Australian Politics
University of Sydney professor tells first year students that Hamas' mass rapes on October 7 are 'fake news' and a 'hoax'
In this case the lady is a prolific and and successful writer of fiction so it might be that her fictive imagination has run away with her.
She is of South Indian origin so an "anti-colonial" orientation may also have informed her thinking
As I am a graduate of Sydney U, I would be embarrassed if she is allowed to continue teaching there. I believe that the university is "investigating"
First-year university students have been left 'repulsed' after a professor told them mass rapes committed by Hamas during the October 7 attacks were a 'hoax' and 'fake news'.
Sujatha Fernandes, a sociology professor at the University of Sydney, told her class in April that the media had 'distorted' the war, The Australian reports.
'Western media has played the role of an ideological state apparatus by suppressing coverage of the atrocities, peddling fake news,' Professor Fernandes said.
'[The media] promoted hoaxes that Hamas beheaded babies and carried out mass rape, in order to shore up support for Israel, and distorting events.'
The United Nations (UN) has said there were 'reasonable grounds' to believe Hamas carried out mass and gang rapes on October 7.
Professor Fernandes' continued her lecture by alleging Israel had engaged in 'ethnic cleansing, collective punishment and forced starvation', the report also claims.
A number of students, who wished to remain anonymous, said they were shocked by Professor Fernandes' comments.
One said they didn't commit to four years and thousands of dollars' worth of university classes to be taught by lecturers who 'blatantly promote lies and foster an unsafe, threatening environment'.
Another student who identified themselves as Jewish said it reflected a 'rising trend of anti-Semitism' at the university.
They added that it was particularly concerning for a professor to 'deny undeniable proof of the events of October 7, which Hamas proudly filmed themselves doing'.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Professor Fernandes and the University of Sydney for comment.
Pramila Patten, the UN's Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said they witnessed 'scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality'.
Ms Patten said the acts committed on October 7 were 'a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors', including sexual violence.
Her team found 'convincing information' that sexual violence had been committed against hostages and those in captivity.
They reached the conclusion came after reviewing over 5,000 photographic images and some 50 hours of footage of the attacks.
However, part of the report also found that at least 'two allegations of sexual violence in kibbutz Be'eri - widely reported in the media - were unfounded'.
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Australians say migration is 'too high' as the housing crisis worsens
Almost half of Australians believe there are too many migrants moving to Australia, even though the vast majority say cultural diversity is a boon for the nation.
A new poll released by the Lowy Institute on Australian attitudes revealed 48 per cent of respondents said the total number of migrants coming to Australia each year was too high.
This result was a slight increase from the last time the question was asked in 2019, and remains six percentage points lower than its 2018 peak, but still reflects an 11-point rise since 2014, months after the government launched its infamous Stop the Boats campaign.
The number of people who believed the migration intake was 'about right' has also dropped from 47 per cent in 2014 to 40 per cent in 2024.
Despite this, nine in 10 Australians still believe the nation's culturally diverse population has been positive for Australia, when multiculturalism is a product of decades of immigration, report author Ryan Neelam said.
'We find that people can hold contradictory views in their mind at the same time, but it may not be explained as a contradiction,' he said.
'People see the country's identity as being a multicultural one, but when it comes to the immigration rate it looks like they've become less open towards that.
'It is such a large, complex issue... depending on which part of the issue you ask about, people could have views that seem quite different.'
This political debate is now playing out as the nation endures a cost of living crisis, with the major parties introducing policies that link migration to economic impacts and housing issues.
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What is the ‘energy transition’?
For Labor, it is a transition to renewables. For the Liberals, it is a transition to nuclear power and renewables.
As part of the transition, Labor wants nothing to with nuclear power; the Liberals support it. Labor dislikes coal; it is not clear what the Liberals think about coal.
Both aim to reach Net Zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
There is a much simpler and more effective transition at hand – a transition to coal, nuclear power, and natural gas, with little place for renewables and no place for Net Zero.
Underlying this approach are the following considerations:
coal, nuclear energy and natural gas are the only ways of providing baseload electricity in Australia – meaning in practice, reliable, around-the-clock, low-cost electricity
wind and solar energy cannot provide such electricity
The proposed coal-nuclear-gas transition is the centrepiece of a campaign planned by a group in the Latrobe Valley, provisionally called the Coal-Nuclear-Gas Alliance.
The alliance will focus on three key actions.
The first action is the development of a new coal plant in the Valley and the refurbishment of the Loy Yang A and B coal plants, using high-efficiency-low-emissions (HELE) technology.
Such technology is not only more efficient than current technology, but also results in a lowering of greenhouse-gas emissions from coal plants of up to 30 per cent.
Further coal capacity in Australia is vital.
It will take until at least the 2050s for nuclear power to become a significant component of overall electricity generation in Australia.
And coal will not be replaced quickly by natural gas, which is in short supply in the eastern states and, in any case, has historically been more expensive than coal or baseload electricity.
The second action is to offer the Valley as the location for Australia’s first nuclear power plant.
Should this be supported in the Valley, the political task of introducing nuclear power in Australia will be greatly facilitated.
The third action is the promotion of natural-gas development in the Valley.
This requires the reversal of the state government’s effective banning of gas exploration and production in Victoria and of the federal government’s recent interventions in the eastern states’ gas market, including the price caps introduced in late 2022.
The Latrobe Valley is probably better placed than any other region in Australia in successfully addressing Australia’s energy future.
It has enough coal for over 500 years of electricity generation.
It can offer sites for a nuclear plant close to transmission lines and with a workforce to operate such a plant. One possible site is Yallourn (the coal resource currently being mined at Yallourn will be exhausted by the mid-2030s).
In addition, Gippsland has significant untapped natural-gas resources. In the words of journalist, Robert Gottliebsen, it is one of ‘three major fields that will end the shortage of gas for domestic market’ in Australia (the other two being Narrabri in NSW and the Surat Basin in Queensland).
Tapping these resources opens the possibility of gas becoming price competitive with coal for baseload electricity and, even if this is not the case, of making a major contribution to gas use outside the electricity sector.
What are the arguments against wind and solar power?
The first is their intermittency. Theoretically, it may be possible to overcome this with battery support. However, such support would be impossibly expensive if applied to the grid as a whole, taking account of the need to allow for wind and solar droughts and the enormous battery stock required (over 5,000 times the current stock).
Second, wind and solar farms are proving to be high-cost.
For example, wind and solar farms are typically distant from the grid and thus often require substantial new transmission infrastructure. This is expensive.
In addition, they entail significant over-building – to illustrate, if a coal-fired power plant of, say, 1,000 megawatts is to be replaced by wind and solar farms, the capacity of these farms will need to be well over 3,000 megawatts because they only produce electricity for around 30 per cent of the time.
Furthermore, electrical engineers refer to costs associated with frequency control when wind and solar power are fed into the grid.
Up to the early 2000s, Australia had among the lowest electricity prices in the world, with coal being responsible for over 80 per cent of our electricity production.
Since then, the role of coal has steadily declined and retail electricity prices have increased nearly twice as fast as overall consumer prices. Australia no longer has cheap electricity by world standards.
Third, the expansion of wind and solar farms requires radical changes to Australia’s countryside. In the words of former chief scientist, Alan Finkel (who supports renewables), ‘think forests of windfarms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sky; think endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert’.
Protest movements are spreading around the country strongly opposing such outcomes.
For those critical of the idea of supporting coal, nuclear power, and gas, a simple question can be asked: How else do you ensure that Australia has access to reliable, low-cost electricity, a critical component of any modern economy?
The coal-nuclear-gas campaign emerging from the Latrobe Valley is at an early planning stage. To succeed, it will need to be well financed and to develop a detailed plan for mobilising support, including grass-roots support in the Valley and other parts of Victoria and political support in Melbourne and Canberra.
Last year’s referendum on The Voice exposed a large gap between grass-roots views on the issues involved and the views of those seen as opinion leaders – political parties, major corporations, universities, the media and environmental organisations.
Does a similar gap exist in the case of energy policy? And will it increase if (as is feared) electricity supplies become less stable, electricity prices keep rising and regional protests against wind the solar farms become more widespread?
If so, a shake-up in energy policy lies ahead, with the Latrobe Valley well placed to lead the way. If it can do so, other regions are likely to follow (e.g. Hunter Valley in NSW, Surat Basin in Queensland)
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/05/a-new-energy-transition-coal-nuclear-and-natural-gas/
**************************************************Canberra-led investment? That’s always a bad idea
An inability to learn from experience is a hallmark of the Left
Ed Husic’s suggestion that businesses would be more inclined to invest in Australia if we charged them less tax did not go down well with the Treasurer. We’re not privy to the words Jim Chalmers used to slap down his ministerial colleague after he floated a proposal to lower the company tax rate at a business conference last week. Suffice it to say journalists described the exchange as “terse”.
As Dennis Shanahan wrote on the weekend, the clash between Husic and Chalmers was arguably the most important development in a crowded political week. It was more than manoeuvring by a political rival or a break in cabinet solidarity. It was a challenge to Chalmers’ top-down approach to economic management and his insistence the state is best placed to direct capital flows, rather than the markets. The notion that our economic prospects might improve if business was left to its own devices is the kind of neoliberal nonsense guaranteed to raise the Treasurer’s hackles.
Husic’s proposal would have been a big story if the Press Gallery took economics as seriously as its predecessor. The merits of public policy decisions are seldom examined by journalists and commentators who are not afraid to flaunt their prejudice, as the ABC’s Laura Tingle did at the Sydney Writers Festival last week. Anthony Albanese’s government deserved credit because “they are actually trying to do policy,” she said. “Whether you think the policy is shit or not, that’s another issue.” The mainstream media’s reluctance to hold a progressive Labor government to account has allowed Albanese to abandon economic conventional wisdom of the past 40 years without so much as a raised eyebrow.
The disastrous experiments in state-run economies in Soviet states driven by mandates and five-year plans were taken as conclusive evidence command economies didn’t work. Governments in the West began to deregulate economies and were rewarded with greater prosperity.
As Johan Norberg writes in his recent book, A Capitalist Manifesto, the first two decades of the 21st century have been the best period in history for human wellbeing. He calculates that 138,000 men, women and children have emerged from poverty daily. Yet left-wing economists have not been prepared to give up the fight so easily. The declaration of a climate emergency offered a new excuse for state intervention, which the Albanese government embraced.
The Future Made in Australia policy is driven by the hubris that the government knows best. It assumes to direct private resources accordingly. The Future Made in Australia policy is what Chalmers meant when he promised in an essay in The Monthly at the start of last year “to rebuild a better capitalism”. He declared the government’s new role was to “design markets, facilitate flows of capital into priority areas, and ultimately make progress on our collective problems and purpose”.
The intellectual foundation for this radical departure from free-market principles is the work of Mariana Mazzucato, who Chalmers says is his favourite economist. Mazzucato’s book, The Entrepreneurial State, is best described as a collection of anecdotes rather than an intellectual thesis.
She calls for “moonshots” and “mission-orientated innovation”, arguing that if governments can put astronauts on the moon, they can solve the urgent challenges facing our planet. She ignores the exceptional nature of the Apollo project, which pursued a narrow military objective with virtually unlimited funding. The few industrial spin-offs from moonshot technology came at a high price.
The greatest advances in space technology today are driven by innovation in a competitive private market. Australians living outside the range of mobile phone towers know this all too well. The government-run National Broadband Network program invested $2bn, launching two conventional geostationary satellites 37,000km into space to deliver high-speed internet to remote districts. That service is now effectively redundant thanks to the arrival of Elon Musk’s Starlink.
In defiance of the long history of non-market failures and government-selected losers, the Albanese government is pressing ahead with 10-figure investments in unproven technology such as green hydrogen and quantum computing. Like the architects of the NBN, it arrogantly assumes it knows what the technology landscape will look like in a decade and that no smart-aleck private entrepreneur will come up with anything better.
Capitalism is nothing more or less than an economy not run by the political authorities. Its defining feature is the absence of control from above. Its purpose is to allocate scarce capital with alternative uses to endeavours most likely to improve the material circumstances of the people as a whole. It does so by using the rich sum of information embedded in price signals tempered by an assessment of risk. Neither of these factors plays much part in what we call government investment, which is, in fact, reallocation of private capital. Governments, as we should never forget, have no money of their own.
Husic’s proposal to ease the corporate tax burden recognises industry welfare is no substitute for economic reform designed to create the conditions where businesses and individuals can thrive. Whether our future will be built in Australia rather than China or Arizona ultimately depends on competitive taxation and cheap, reliable energy rather than the wisdom of the political class.
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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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related. I hope she recovers soon from her encounter with Guillain-Barré syndrome
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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