Australian Politics
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Malcolm Turnbull eyes pumped hydro opportunity in the Upper Hunter
Pumped hydro requires TWO dams. What does Mal think the dam-hating Greens will say about that?
Acompany owned by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy has won a tender to develop plans for two pumped hydro projects in the Upper Hunter.
WaterNSW has awarded a development agreement to Upper Hunter Hydro (UHH) to explore the feasibility of the projects using WaterNSW land and reservoirs in the Hunter Valley.
The company was registered in early 2022 under the ownership of Wilcrow Pty Ltd - a Turnbull family entity that has traditionally held its pastoral properties in the Upper Hunter.
The pumped hydro projects, which would deliver long duration storage totalling more than 1.4 gigawatts for eight to 12 hours, could power a million homes.
Upper Hunter Hydro has been granted access to the Glenbawn Dam and Glennies Creek Dam as part of its investigation.
WaterNSW said the company would seek to secure all necessary approvals and consent for their projects.
Elsewhere in the region, AGL and Idemitsu are exploring the feasibility of establishing a $450 million pumped hydro project at the former Muswellbrook Coal site at Bells Mountain.
Mr Turnbull said pumped hydro projects would provide important support for industry and employment in the Hunter.
"Australia has abundant wind and solar generation, some of the best in the world. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Pumped hydro provides the long duration energy storage we need to make renewables available 24/7 and secure our clean energy future," he said.
"Renewables development is not for those wanting instant gratification .... but it is dawning on the market that we are going to need a lot more long duration storage than we thought."
Mr Turnbull said the Upper Hunter Pumped Hydro would proceed to a detailed design phase that incorporates "wide ranging community and stakeholder engagement" as well as "thorough environmental assessment," to secure planning approvals and backing from investors.
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Kudos To Mr. Nuzzo for Taking on the Feminist Status Quo
It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call out the feminist claptrap throughout the academic world.
There’s a four-year gap in life expectancy in Australia between men and women. So how come our peak science funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), in 2022 allocated over six times more funding to research on women’s health compared to men’s?
This glaring bias in research funding attracted the critical gaze of a Perth-based academic with a keen interest in men’s health.
James Nuzzo is an exercise scientist, currently affiliated with Edith Cowan University, who has been busily churning out academic articles on topics like exercise neurophysiology and physical fitness testing.
But he’s become increasingly concerned to see his discipline infiltrated by gender ideologues whining about women missing out while totally ignoring the health outcomes of boys and men.
He’s calling out their bias and poor scholarship in a hard-hitting series of blogs on Substack (The Nuzzo Files) and podcasts.
For instance, Mr. Nuzzo points out that we hear constant allegations about the widespread exclusion of women in clinical trials.
In America, complaints about the neglect of women in health research led, in 1990, to the Office for Research on Women’s Health being established within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Since then, annual reports from the Office reveal that women constitute 55-60 percent of all participants in NIH-funded clinical trials each year. Thirty years later, the Office is flourishing, pouring out funding for women-only projects.
Similarly, Australian governments are falling over each other to prove their commitment to improving health outcomes for women and girls—and the NHMRC funding simply reflects that consistent anti-male bias.
This is simply one more example of the feminist claptrap now seeping throughout our academic world.
I hear regularly from principled researchers grinding their teeth at this blatant ideology and poor scholarship. Most don’t dare put their head above the parapet.
It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call it out, despite being well aware he is likely to implode his academic career in the process.
Another Small Victory In the Bag
Mr. Nuzzo’s most recent public skirmish in this territory involved an article in Sports Medicine written by mainly female exercise physiology students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claiming that “gender-based violence is a blind spot for sports and exercise medical professionals.”
The UNSW scholars devoted their entire article presenting women as the only victims of interpersonal violence (IPV)—the single mention of men referred to their “socially determined privilege,” an alleged cause of violence against women.
No mention of young male victims of abuse by coaches or fellow athletes, of which there have been plenty, nor of lesbian perpetrators of abuse (lesbians top the chart of rates of IPV). And not one word about the decades of research showing men and women are victims of IPV at roughly equal rates.
Mr. Nuzzo set out to put them straight, seeking to get the true facts published in a response letter in Sports Medicine. And he succeeded, but only after nearly a year of back and forth with the journal. It helped that he combined forces with Deborah Powney, the University of Central Lancashire psychologist doing work on male victims of coercive control, and John Barry, from the Centre for Male Psychology in London.
Sports Medicine took the unusual step of submitting the letter to peer review, but the three reviewers all concurred with the critique by Nuzzo and his co-authors. Ultimately the letter was published—one small victory for proper scientific inquiry.
Their published comment proved it was the UNSW academics who had the blind spot, by providing a summary of some of the best research showing equal gender rates of IPV victimization, which also applied in sports environments.
Storm in a teacup, you might conclude. Perhaps. But it is a telling example of how the feminist take-over of our universities is playing out.
The Next Generation
We now have increasing numbers of radical young female academics and students, probably indoctrinated back in their school days, all keen on displaying their feminist credentials in their so-called scholarship.
Increasingly, they are forcing this sludge into diverse disciplines, right across all academia.
Worryingly, these are the teachers of the next generation, intent on convincing young women they are set for a life of persecution, abuse and discrimination.
They are teaching our future bureaucrats who’ll be setting key policies, the future lawyers, judges, social workers, and the politicians who will be deciding where the dollars are spent.
Their goals are transparent and the process is unfolding before our very eyes.
Kudos for James Nuzzo for having the courage to take them on, in published articles, blogs and podcasts. It’s infuriating to read his research and discover how much we’ve been hoodwinked.
The Big Two Globalist Agencies
Another of Mr. Nuzzo’s published articles concerned bias against men’s issues in the U.N. and WHO. He conducted a content analysis showing consistent promotion of women’s issues whilst men are ignored. The U.N.’s sustainable development goal on “gender equality” is exclusive to females.
The organisation observes nine International Days for women’s issues/achievements and one day for men. They operate 69 Twitter accounts dedicated to women’s issues and none for men. And so it goes on.
DAVIA (the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) has launched a petition that calls on groups to “suspend their funding of the United Nations until all U.N. agencies fulfill their pledge to respect the ‘dignity and worth’ of all persons and assure the ‘equal rights of men and women.’” That’s a worthy goal.
It’s also a pleasant change to find someone looking for the good in men.
Mr. Nuzzo recently wrote a blog on Men: The Martyrs of Medicine. He’d unearthed a 1929 medical journal article listing the names of male doctors and researchers who died as a result of acquiring the disease they were studying or medical technology they were developing.
Brave men who gave their lives trying to save others from yellow fever, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases.
It was quite a story and a welcome change to see the risk-taking, now so often labelled as ’toxic,' being promoted as valuable, even inspiring.
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Gender pay gap zealots care nothing for facts or fairness
If we are in the business of publicly naming and shaming gender pay gap scoundrels, then the Workplace Gender Equality Agency ranks as the worst.
Each year, this agency tops the list as worst offender when it comes to analysing the so-called gender pay gap. Each year we taxpayers pay these bureaucrats to churn out work that consistently defies logic, fairness and choice.
WGEA’s latest report, released at midnight on Monday, has taken an underlying fraud to a higher level of wickedness. Why? Because if you are going to publicly humiliate companies, you had better have the right set of numbers to justify that exercise.
Instead, WGEA data is as hollow as a drum, but that doesn’t stop it beating said drum for ideological purposes.
One killer line brings down this house of cards: the data does not compare men and women doing the same job in a company.
Think about that glaring omission given WGEA has the temerity to shame companies such as Qantas, Virgin Australia, Telstra, Woodside and Santos for being the worst offenders when it comes to the gender pay gap.
Suffice it to say that not only would none of the companies on WGEA’s name and shame list not pay men and women differently for the same jobs even accidentally, most of them go to great lengths, through careful pay audits, to ensure men and women doing the same job are paid the same money. The gender pay gap actually has nothing to do with equity or fairness or any similar concept. It is simply a smokescreen to force social change.
I am not going to recount WGEA figures because if you start at the wrong place you end somewhere up the garden path. And those who are of a fair mind should not buy into this fraud.
To illustrate, WGEA’s chosen model doesn’t account for the fact more women than men prefer to work less hours, that women choose different jobs than men – in other words, that women make different choices to men.
In other words, WGEA’s chosen measurement for the gender pay gap is unadjusted for anything that happens in the real world to explain differences between women and men.
Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find any serious attempt by WGEA’s bureaucrats to mention, let alone thoughtfully analyse, the different choices men and women might make. WGEA is so obsessed with asserting there are iniquitous structural inequities in our society that it is happy to doctor the data by excluding the choices of women to get to its result. For WGEA a flawed means justifies the ideological end: screaming each year about the gender pay gap and ramping up those screams by producing a list of worst offenders.
One of the dumbest defences of its flawed model is the claim by WGEA boss Mary Wooldridge that their chosen measurement is replicated internationally. That apparently makes it just fine. “The gender pay gap is a widely used, internationally recognised measure for gender equality,” Wooldridge said.
Consider that logic carefully. Never mind that the data is hollow, inaccurate tosh; it becomes legitimate if the same hollow, inaccurate tosh is replicated on a global scale. What WGEA appears to be saying is that the bigger this flawed agenda gets, the more untouchable and incontestable it is. It’s just as well we don’t use the same reasoning to justify international drug cartels.
Let me put forward a different view: reproducing something rotten again and again, across countries, doesn’t make it acceptable. It makes it worse. It means there is a grand fraud afoot.
So why is there global reliance on fake data? That’s the easy part.If WGEA and other similar activist agencies used more accurate measurements that factored in the different choices millions of women make, their agenda, activism and relevance would be in ruins. By excluding choices as relevant factors, WGEA is left with a gender pay gap caused by structural inequality. It gets to stay in business by claiming each year that the system is stacked against women and fairness.
Given that it has been illegal for more than 50 years to pay men and women different amounts for the same work, WGEA is clearly not interested in genuine pay equality. Its aim is to confect and cement an emotive-sounding cause to justify massive social change that suits its vision of a modern society.
But its dodgy numbers mean all it has done is create a straw man.
Those who lap up the naming and shaming WGEA data would do well to consider the massive, centralised, disempowering social change required to eliminate WGEA’s confected gender pay gap. There are two routes. Either we insist that women work more hours, do the same kind of work as men, regardless of their choices, or we need to pay women more for less work. Which one of these social “reforms” is genuinely equitable, let alone attractive?
Eliminating differences between men and women that contribute to different pay outcomes means effectively mandating that men and women must be 50-50 in all jobs (not just cushy jobs but garbos and gravediggers too), that men and women must be 50-50 in all university or training courses, that men and women must split 50-50 all domestic and childminding work, and must share all holidays or absences from work 50-50. We would need to eliminate differences in choices and attitudes to life, work and family between men and women.
At the moment, the gender pay gap – as defined by WGEA – exists mainly because many women choose to work in lower-paid jobs. Therefore, to “fix” this gender pay gap, we need a societal change to reduce the number of women in lower-paid jobs. Does that mean cleaning out women from the ranks of clerical and admin roles and any other lower-paid work? Does it mean getting rid of many women in HR departments too because only that will lead to a 50-50 gender equal workplace? Only through social engineering on this colossal scale can we make men and women statistically the same in an aggregate sense to satisfy WGEA’s agenda.
How about WGEA, with 30 female employees out of a workforce of 32 as at June last year, clean up its in-house gender inequality first before pointing the finger at others. Or has WGEA inadvertently discovered that there are some jobs that more women than men prefer to do?
There is another way to gender pay parity that the boffins at WGEA probably prefer – simply pay women more even if they work less, and regardless of what kind of work they do. That might be social utopia for the gender equity ideologues. Revenge is a long time coming, some will say.
I’m willing to bet that in the real world, women want to continue making their own choices, thank you very much, to work less, to work in different fields and in different roles.
Equally, it’s not hard to guess that men might come to resent employers who paid women more money than men for working fewer hours than men.
Either way, the change WGEA has in store for us to reach its version of gender pay parity is ugly in a free society. WGEA, noisy local accomplices such as Chief Executive Women and sister organisations globally use “gender parity” to demand equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. Their “data” is nothing more than politics, focusing on aggregate outcomes, not individual preferences.
It is, simultaneously, a laughable and depressing insight into the current state of the Western world that we countenance taxpayer-funded bureaucracies filled with a majority of senior female bureaucrats (so much for in-house gender equality) who behave like chorus girls on a global stage singing from the same song sheet of fraudulent numbers.
Like central planners from previous eras, the gender pay gap ideologues are the latest bunch of we-know-better-than-you emoters who sideline facts, fairness and individual choices.
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Anti-Israel activist Laura Allam has been accused of organising the kidnapping and torture of a man because he worked for a Jewish employer
Is there no limit to Muslim insanity
The 28-year-old from Fraser Rise in Melbourne’s northwest has been charged with kidnapping, armed robbery, false imprisonment, unlawful assault and assault by kicking over the alleged attack on a 31-year-old man in St Albans on February 16.
A Victoria Police spokesman said it was alleged the man was pulled from a car near the intersection of Gladstone and Cleveland streets about 9.30pm, the Herald Sun reported on Tuesday night.
“He was then allegedly placed in another car and assaulted and robbed before being released in Braybrook,” the spokesman said.
The police spokesman said detectives had charged two people in relation to the alleged kidnapping.
Police sources told the Herald Sun the man had required extensive treatment in hospital for his injuries, and that police believed Ms Allam, a well-known member of the Lebanese community, orchestrated the assault.
Ms Allam’s alleged accomplice was a 37-year-old Brunswick man, who police said would face a string of charges.
Ms Allam and her alleged accomplice were bailed to appear at Melbourne Magistrates Court on May 31.
The Herald Sun reported that a suppression order relating to Ms Allam’s case had prevented it from publishing her image and providing certain details about Ms Allam’s advocacy work.
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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
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My son Joe at ANU
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