcane farming.
Ms Plibersek faces a battle to stave off a formal ruling when the report is considered at the meeting of the World Heritage Committee in mid-2023. Having recently met with UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay in Lisbon, she will speak with her international counterparts at global environmental talks in Montreal next month.
The Australian understands Ms Plibersek is prepared to lobby hard if a formal proposal to place the reef “in danger” is made.
Ms Plibersek and her Queensland counterpart, Meaghan Scanlon, sought to distance themselves from the report’s findings, arguing they were the result of the former Coalition government’s failure to act on climate change.
“The reason that UNESCO in the past has singled out a place as ‘at risk’ is because they wanted to see greater government investment or greater government action – and since the change of government, both of those things have happened,” she said.
“We’ll clearly make the point to UNESCO that there is no need to single the Great Barrier Reef out in this way.”
Former Coalition environment minister Sussan Ley only last year successfully fended off an attempt downgrade the health status of the reef. She flew to Europe last July to directly lobby World Heritage Council members.
Steve Edmondson, a reef tour operator in Port Douglas, said the UN-backed report relied on old information gathered during a monitoring mission in March while the reef was going through a mass coral bleaching event.
“I don’t think it considers that there are a lot of positive things that have happened in the past year,” he said. “The reef is in excellent condition at the moment and that’s what our guests are experiencing every day.
“It’s actually doing better than it has done for a very, very long time. It is fragile, but I do feel encouraged by the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef.”
An August report from the commonwealth’s chief independent marine science agency found the northern and central parts of the reef have the highest amounts of coral for 36 years, despite another bleaching episode earlier this year.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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