State government announces $160m Renters Relief Package to help battling tenants

This is a fantasy. Landlords already distrust bonds provided by the government rather than the tenant. So this "relief" will be no relief at all

The Miles government will provide bridging loans for rental bonds as part of a $160m package to help battling tenants amid the state’s housing crisis.

Bonds will also be able to be transferred between rental properties and the government will crack down on dodgy practices such as rent bidding under the initiative to be announced on Sunday.

The Sunday Mail has obtained exclusive details of the “Renters Relief Package” which Mr Miles said would help ease the burden on Queensland’s 1.8 million renters.

Bonds for rentals in Queensland are typically four weeks and often amount to thousands of dollars. The Department of Housing already provides bond loans and rental grants to struggling renters.

Under the relief package, the government will establish a portable bond scheme allowing tenants to transfer bonds when relocating from one rental property to another.

“While this scheme is being established, a Bridging Bond Loan product will be introduced to assist households to afford the upfront cost of a new bond, pending release of their old bond,” a government spokesperson said.

“A new rental sector Code of Conduct will be explored with all parties to crack down on dodgy and unprofessional practices and ensure better protections for renters.

“Rent bidding (where prospective tenants are encouraged to outbid each other for properties) will be banned and penalties will be enforced against agents who engage or encourage these practices.”

The package will also involve additional funding for the government’s more than 20 private rental products and services, with eligibility criteria for renters to be widened.

The government will also double the number of specialist customer service staff in the state’s 21 Housing Service Centres by hiring an additional 42 RentConnect officers.

“These vital frontline workers will help connect renters with the support and services they need to get and keep a rental home,” the spokesperson said.

Mr Miles said the scheme – part of the government’s much-vaunted Homes for Queenslanders initiative to tackle the housing crisis – would help the more than one in three Queenslanders who rented their homes.

“Our plan makes sure Queensland renters get a fair go and have the supports they need to ease the cost of keeping a roof over their head,” he said.

“Through this package, we hope to ease the cost of getting into a home and help renters to save the money they need for a house deposit.

“And, we are putting tough new laws in place to stop rent bidding and crackdown on dodgy practices.

“Queenslanders can trust that my government will be behind them at every step of their housing journey.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/state-government-announces-160m-renters-relief-package-to-help-battling-tenants/news-story/21fd658d7cb9e07c13eb57a63b99d9c0

***********************************************

Australian Employer Ordered to Pay Compensation for Vaccine Injured in ‘Significant Precedent’

An Australian court has ordered an employer to pay weekly compensation and medical expenses to an employee after ruling that a vaccine injury that occurred from a workplace directive is compensable under the law.

Daniel Shepherd, 44, worked as a child and youth support worker with South Australia’s Department of Child Protection when he developed pericarditis after receiving his third Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in February 2022.

Pericarditis is inflammation of the pericardium, a thin sac that surrounds the heart. The condition is reported to be more common in males aged 18 to 49, with an estimated 27 cases per 100,000 doses.

Mr. Shepherd was told by his employer that his employment would be terminated if he did not receive the third dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The directions for the mandate were made under Section 25 of South Australia’s Emergency Management Act in January 2022, which required support and healthcare workers to receive a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to continue working.

Mr. Shepherd received two COVID-19 vaccinations on Aug. 19, 2021, and Sept. 9, 2021, respectively, according to documents submitted to the South Australian Employment Tribunal.
On the first dose, Mr. Shepherd experienced aching joints, cold, and flu symptoms, and minor chest pain for one to two weeks. He experienced similar symptoms on his second dose.

Mr. Shepherd then received his third booster dose on Feb. 24, 2022, after receiving a message from his employer saying that employees needed to have a third dose of vaccine within four months of having a second vaccine.

The following day, Mr. Shepherd experienced severe chest pain, which worsened over the next two weeks.

On March 11, 2022, the chest pain was so unbearable that he felt “like someone was kneeling on his chest.” Having thought he was experiencing a heart attack, Mr. Shepherd was taken by ambulance to the Ashford Hospital, where cardiologists diagnosed him with pericarditis.

The 44-year-old husband and father of a 5-year-old boy noted some improvement four to five months after the chest pain; however, further episodes of severe chest pain followed and symptoms returned.

Mr. Shepherd has not worked since March 2022, except for two months when he worked part-time in an administrative role.

Vaccine-Injured Files Claim Against the State

Mr. Shepherd filed a claim for compensation against his employer, the State of South Australia, which was initially rejected.

The state had initially contested the connection between the vaccine and the injury but later acknowledged that the third dose caused Mr. Shepherd’s pericarditis and subsequent incapacity to work.

Despite that, the state argued that the injury didn’t arise from his employment under the Return to Work Act, and that the injury was linked to the Emergency Management Act.

The state argued that if criteria under the Return to Work Act are met, they are exempt from liability in relation to the broader management of the pandemic under the Emergency Management Act.

But Tribunal deputy president Judge Mark Calligeros rejected those arguments.

“The injury was a direct consequence of an Emergency Management Act vaccination direction and of Mr. Shepherd’s employment,” Judge Calligeros said.

“The connection between employment and the injury is a strong one, given I have found that Mr. Shepherd would not have had a third dose of the vaccine if he had not been required to in order to continue working.

“The state required Mr. Shepherd to be vaccinated to continue working in a healthcare setting because it sought to protect and reduce the risk of infection to the public and general and those members of the public receiving healthcare services in particular.

“It would be ironic and unjust if Mr. Shepherd was denied financial and medical support by complying with the state’s desire to preserve public health.

“The rejection of Mr. Shepherd’s claim should be set aside, and it should be ordered instead that he receive weekly payments of income support and payment of medical expenses.”
Ongoing Pain

Currently, Mr. Shepherd tires easily, and becomes tired after walking his son to school, some 400 metres (437 yards) from his home. Prior to the injury, he was able to hike up and down Mount Lofty, walk, and do Chinese boxing, which he is now unable to do.

In an interview with 9News, Mr. Shepherd said he now has the heart of a 90-year-old. “Even today with just mild exertion [I get] chest pains and then it’s followed by fatigue, like severe fatigue,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to have to say, ‘Sorry buddy, daddy’s tired’.”

In a social media post, Senator Gerard Rennick said the ruling is a “significant precedent.”

“[E]mployers are now going to think twice about forcing people to get a vaccine if they have to fork out for potentially significant medical costs if the employee then incurs a vaccine injury,” Mr. Rennick said.

“This is only one case, and I suspect it will be appealed.

“I hope the decision is upheld because it will then open up the option of employers suing governments who mandate vaccines or pharmaceutical companies for unsafe or ineffective vaccines.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/australian-employer-ordered-to-pay-compensation-for-vaccine-injured-in-significant-precedent-5579036

******************************************************

The real Stolen Generation: Give us back our kids

The people who wail about Australian government agents maliciously stealing kids from their parents as part of a program of ‘cultural genocide’ are half right.

They are just wrong about which kids were actually stolen, and by whom.

Let’s start with the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’, which were the subject of a comprehensive report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, published in 1997.

The report, deliberately or not, misinterpreted a historically rare dilemma: what to do with kids trapped between the hunter-gatherer culture of their often drunk parents and the liberal democracy into which they’d been born as citizens. It claimed ‘many thousands’ were forcibly removed from their parents and placed in institutions or, if they were lucky, a loving foster home.

In truth, few were forcibly removed, and the number of kids totalled, according to historian Keith Windschuttle, about 8,250 – all of them in desperate in need of rescuing.

Most people with part-Aboriginal ancestry are now happily part of modern Australia. It is those who, for whatever reason, never escaped their remote ‘communities’ who continue to suffer misery and deprivation.

Nevertheless, leftists have been able to twist the Stolen Generations report into proof of the genocidal intent of ‘colonialism’. Politicians across the nation have ever since been cowed into avoiding policies that could in any way be construed as a repeat of last century’s ideas.

Which is ironic because, despite widespread fervent opposition to the idea of stealing kids from their parents, the practice has only since increased on an industrial scale. Only now the victims are mostly white, and they number in their millions.

Ask any parent or grandparent aged over, say, 50 and you will hear the same story –they have all lost at least one child to the state. I’m only mildly exaggerating here; almost every parent I know in this cohort has been affected by this.

The story never varies: a beloved child of devoted parents diverted from a happy, conventional life towards a future defined by victimhood, intersectionality, gender fluidity, nihilism, contempt for tradition, state dependency and (spoiler alert) depression.

The story is invariably delivered with the same mix of profound sadness and bewilderment that a child could turn his or her back on loving parents and a bright future.

But, as anybody who has passed even a cursory glance over our education system, this shouldn’t be bewildering at all. While we parents were at work earning money to pay for the state-designed education of our kids, that education system was busily stealing our kids away from us.

For most of us older parents, this happened when the child was sent off to university.

What should have been a rite of passage into a world of intellectual wonder and opportunity turned out to be an indoctrination into useless knowledge about environmental catastrophism and colonial guilt.

But now it’s worse. Not only are secondary and primary teachers stealing kids (by encouraging kids to change gender without telling their parents, for example), pre-school teachers are also getting in on the act.

‘Meaningful engagement with philosophies and pedagogies for social justice… opens up space to explore issues of profound importance, such as gender equity, LGBTQI+ rights, trauma and its impacts, and the climate crisis,’ says a report about education of 0 to 5-year-olds by the New South Wales government from last year.

‘While these are key examples, there are many other issues and ideas to explore, and a multitude of perspectives that children can bring to these important conversations as we continue working to honour children’s rights and social justice in early childhood education.’

And you thought pre-school was about playing in the sandpit followed by an afternoon nap.

Every time you hear a politician boast about increasing subsidies for childcare, remember this: they aren’t doing it to ‘help working families’, they are doing it to enable their apparatchiks in the education industry to convert children into brain-dead, pliable cogs to be fed into the government’s increasingly ubiquitous ideology-machine.

There is now no part of the entire education system where it is safe to send children. How the parents of toddlers today will cope is beyond me.

My generation of parents (late boomer/Gen X) are partly to blame.

I remember hearing the term ‘Participation Award’ for the first time, twenty years ago. My kids were playing Auskick at the time, where end-of-season participation awards were obligatory for even the least physically gifted child.

Some newspaper commentators said this was wrong because it shielded kids from a harsh reality, that not everyone gets a trophy in life, and that merely turning up and performing badly is not a cause for celebration.

Perhaps, I thought. But can you really dismiss the joy these kids felt from being part of something?

I now realise I was wrong. Those ridiculous participation awards encouraged kids to celebrate failure in a field to which they were never suited. I imagine that if some of them had been harshly but fairly discouraged from playing football, they might instead be playing violin in a symphony orchestra by now.

My generation was also mostly preoccupied with raising kids with love, and not much else.

In hindsight, a bit of discipline, not to mention religious spirituality, might not have gone astray. It was a bit presumptuous of us to think we could dispense with these ancient parental traits without consequences.

Our shortcomings as parents have made our kids sitting ducks for the faceless generals who are now recruiting them as woke foot soldiers in the culture wars.

This has happened before. Mao taught his young Red Guards to dob in their parents if they showed signs of being counter-revolutionary. Some did, sending their parents to the firing squad.

In his history of the Third Reich, Michael Burleigh says the Hitler Youth of the 1930s ‘became strangers’ to their parents, ‘perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors’.

In both these cases, things did not end well.

Australian parents who feel victims of a similarly malign and overwhelming force are loath to imagine things panning out quite so badly. They just want their kids back.

Perhaps the Human Rights Commission could hold a similar inquiry to the one it held in 1997. After all, this Stolen Generation is infinitely bigger, and the people doing the stealing are far more sinister. Worse, this time cultural genocide is a distinct possibility. I’m not holding my breath for it, though.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-real-stolen-generation/

****************************************************

Go woke, go broke

The furore over certain organisations trying to ignore Australia Day is just part of a major trend in developed countries where time and again very smart, driven executives of major companies have fallen for the trap of thinking that the vast bulk of consumers of their company’s products share the concerns of tiny but extremely noisy groups with woke agendas.

Perhaps the least costly of these many errors is that of senior executives at bodies as diverse as Woolworths, Cricket Australia and the Australian Open trying to avoid mentioning Australia Day or acknowledge the national holiday celebrations, only to be forcefully reminded that the vast bulk of consumers and sports-watchers are quite happy with the day as it is. They do not want it ignored or re-labelled ‘invasion day’ or ‘oppression day’ as activists have demanded.

After receiving three thousand emails and having opposition leader Peter Dutton call for a boycott against his supermarket chain, Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci admitted he had misread the political climate over his decision to drop Australia Day merchandise. He also insisted that his decision was due only to last year’s poor sales of such merchandise and that he would celebrate the day himself.

The Australia Day furore, however, is just a bad day at the barbecue compared to the errors costing billions committed by executives of major companies overseas, including those in charge of the iconic US magazine Sports Illustrated. Like all magazines, Sports Illustrated has been struggling to find its place in the digital age, with online sites eating into its core readership, but attempts to reverse this by applying woke obsessions made things far worse.

Sports Illustrated featured articles on subjects such as the lack of ethnic diversity in major sports – an issue in which the vast bulk of its readers had no interest – and even attempted to block advertisers who did not demonstrate a commitment to female equality. But most ludicrous of all was a woke revamp of the magazine’s annual swimsuit issue, a major seller with the publication’s overwhelmingly hetero, male readership.

Instead of using the mainstays of previous years such as a busty Kate Upton, svelte Canadian model Kate Bock or the full-figured girl-next-door-type Myla Dalbesio with a strategically cut t-shirt, the magazine featured transgender men in bikinis and fat women. To the surprise of no one but hard core activists this did not work and the company producing the magazine has all but closed the title, laying off the bulk of the staff. As the magazine rights are owned by another company, Sport Illustrated may yet reappear in another form but at the time of writing nothing has been announced.

The layoffs at Sports Illustrated are, in turn, part of a string of mass sackings at other iconic publications. In January the Los Angeles Times newsrooms announced that it would layoff at least 115 people or about one-quarter of its journalist staff less than a year after a round of major redundancies. Billionaire owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong declared that the paper could not continue to lose $US30-40 million ($A46-61 million) a year without increasing revenue and readership. The New York Times and the Washington Post have also announced major lay-offs.

All sorts of reasons can be found for the shake-out at these major newspapers, with the Covid pandemic and the long-running actors strike undoubtedly affecting the LA Times. But online media commentators, openly gloating over the problems of their print competitors, also pointed to the apparent obsession the traditional media has with subjects such as gender and identity politics and climate, as well as its marked cheer-leading for the left. The journalists on those publications, commentators say, have completely lost touch with the concerns of the bulk of their readers.

Even the Disney Corporation usually closely attuned to what its consumers want has been fooled by woke concerns into making what can only be described as strange decisions, notably over the Star Wars franchise which the corporation acquired along with Lucas Films more than a decade ago. Films in this franchise regularly earn more than $US1 billion in ticket sales. But after producing a series of other films that flopped at the box office, Disney decided to revamp the corny space opera and adventure brand by introducing woke themes such as female empowerment.

However, the corporation’s decision to hire a Canadian-Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy to direct the next Star Wars film, a political activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality, resulted in an enormous backlash from fans.

The fans were, in part, reacting to a comment made by Obaid-Chinoy many years ago that she ‘liked to make men feel uncomfortable’ that resurfaced around the beginning of the year. However, online comments indicate those fans see Obaid-Chinoy’s appointment as further evidence of the general decline in the brand since Disney took it over, and that they anticipate that the new film scheduled for release in 2025 will be a ‘woke disaster’. They also point out that Princess Leia was taking on bad guys and fending off Hans Solo back in the 1970s, so why does the brand have to be made more female now?

Another woke disaster was an attempt by fashion brand Victoria’s Secret to atone for past sins, including an unfortunate connection with serial abuser Geoffrey Epstein, by dumping its usual catwalk show of supermodels parading in the brand’s signature Angel’s Wings, including South African Candice Swanepoel and Australia’s own Miranda Kerr, for models who were plus- sized, transgender and disabled.

The result was a £1.1 billion (A$2.13 billion) fall in sales between 2020 and 2023, with the fashion brand announcing at the end of 2023 that it would, as various commentators noted, ‘bring sexy back’.

Fashion is, well, subject to changing fashions, but even hard-headed car industry executives have swallowed woke/climate nonsense, including activist assurances that electric cars will dominate the car market. As noted in this publication (‘EV Speed Bump’, 2 December) car makers such as General Motors and Ford are discovering for themselves after spending billions what non-activist commentators have been telling them all along, that the broad middle class of consumers owning just one cheap car that they need to get to work or take the kids to school have little interest in expensive electric vehicles.

Every week there’s a fresh disaster. This week, Aussie surf brand Rip Curl was forced into damage control after using a transgender surfer to replace a woman. But the real question is why smart, experienced executives let themselves be fooled into spending billions to please perhaps one per cent of the public, who might not even buy their company’s products, while ignoring or alienating almost all their customer base.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/model-business

************************************

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

***************************************