Australian Politics
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Finance guru Mark Bouris’s radical solution to housing crisis
This is a reasonable proposal but will not address the supply/demand imbalance. It would probably send prices higher
Don’t expect the housing situation to get better any time soon. We have massive demand – fuelled by record population growth. We have low supply.
The latest figures show that housing approvals have fallen to a decade low. The number of loans to build or buy a new home have crashed to record lows. Construction companies are going broke practically daily.
I don’t see any genuine solutions being tabled.
In fact, the only thing our politicians seem capable of doing is spruiking pie-in-the-sky housing targets … that I suspect even they know we’ll never meet.
What we need are practical solutions.
Reducing immigration to 100,000 people a year (instead of 500,000 a year) should be step one. But I think we keep international students. They are a huge export for us in the education area. This is obvious.
Reduce demand overall, rents go down. It’s as simple as that.
But that doesn’t help mortgage holders. They still have massive mortgages.
They’re now paying off their mortgages at much higher interest rates. As a result, they’ve shut their wallets. And this is hurting the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on them to spend.
So here’s a proposal: make interest payments on mortgages tax deductible.
Hear me out.
Let’s say you owe $500,000 on your mortgage. Let’s also say your interest rate is 7.0 per cent. That means each month you’d be paying just over $2900 in interest alone.
Now imagine you’re in the United States.
Over there, this $2900 monthly interest payment would be tax deductible.
Yes, you read that correctly.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, mortgage holders get a “home mortgage interest deduction” that allows them to deduct interest paid on up to US$750,000 of their home loan principal.
The deduction only applies to home loans on a primary place of residence. Fair enough.
So why don’t Australians get the same benefit?
If it’s good enough for the Americans, surely it’s good enough for us too?
The PM could pass legislation on this next week.
Sure, you’d have the boffins at Treasury lose their minds over this proposal.
They’d say the tax offset would take too much money out of Canberra’s coffers.
But I’d rather the money be in the hands of mortgage holders who can spend it at local businesses, invest it in good companies and save for a rainy day … instead of having it in under the control of Canberra-based politicians and bureaucrats.
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More Sydney parents than ever opt for private schools
Many government schools are so dire that you can't blame them
The state’s private schools are enrolling more students than at any time on record despite soaring cost-of-living pressures and fee hikes that have pushed tuition costs above $40,000 a year at numerous Sydney private schools.
Official data released on Wednesday shows the proportion of students enrolled in NSW public schools has fallen for the fifth year running, dropping to 62.9 per cent in 2023. It is the lowest share of students attending state schools in the past two decades of reporting.
The exodus from public schools in NSW is being driven in part by the establishment of low-fee private schools in Sydney’s north- and south-west growth corridors, where the construction of new public schools over the past decade has failed to keep pace with population growth.
Most other states and territories have experienced a similar trend, the figures released by Australian Bureau of Statistics show.
In NSW, 785,847 students were enrolled in public schools last year, 267,253 in Catholic schools and 195,356 in private schools. The proportion attending private and Catholic high schools is approaching half of all secondary students, rising to 43 per cent last year.
University of Sydney education researcher Helen Proctor said the issues public schools faced were widely publicised, such as teacher shortages, which could be contributing to parents considering private options.
“There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down,” Proctor said. “It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.”
A separate snapshot of data provided by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW shows 65,000 students, or 28 per cent of those enrolled in the private system, are attending a school that charges $20,000 or more.
About 60,000 pupils, or a quarter of all those enrolled in the private system, attend a school with fees below $5000 a year. Another 72,000 pupils attend a school that charges between $5000 and $10,000.
Between April 2022 and March last year, repayments on a million-dollar mortgage increased by more than $2000 a month. A survey conducted by National Australia Bank in 2022 found one in 10 parents were relying on family members, including grandparents, to pay tuition costs.
Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said systemic schools have grown at the fastest rate since 2013. They typically charge up to $3000 a year, with substantial sibling discounts.
“These numbers are a huge vote of confidence from parents because parents know they get quality and affordable education, and that their children thrive in our schools,” McInerney said.
“We provide high job prospects, further study pathways and create great citizens. It’s a massive contribution to society.”
Association of Independent Schools of NSW chief executive Margery Evans said the bulk of the growth in independent schools was in the lower and mid-fee bands under $10,000.
“The main growth has been low and mid-fee schools, many in Sydney’s north-west and south-west growth areas. We’ve also seen increasing numbers in regional schools including in Tweed Heads. These schools are affordable for parents paying off mortgages, and appealing because they are kindergarten to year 12 campuses,” she said.
“There are also almost 20 faiths represented in the independent sector across 350 schools, including Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish schools. These schools provide an education that reflects parents’ values and beliefs. Forty years ago, there weren’t any Islamic schools. There are (now) 29, with 22,000 students.”
NSW Education Minister Prue Car said over the past five years, NSW has seen the biggest drop in the country when it comes to the share of students in government schools.
“It is no coincidence that we have had 24,000 students leave the public system at the same time the previous Government oversaw a teacher shortage crisis,” she said. “The government is undertaking urgent work to repair the states’ education system, by investing in our teaching workforce and addressing the chronic teacher shortage facing our state.”
Mother Jasmine De Leon chose to send her youngest two children to a local private school, Norwest Christian College, near her home in Quakers Hill, partly because it was a co-educational pre-school to year 12 campus.
“My kids have been going to the same school since they were four years old, and having that pre-kindergarten year was what really interested us,” De Leon said.
“There is also a big sense of community and a structured environment. They also offer smaller classes and a variety of extracurricular subjects.”
She considered having her two children sit the public selective high school test, but after five years at their current school they “had become comfortable and had established strong friendship groups.”
“It’s also at the lower end for private school fees, and it was affordable for us and worth it when considering what the school could offer”.
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Drop Makarrata Commission to avoid further antagonism, says Ken Wyatt
Former Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt has warned Labor against pursuing a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth telling because this would further “antagonise” Australians and stoke division, following the failure of the voice referendum.
The first federal Aboriginal cabinet minister said embedding truth telling in school curriculums – as Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney suggested on Wednesday – would not work in isolation as a means of helping all citizens understand the nation’s history before and since settlement.
“School curriculums alone will not do it,” Mr Wyatt said.
“I wouldn’t go with a Makarrata Commission, not based on the African model. Because in the face of the No vote you don’t want to antagonise. I think the Prime Minister has lost a lot of kudos and ground on the voice failing. His leadership has to have a question mark over it.”
Mr Wyatt has been a long supporter of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart’s call for an Indigenous voice enshrined in the Constitution – followed by treaty and truth telling. He quit the Liberal Party over its position on the referendum.
Ms Burney said on Wednesday she was still talking with communities about the outcomes of the referendum and “what the next steps would be”, but would not put a timeline on truth telling and what that could look like.
“I’m having discussions with the cabinet about that … the issue of truth telling is incredibly important,” she told the ABC.
“There are many, many ways in which that can happen including the school curriculum.
“There’s not a particular model that I’m favouring at the moment … I am very open, as the government is very open, to what it might look like.”
The Australian understands there are no discussions between federal and state governments on implementing truth-telling into curriculums, with the national curriculum not due to be reviewed until 2026-27.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures were already key priorities in the curriculum.
“The Australian curriculum version 9.0 includes a range of additional content that recognises the experiences and perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” a spokesman said. “The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority aims to deepen all students’ understanding of the histories and cultures of First Nations Australians and their knowledge of important aspects of our national history.”
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership acting chief executive Edmund Misson pointed to professional standards that required teachers to demonstrate how they promoted reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the classroom.
Australian Primary Principals’ Association president Angela Falkenberg said enormous strides had been taken in the curriculum over years to embed Indigenous history and culture into teaching and argued truth-telling efforts should be focused on adults.
Kevin Donnelly, who reviewed the curriculum under the Abbott government, said he believed the pendulum had swung too far away from teaching children about Western history and values, detracting from their “national pride” as part of a left-leaning agenda.
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson echoed Dr Donnelly’s comments, saying: “Classrooms should remain a place for education, not a forum to foster division and activism.”
While Mr Wyatt was a supporter of a constitutionally enshrined voice, as minister he toed the Morrison government’s line and did not pursue the measure. Instead he oversaw work on a legislated voice, resisted calls for a truth commissioner and believed in “organic and evolving truth telling” rather than formal hearings such as take place in the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa.
Mr Wyatt said Labor should commission a series of documentaries through the ABC on Indigenous history and repurpose the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies for a couple of years to develop “historical monologues”. He believed the arts, the media, schools and universities all had a role in helping Australians learn the stories of where they live.
“We did a fair bit of work on (truth-telling),” he said. “What I was in the process of bringing together is all of the national bodies that hold records of Indigenous Australians, seeing what they had in their collections including the film archives. I was looking at some of the work out of the frontier wars by Rachel Perkins. And then I was looking at how do we translate that into … not a catalogue, but an understanding of what history we have.”
Mr Wyatt said all of the work he had progressed for truth telling would be available to Ms Burney.
“The National Indigenous Australians Agency would have all of that and I’m surprised they haven’t come forward and said ‘Minister (Burney) the previous minister had us working on this stuff’,” he said.
Voice campaigner Sean Gordon said truth telling could not occur effectively without a regional and local voice model first being set up.
The Greens and independent Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe called on the government not to walk away from Makarrata, treaty and truth telling.
However key architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart did not pushed for national truth-telling hearings during the voice campaign last year.
Instead, Uluru Dialogue co-chair Megan Davis warned against “performative story-telling” led by government.
Professor Davis advocated for local truth telling projects such as the Carrolup Elders Reference Group and its Centre for Truth-telling.
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Diversity must be irrelevant when selecting judges
Right now, nobody knows the religious or racial breakdown of the federal judiciary. And in the age of doxxing, that is how it should stay.
As the Jewish community has learned, there is no shortage of racist ratbags in this country who are prepared to single out people for malicious mischief based on their race or religion.
This is why the federal government needs to be very careful about its proposal to start collecting statistics on the “diversity” of the judiciary.
The only possible reason for collecting data on the ethnic or religious background of judges would be to use it as a benchmark for future race-based judicial appointments.
Collecting this data might seem well meaning, but it misconstrues the role of the judiciary, would feed racial division and would inevitably hurt the standing of the very people it is intended to benefit.
At the moment, the community knows that all judicial officers are selected based on their ability to do the job. They are not selected because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or disability.
They are there to do a job of critical importance. They are not there to represent anyone or provide special treatment for those of the same race or religion.
Inherent characteristics such as ethnic background are simply irrelevant to the question of whether candidates for the bench are fit for office.
But it is easy to see how that would change if statistics on judicial diversity were ever introduced.
Politicians would inevitably brag about their successes on this measure, while criticising their opponents who fall short.
Merit might remain the formal criterion for appointment – but in name only.
The commitment to measure judicial diversity was made by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus in September 2022 when he accepted in principle a series of recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission.
He committed the government to promoting diversity on the bench and introducing what he described as a more transparent process of appointing judges.
This forms the context for this week’s push by the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration to promote diversity and cultural awareness as key considerations in selecting judges.
So with the push for diversity on the bench gathering strength, it is worth considering what sort of selection system would achieve this outcome.
In its 2022 report on judicial impartiality, the Law Reform Commission did not recommend any particular method of selecting new judges.
But that report does single out one proposal which, if enacted, would restrict the discretion of the attorney-general and hand real influence to an advisory panel.
This system would have the effect of imposing a political penalty on any attorney-general who departed from a list of candidates drawn up by an advisory panel.
The composition of the proposed advisory panels would be diversified – “potentially including lay members”.
And if an attorney-general departed from the panel’s short list, a public explanation would be required by law.
Instead of allowing each federal government to choose its own method of selecting judges, the method outlined in the commission’s report would be entrenched by statute.
Compare this to the view of Marilyn Warren, a former chief justice of Victoria. In 2007 she told a conference hosted by the National Judicial College that the predominant experience was that the current appointment system had worked well.
She warned against removing the judgment of the executive branch of government – whose core is the ministry and the Governor-General – and “imposing a mandatory community-based selection model”.
“Transparency for the sake of satisfying modern pursuit of accessibility of process will make the process more open and public but political and, inevitably, controversial. Look at the American experience,” Warren said.
The selection system outlined by the Law Reform Commission seems to come very close to the sort of “bureaucratisation” that has been opposed by Robert French, a former chief justice of the High Court.
In 2017, when French retired from the court, he made it clear he supported the current system in which judicial selection is a matter for the executive.
“The question is, first of all, should that selection process be constrained by a limitation to a number of names put up by some sort of panel? Or should the executive simply have a process by which it receives the best possible advice?” French said.
“I am inclined personally, although there are others who would debate this, not to favour bureaucratisation of the selection process.”
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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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Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Labor is gearing up to go negative on housing investors
"Negative gearing" enables well-off people to transform more income into capital than might otherwise have been possible. And anything that rich people do is automtically suspect to Leftists.
I used negtive gearing in my time so I know exactly what it is and does. And a major effect of it is to REDUCE rents. By using other income to subsidize my property investments, I was able to accept rents that were too low to cover my mortgages and other debts.
But lower rents seem to be bad if a landlord gets some benefit out of that apparently
It’s a matter of when, and not if, Labor goes after negative gearing.
And it is the “why” that informs this view.
Labor has been historically hostile to negative gearing, and there is no evidence it has collectively changed this view.
On the contrary, the caucus is pushing hard for it.
Voters may have rejected it twice – in 2016 and 2019 when Labor first put its abolition on the table – but that hasn’t softened the party’s devotion to the principle.
Politics has remained the obstacle.
What has changed is the pressure union-dominated industry super funds have been recently applying. The industry super funds are desperate to get their claws into rental stock as a private asset class.
The best way to do that is to get mum and dad investors out of the picture.
If anything, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers’ weasel words over the past week have strengthened the view that Labor is tilling the soil again to have another crack at it, at some point.
The Treasurer’s view on it is implicit in his thesis for the remaking of capitalism. He has made it his mission to leverage the wealth of superannuation to deliver on his remodelling of the economy and its institutions.
Housing is a key part of it. And having union-dominated super funds control the rental stock of the nation – which is 30 per cent of the market – fits neatly into this ideological model.
Industry funds are salivating over it because of the low-risk high-yield equation. As a private asset class, the valuations can also be manipulated.
Corporatising rental stock – quasi-nationalisation – has an obvious political attraction for Labor. The party has held a long-term aversion to mum and dad property investors, a lot of whom wouldn’t vote Labor.
The Greens understand the significance of this. It is less clear, however, why some teal independents – whose constituents are over-represented as wealthy property investors – are supportive.
Either way, this is an issue that will be revisited by Labor at some stage. This is almost a certainty.
Little that has been said over the past week should offer anyone any confidence that Albanese and Chalmers haven’t been working up options.
A question is whether it would be grandfathered – as was Bill Shorten’s model.
It is impossible to see how it could be done otherwise without forced divestiture. This would be insanity.
Grandfathering, however, produces questionable revenue gains for the government.
The motivation runs far deeper and is inherently more ideological. Labor’s inspiration is for a new class of public housing for renters. Under its model, the industry super funds would own the housing stock.
Why the Albanese government would be considering negative gearing changes in the middle of a supply crisis is confounding to industry experts.
The Henry tax review – commissioned by Wayne Swan as treasurer when Chalmers was working for him – was clear about this. It warned against any changes to taxes on housing until the supply issue was solved.
Abolishing or curbing negative gearing is an effective increase in housing tax. And if you tax something, you get less of it.
If Albanese’s aim is to not see a further two promises broken, its difficult to understand why Labor would be contemplating negative gearing changes as it seeks to build 1.2 million homes in five years.
The retail politics of negative gearing are simultaneously crude and complex. Labor seeks to sympathise with first-home buyers, using the argument that young families shouldn’t have to compete at an auction with a foreign investor or a plumber seeking to buy a 10th property.
This argument becomes impossible to sustain if the alternative is that a first-home buyer instead must compete with a pension fund seeking to buy its 10,000th home.
In the context that government on Monday reduced tax on foreign investors to help facilitate Labor’s build to rent model, which has produced close to zero new homes, it would be inconceivable they would be seeking to increase taxes on mum and dad investors.
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Frontline workers will be long-term losers under Labor’s tax cuts
Sparkies, paramedics, police officers and accountants will be long-term losers under Labor’s stage three tax changes, as a major credit rating agency says Anthony Albanese’s revamped tax cuts will likely be more inflationary than Scott Morrison’s original plan.
Under Labor’s tax changes, electricians, school principals, cops, train drivers and others will pay more tax under the proposed legislation in a decade, analysis by The Australian has revealed.
Bigger tax cuts for middle-income earners promoted by the Prime Minister and Jim Chalmers are projected to erode over time as bracket creep captures more Australians under a higher 37c tax rate. In 10 years, Australians earning the equivalent of more than $104,000 today will be worse off under Labor’s redistribution of the tax relief.
That leaves a wide pool of Australians, including essential workers, winning in the short term but having less money in their pockets in the future as their average tax rates push higher.
Ahead of Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy being grilled at Senate estimates on Wednesday, an S&P Global report said while Labor’s tax cuts would have a “broadly neutral” impact on the budget, they could be more inflationary than the Morrison government’s stage three.
“They may … be marginally more inflationary than the original tax cuts since they will provide additional funds to low- and middle-income earners,” the report, which provided an annual review of Australia’s economy and budget position, said.
The Australian can reveal school principals will be among the first to begin paying more under Labor’s plan.
A year after the introduction of the modified stage three, principals’ average incomes are expected to creep above the $146,486 annual salary threshold separating winners and losers.
By 2033-34, those earning more than $104,000 today – assuming 3.5pc annual wage growth – will leave a much wider pool of Australians, including essential workers, with less money in their pocket.
In the middle of 2027, electrical engineers, tram and train drivers will be left out of pocket as they become what Labor believes are high earners. By the end of this decade construction managers are among the occupations who will earn too much to be beneficiaries of the tax changes.
Two years later, police and crane operators will be worse off as their average taxable incomes push towards $150,000 a year. That will be followed by accountants and vets from 2032, while fire or emergency service workers, paramedics, and electricians will be worse off from mid-2033.
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Pacific Islands Push for More University Students in Australia
Going to university in Australia could become simpler for Pacific Islanders if they are considered domestic students.
The high commissioner for Samoa, Hinauri Petana, told federal politicians the crippling cost of international student fees in Australia was curbing educational outcomes in her nation.
“Our appeal is that, by all means, international rates should stay for who can afford it, but for the Pacific we'd like to see our own private citizens to send their children here at the same rates,” she told a public hearing into education and tourism in the Pacific this week.
“Australia has been one of the leading countries in the world in terms of education.”
Greater investment and assistance would help her nation in developing its own education sector, Ms. Petana said.
Australia hosts nearly one million international students each year with most hailing from China, India, and Nepal.
Pacific Islanders make up less than one percent, with 7000 to 8000 people on student visas.
Yves Lafoy, representing New Caledonia, floated the idea of a set number of people that could be considered domestic students.
“We back the concept of a quota of Pacific students to benefit from Australian fees,” Dr. Lafoy told the hearing.
A ballot visa for Pacific Islander nations was established by the Labor government in 2023 and from late 2024 will allow 3000 people per year to receive permanent residency if they’ve been offered an ongoing job in Australia.
People studying on the Pacific Engagement Visa will pay domestic fees and will be able to access Commonwealth student loans as well as Youth Allowance and other benefits.
Luke Sheehy, chief executive of Universities Australia, said scholarships from individual universities and other educational programs were all options for students from the Pacific to come to Australia.
“These are terrific and often transformative initiatives, and further consideration given to encouraging and supporting more students abroad to receive an Australian education would be welcome,” Mr. Sheehy said.
Long wait times and exorbitant visa costs for Pacific Islanders wanting to visit Australia were also holding back integration in the region, the committee heard.
‘It is very difficult, even to come be a tourist in Australia,” Ms. Petana said.
‘You have to show your sponsorships, you have to show your bank account, all kinds of things.”
Samson Vilvil Fare, the high commissioner for Vanuatu, also spoke in support of easing Australia’s visa requirements on Pacific Island visitors.
Complicated paperwork and frustrating wait times meant people were often delayed or may not end up coming to Australia, he said.
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More Groucho Marx than Karl Marx: Anthony Albanese fixing the economy
Anthony Albanese clearly believes that his turn back to the left – smashing high income earners with Stage 3 tax changes and smashing employers with new industrial relations rules – is in tune with a fundamental shift in Australian politics.
On the face of it, the polls seem to back him in.
The Prime Minister hasn’t paid any real price for the income tax flip flop, daring Peter Dutton to vote against a tax cut “for every single Australian taxpayer” even as he snatches back thousands from anyone on more than $146,000 a year.
At the same time, new French-style right to disconnect rules have also landed well with, tellingly, Greens MPs sending out media releases touting their popularity on Tuesday.
The man who in 2022 portrayed himself as a safe and moderate economic manager has gone all-in bashing bosses and the big end of town.
In doing so, the Prime Minister has revealed himself as more Groucho Marx than Karl: “Those are my principles and, if you don’t like them, well, I have others.”
This has the potential to be a massive mistake, both politically and for Australia.
Time and time again, commentators have declared the end of Australia’s fundamentally centre-right politics only to be caught out, most recently in the wake of the failed Voice campaign.
And while Albanese’s political bet has, for the moment, paid off, it is also putting the rest of the Australian economy at grave risk of serious long-term damage.
Sure, we may not be in a technical recession, inflation is moderating and employment remains strong.
The threat of multiple interest rate rises has, for the moment, passed.
But household income, real wages and productivity are all going backwards, while failure to do anything about the tax system means an increasingly bloated government will continue to rely on the lazy tide of bracket creep.
Instead of moving to reform and actually grow the economy in the tradition of Hawke and Keating, the government is pushing Whitlam-era bash-the-boss rhetoric and putting handbrakes on business.
But the government, and many of its media enablers, are misreading the room if they think that Labor and its effective junior partners in the Greens are on to a winner with this new class warfare.
People are anxious, absolutely. Particularly in already crowded cities like Sydney, people are looking to blame others for traffic and expensive housing and a million other houses.
This explains the regular two-minute hates on Twitter (or X, if you will) against Balmain and Fitzroy “boomers” and NIMBY councils who are supposedly preventing benevolent developers from throwing up tons of affordable housing.
But deeper down, people sense that a country – their country – that has more or less dodged recessions for 30 years is suddenly faced with the prospect of not just a few quarters of backwards growth but a sustained fall in living standards.
People who grew up with the expectation of a quarter acre block (or California bungalow or inner city terrace) are now being told they will have to leverage themselves to the hilt for a train-line apartment that may or may not come with bankruptcy-inducing defects.
And while no one ever voted for it (now there would be a referendum) both sides of politics have long adhered, more or less, to a Big Australia immigration policy.
Huge arrivals keep overall GDP in the black, depress wages and push up property prices – though whether these are good or bad things depends on whether you’re a suburban commuter on the one hand or a politician or property developer on the other.
Those big numbers will also impact social cohesion in ways we cannot even begin to predict, though it surely sends an odd message to those who came here seeking a better life to have their children go to school and learn how awful Australia Day is.
Meanwhile, we don’t yet know the full details of the Albanese Government’s IR deal but we do know that unions and troublemakers are about to have a whole new set of ways to turn the screws on productive enterprises, particularly small and medium-sized ones.
And this is before we get to the nightmare of the rushed renewables transition, which promises lower energy prices but never seems to deliver, and which in the process is forcing the country to deindustrialise.
A devastating report out of Victoria in The Australian on Tuesday showed the direction this is heading.
There, the Government’s anti-gas policies, taxes, regulation and the cost of doing business generally led to a net decrease of more than 7600 businesses in the last financial year in that state. This, rather than real reform, is what the Albanese Government’s new policy settings will replicate nationally, making them so dangerous.
To return to Keating, then as now Australia is in danger of becoming what he called a banana republic.
“If this government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again, and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for,” Keating told John Laws in 1986.
“We will end up being a third-rate economy ... a banana republic.”
Hard choices and real reform made sure that didn’t happen then.
Now, though, it’s looking like back to the future.
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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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Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Was the Covid cure worse than the disease?
A lot of Australians are dying. Many politely say: We need to know why. …but really now, how long must polite company continue this faux naivety?
The Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), is the only body in Australia that undertook the task to investigate why Australian Excess Deaths continue to equate to about two jumbo jet crashes each week, and every week, since early 2021. That is two jumbo jets of dead Australians a week.
Why did AMPS step up thus?
Because the Australian Senate voted down a motion last year to hold hearings into why Australia has been experiencing this surge in Excess Deaths. Again this week, Labor and the Greens voted against investigating why Australia is experiencing continued excess mortality that began early 2021. Our elected officials turned their backs on us.
You see, the two major federal political parties were instrumental in motivating state governments to lock down Australians, confining essentially millions of people to their homes, with the only hope of release back into the general community being dependent on receiving a Covid vaccine, all to be recorded, of course, on vaccine passports. Millions of others had no choice – no jab meant no job. With bills to pay, mortgages to service, and kids to feed, many surrendered to this State-sponsored coercion.
With no equivalent Bill of Rights to protect the Australian people, and the almost complete abolition of human rights, many among the millions desperate to regain their fundamental freedoms succumbed to this disgusting and brutal authoritarianism. Australia’s political overlords had successfully revived our early penal colony history, where throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, we became ruled by physical force and rubber bullets.
And it worked – by the end of 2021, somewhere between 85-95 per cent of Australians had fallen victim to the many tactics employed by our federal and state governments, to receive the ‘safe and effective’ gene-based injections.
Now, a lot of Australians are dying. People are asking, why?
To be clear, in 2020 Australia experienced below average All-Cause Mortality, despite apparently the presence of a highly infectious and deadly virus said to be circulating amongst us. In fact, deaths due to respiratory disease were 16.2 per cent lower, while influenza and pneumonia deaths were 36 per cent lower. Does that read like a pandemic to you? Covid deaths didn’t even break into our top 10 leading causes of death, and were at 832, far below the more than 3,000 suicides. So low were Covid deaths that Australia did not appear to have data to support the urgent cries from politicians, here and globally, to the effect that we all were facing imminent death from SARS-CoV-2. In truth, we faced and experienced a political theatre.
It is our opinion that this is why the Australian Senate continues to look the other way, now that it finds itself confronted by the fallout from a theatre of the absurd, the violent, and the dishonest.
In October 2023, AMPS released the investigative findings of over 30 science and medical authors into Australia’s Excess Deaths. In brief, we suspect that Australia may be suffering from an iatrogenic disaster potentially caused by the uptake of Covid vaccines.
The book is simply titled out of respect for the dead – Too Many Dead: An Inquiry into Australia’s Excess Mortality.
Some of the generous co-authors include Associate Professor Peter Doshi, Edward Dowd, Phillip Altman PhD, Andrew Madry PhD, Geoff Pain PhD, Wilson Sy PhD, Dr Monique O’Connor, Conni Turni PhD and Astrid Lefringhausen PhD, Jessica Rose PhD, Dr Tess Lawrie, Professor Norman Fenton, Dr Clare Pain, and Dr Aseem Malhotra, together with another 21 science and medical doctors of great distinction.
To say no stone was left unturned by such an esteemed ensemble of scientific and medical expertise would be an understatement. As the book notes:
This book has been assembled by an aggregation of highly-qualified and experienced doctors and researchers who take their ethics seriously. Here, information has not been withheld, or, worse, blocked.
AMPS did also fairly invite Australian medical regulators to contribute their analysis and synthesis of the Australian data, where it was hoped they would call upon the over 3,500 international case studies casting extreme doubt over the integrity of the Covid vaccines. Instead of a comprehensive contribution, there was silence; no response was provided. In correspondence to a previous letter, former head of the Department of Health, Mr Brendan Murphy, sent a rather brief letter, which read in part:
Regarding excess mortality statistics, there is no credible evidence to suggest that excess mortality is related to Covid vaccination either in Australia or internationally.
‘No credible evidence’?
In pondering these words from Australia’s (former) chief health bureaucrat, Too Many Dead observes:
For three years Australia succumbed to the will of corporate ideologues in big pharma, big media, big finance, and big government who seem to prioritise profit over people. This enslavement, and it is nothing less, may help to explain these high excess death rates being witnessed now at more than 15 per cent above baseline mortality. Put another way, AMPS and all ethical and informed doctors are horrified at the ten or twenty or thirty thousand excess deaths in this country in the time since March, 2021. Australian and other Western data show a mass casualty event; peculiarly, the higher figures are occurring in the countries that are highly injected, but our political and medical authorities seem to think there is nothing worth scrutiny. Now, with this book, it has been probed. This investigation has had to cut straight across the lockstep media messaging, the medical misinformation and the censorship.
Too Many Dead shall be seen through the years as a book of the age of Covid, a historic document gathering together meticulous facts that cause governments everywhere fear for what they have wrought and brought upon their people, death, and the pestilence of a thousand forms of injury brought and wrought by their ‘safe and effective’ solution to a non-pandemic.
I commend the authors of Too Many Dead for bravely stepping into the pages of history bearing the torch of Truth.
And to you good readers on far away shores I commend Too Many Dead as a systematic and disciplined account, and blueprint, for beginning the same journey into your Truth, for what has befallen every nation that opted to secure benefits for big pharma first, before the peace and health of their people … their mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, and our innocent infants.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-dying-of-down-under/
************************************************International students turned away in record numbers
Australia is on track for a steep fall in net migration after federal officials turned away thousands of overseas students who applied to start courses this month, bringing student visa grants down by 20 per cent in the biggest shift in two decades.
The cut to the education program is the biggest single factor in driving the total migrant intake down to 375,000 this financial year and putting it on course for 250,000 the following year.
The government’s migration strategy unveiled last year has imposed stronger English-language tests on students and requires them to prove they are genuine students before they enter the country, while making it harder for them to stay if they do not find jobs that help fill a skills shortage.
The government remains open to more controversial measures, such as a cap on student numbers or higher fees on their visa applications.
The cuts to student visas are not being felt across all universities. The biggest impact is at private colleges with low ratings for visa approvals and some universities are also writing to overseas applicants to cancel their applications because they will fail a tougher visa test put in place last year.
Most of the country’s leading universities are not seeing any big fall in overseas student numbers, the latest results show, because they have not fallen foul of the stricter tests within the department.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil sent a formal instruction to the Department of Home Affairs last year, known as Ministerial Direction 107, to tell officials to put a priority on student visa applications for universities with a good track record and to give the lowest priority to those for institutions with a history of problems.
This means the priority takes into account the track record of all overseas students at each institution so they are given a low ranking if they have had a large number of visa refusals, fraudulent applications or students who overstay their visas.
All the Group of Eight universities are in the “tier one” category in this new system, while the “tier three” group at the lowest level of the system is mainly made up of private vocational education colleges.
Australia has more than 650,000 overseas students and an increasing number of them are prolonging their stay by applying to do a second course, with 150,000 of the total being on their second student visa.
The results from the department show that overseas students are being turned away in record numbers because the visa grant rate has been driven down to 80 per cent, the lowest since records began in 2005.
In a rare fall, the student visa grants in December were lower than in November – a sign of fewer arrivals for the coming academic year – and are 20 per cent below the same period last year.
The outcome shows the department is bringing international student visa grants down from 370,000 last financial year to 290,000 this year and believes there is a reasonable chance the outcome will be slightly lower.
The new migration figures provide the first outcomes from the dramatic shift last year when the Coalition accused Labor of planning a “big Australia by stealth” and the government vowed to lower the intake and crack down on dubious visa claims.
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan criticised O’Neil for presiding over the biggest influx of overseas students as well as a record migrant intake last year.
“Labor says they don’t want a Big Australia but under the Albanese Government 900,000 people will arrive over two years and 1.625 million will arrive over five.”
O’Neil said the country could not sustain the big increase in migration after the borders were opened at the end of the pandemic. “Migration is too high and our government has taken action to bring it back to normal levels,” she said.
“The early signs are that these changes are working. We are seeing sharp decreases in numbers. This is led by deep cuts in the areas of higher education, where we have unfortunately seen widespread integrity issues.”
Another key factor in driving the migration intake down is a special program called the Pandemic Event Visa, which was introduced by the previous government with no fees and no skills test and attracted more than 100,000 people.
Labor closed the pandemic program to new applicants last year and expects 60 per cent to leave the country and the remainder to shift to other visas because they have skills that are in demand and jobs that pay above the $70,000 salary threshold for approval.
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How the radical minority tail is wagging the Labor dog
Whether it is the union movement, the vicious Green-Left, Palestinian migrants who support Hamas, or just run-of-the-mill fringe dwellers, the Albanese government is at their service.
Forget the views of most Australians as demonstrated by the Voice referendum, small businesses struggling to survive, pensioners and people on fixed incomes who can’t afford to turn on the airconditioning. Labor just isn’t listening.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s preferred option is to pander to minority activists.
Voters who thought they cast their ballot for a local Labor candidate are now finding that their representatives put unions first, nutty environmentalists second, and mardi gras and transsexual enthusiasts third.
Middle of the road Australians who show common sense and not-so radical opinions don’t get a look in at federal or state levels.
In the UK, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has backtracked on his promised $54 billion Green Prosperity Plan which included a government-owned green-energy power company.
Here, Energy and Climate Change minister Chris Bowen hysterically promotes a renewable Net Zero fantasy currently estimated to cost at least $1.5 trillion by the end of the decade and $7 trillion to $9 trillion by 2060.
Further, his narcissistic delusion denies any role for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest and least environmentally destructive source of energy. Hard Left ideology, not science, drives Labor.
Labor’s new IR Bill supported by hard-Left ACT Senator David Pocock, the erratic senators Lydia Thorpe and Jacqui Lambie, cripple productivity.
The biggest business in Canberra is the public service, why should Pocock or Labor worry about the nation?
With less than 10 per cent of the private sector workforce in the union movement, Labor is doing everything it can to pump up the tyres of an institution which should be irrelevant in the modern economy.
The big superannuation funds, controlled by former Labor politicians and union heavies, are in on the joke splashing cash on unions which in turn push their government to lift the rate of super contributions to go into the funds which swell Labor’s election coffers, and round and round the money goes.
The same with the manner in which Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Victorian and NSW premiers bow to the plainly genocidal Islamist thinking to appease Muslims in a handful of electorates.
Meanwhile, our “handsome boy” PM sucks up to Chinese supreme leader Xi while his Communist Party runs a legal system which takes our citizens hostage to influence our foreign policy.
George Orwell, or his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy (who worked for the UK Ministry of Information’s Censorship division in WWII), invented the word “doublethink” to describe the acceptance of two contradictory beliefs as a result of indoctrination.
The Left’s domination of our education system from kindergarten to university has made many Australians doublethinkers.
No thinking homosexual could possibly support a regime which criminalises gays and punishes them with whippings, imprisonment or summary execution by hanging, throwing them off rooftops or bashing them to death, while Israel offers them sanctuary as refugees from such torture.
Why we should reject blind loathing of ignorant minorities
Labor’s acolytes in the law may wring their hands about social justice and diversity but, to the punters, the housing shortage needs to be addressed, crime rates need action (particularly those involving teens and younger), and there are the perennial problems faced by those Aboriginal Australians who remain living in remote communities which have no economic foundation.
Faced with an awful axis of evil in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, our government has run down our defences and is now intent on ensuring we are economically uncompetitive internationally and divided domestically.
Politics drives Labor, not the national interest, and we all suffer because of this short-term power grab.
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2.5m Qld workers to lose workplace health and safety protections
A Parliamentary hearing has been told that 2.5 million Queensland workers are about to lose their workplace health and safety protections in a move to strengthen registered Labor unions that fund the ALP.
A Bill before Parliament seeks to tweak laws that I believe will rob workplace health and safety representatives in independent unions of the powers to represent workers in health and safety matters.
In my opinion it is a terrible attack on workers who face financial hardship if they find themselves ensnared in health or safety matters.
It means 87 per cent of Queensland’s workforce will have to pay thousands of dollars for a lawyer for representation should they become embroiled in a health or safety issue. In my view, workers who choose to belong to an independent union are being discriminated against. So, too, are tens of thousands who choose not to be in any union.
It’s bizarre. It appears the Miles government is seeking to turn the workforce into a union collective, and to hell with those who object.
Is it not a basic human right to be treated equally before the law, irrespective of whether you’re in a registered or independent union?
The move is shrouded in secrecy. The Bill was slipped quietly into the House in the dying days of Parliament late last year and follows recommendations from an expert panel that withheld the names of people who made submissions and what they said. Worryingly, the new laws also seek to expand the powers of the unions in demanding work stoppages for alleged safety breaches.
Industrial Relations Minister Grace Grace told Parliament the Work Health and Safety Act review was conducted by three independent reviewers: Craig Allen, former deputy director-general of the Office of Industrial Relations; Charles Massy, a barrister specialising in industrial relations and employment law; and Deirdre Swan, former deputy president of the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission.
“A total of 51 written submissions were received,” the trio wrote in their report. “Stakeholders who provided submissions included employer and industry representatives, registered unions, legal representative associations, government departments, businesses and individuals.
“All submissions were treated as confidential. Where the content of a particular submission is referenced in this report, the authors have not been identified.” Why?
Grace told the House the review panel recommended changes to strengthen the operation of the health and safety representative framework. “It does this by clarifying and better integrating the role of the health and safety representative in the workplace,” she said. “The bill requires employers to be proactive in supporting the formation of work groups and the election of health and safety representatives.’’
Explanatory notes tabled in Parliament made it appear the aim was to crush the independents.
“To achieve its policy objectives, the Bill will amend the Workplace Health and Safety Act (in) excluding other entities such as: associations of employees or independent contractors; other entities that represent or are purporting to represent the industrial interests of the worker; entities that demand or receive a fee from such bodies; and individuals connected with excluded bodies. Excluding associations of employees or independent contractors which are not registered unions …”
Member for Southern Downs James Lister says the ALP will leave workers in a precarious place.
“This Bill is another naked move by the Labor Party to reward their financial and political benefactors in the old trade union movement,” Lister told me, speaking as an MP, and not as an Education, Employment and Training committee member.
“It also seeks to disadvantage members of the likes of the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland, and the Teachers’ Professional Association of Queensland, and other independent unions, whose better service and cheaper fees have seen thousands of members ditch the ALP-affiliated unions.’’
Lister said Queensland workers were happier being represented by independent unions and associations “without seeing their hard-earned dollars being handed to Labor by traditional ALP-affiliated unions”.
He added: “I think this bill will disadvantage millions of Queensland workers, whose workplace health and safety would be entrusted to a monopoly of union bosses, instead of as now where employees have freedom of choice.’’
Graeme Haycroft, the creator of the key independent unions that won’t align with the ALP, said the new law especially disadvantaged nurses and teachers.
“The Bill seeks specifically to deny representation to all workers on workplace health and safety matters except those who are current or existing members of a registered trade union,” he said in evidence to the Parliamentary hearing.
“It is really about the denial of equal access to justice.
“Those who contribute to the ALP supporting unions get it; those who do not in practice cannot access it.’’
Haycroft is chief of the Red Union Support Hub, the umbrella organisation for independent unions.
“This bill seeks to deny equal access to the law,” he said.
“There were 2,879,746 employed workers in Queensland as at last December. There were 371,815 members of registered unions.
“This Bill effectively says that the only way you can access workplace health and safety legislation protections is by being an existing member of a registered trade union.
“This means that those 2.5 million workers who are not members of these registered trade unions cannot access the workplace health and safety legislation.
He added: “What happened to the ALP being the political party of the worker, and 2.5 million of the workers in Queensland are now going to be denied access to the full protection?
“The only workers the ALP seem to want are those who are prepared to fund the ALP.’’
Haycroft also questioned the higher fees charged by the Labor-linked Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union and the Queensland Teachers’ Union. The members of his independent unions paid $450. “By comparison, the QNMU charges $762. ”
“We believe that if the Red Union had 60,000 nurses, we would be able to deliver the service profitably for about $200 per annum … “Yet the QNMU charges $762.’’
He sees the new laws as “an attempt to punish the nearly 15,000 nurses and teachers who have already left a registered union because they did not want to contribute their membership money to the ALP.”
He added: “It should be a free choice. Let the worker decide who represents them. “If they want to pay more and have money go to the ALP, great. If they do not, they can join something else or not join anything.”
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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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Monday, February 12, 2024
One third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching methods cause 'preventable tragedy', Grattan Institute says
The failed "whole word" method of teaching beloved by Leftist teachers goes back to some work by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 19th century. And they call themselves "progressive"! "destructive" would be more like it
One third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new report.
The Grattan Institute's Reading Guarantee report calls this a "preventable tragedy" caused by persisting with teaching styles popular at universities, but "contrary to science" and discredited by inquiries in all major English-speaking countries.
"In a typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can't read well," said report lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter. "Australia is failing these children."
The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life, the report concluded.
Dr Hunter said the "conservative" financial estimate amounted to a "really significant cost" that did not include productivity benefits from increased reading.
Students left to 'guess' meaning of words
The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s.
It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature.
Proponents say it empowers young people by giving them autonomy.
However Grattan said it left students to "guess" the meaning of words and was saddling parents with expensive tuition costs to help their children catch up.
What are the reading wars?
Phonics, or sounding out words, is part of the "structured literacy" approach, which says reading should be broken down and the elements taught explicitly
After decades of the so-called reading wars, "whole language" has incorporated elements of other approaches such as phonics, but Grattan said it remained "light touch" and "contrary to scientific recommendations".
"What we need to do is set our expectations higher. We need to stop accepting failure," Dr Hunter said. "It's not good enough that one in three students are not where they need to be in reading."
The Grattan Institute said evidence showed a much greater number of students learned to read successfully using the alternative "structured literacy" approach, and at least 90 per cent of students would be proficient using this model.
"Structured literacy" includes phonics, but also teacher-led "explicit instruction" backed by the latest science on how children's brains learn new concepts.
"The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people," Dr Hunter said. "We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people."
Why are some schools still not using phonics?
Despite major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States settling the argument that structured literacy teaching is superior, that hasn't flowed to all classrooms, the Grattan Institute said.
It said where school systems have embraced it, students have reaped the rewards.
Australia's 10,000 schools have a high degree of autonomy, and even in states where education departments advocate for the structured literacy approach, the report said there needed to be more support for teachers to re-train and be provided with ready-made lessons.
"The real issue here is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success?'" Dr Hunter said. "The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom."
Western Sydney University's Katina Zammit, president of the Australian Literary Educators Association, said the whole language method should not end up in history's trash can.
She said that in school systems that moved to the teaching methods championed by the Grattan Institute, some teachers found it too prescriptive.
"The teachers that I have had contact with, some of the children who are being taught this way, have either lost interest in reading because it's a whole class approach or they are not retaining the instruction," Dr Zammit said.
Dr Zammit agreed whole learning did not work for all students but said it could still be useful in the classroom. "One size doesn't fit all students," she said. "Yes, the majority it might, but we do have to look at engagement and motivation as well."
However in a statement to the ABC, Education Minister Jason Clare said the science on teaching reading had been settled. He also foreshadowed mandating teaching styles in the upcoming school funding agreement.
"The reading wars are over. We know what works. The current National School Reform Agreement doesn't include the sort of targets or reforms to move the needle here," he said.
"The new Agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/grattan-institute-reading-report/103446606
**************************************************Cross-party MPs back Jewish community push to outlaw doxxing
A cross-party group of federal MPs is backing a push from the Jewish community to criminalise doxxing – the publication of people’s identifying information to shame, harass or intimidate them – in response to the mass outing of Jewish writers, artists and academics who belonged to a private chat group.
Liberal MP Julian Leeser and independent Allegra Spender, who have previously condemned the targeting of Jewish people and businesses since Hamas’ October 7 atrocities and Israel’s war in Gaza, gave their support to the idea of anti-doxxing laws, while Labor MP Josh Burns declared social media the “new frontier” for antisemitism.
The support came as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned last week’s co-ordinated doxxing of 600 members of the J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and academics WhatsApp group by pro-Palestinian activists.
“The targeting of people because they happen to be Jewish is just completely unacceptable,” Albanese said. “It has got to stop. It must stop.”
The push for anti-doxxing law reform is being led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Anti-Defamation Commission. Under a proposal from the council, a provision explicitly prohibiting the practice would be added to the section of the federal Criminal Code which covers telecommunication offences.
Leeser, a Liberal MP who relinquished his position on the opposition frontbench to campaign for an Indigenous voice to parliament, urged Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to move quickly to ban doxxing.
“Whilst this attack is aimed at Jewish Australians, the tactic of doxxing can hurt anyone perceived to be involved in Australian public life, from the home addresses of public servants and police to local branch members of a political party, or the details of family members of a public official,” he said.
Spender, whose Sydney electorate of Wentworth takes in one of Australia’s largest Jewish populations, said she supported an ongoing Victoria Police investigation into last week’s doxxing and consideration of whether further legal protections were necessary.
“We are all deeply concerned by the tragic and horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, but recklessly publishing details of fellow Australians to provoke division will not have any positive impact on peace in the Middle East,” she said. “It simply tears at our social fabric and brings enormous distress to fellow Australians.”
Burns, whose electorate of Macnamara includes the Melbourne suburbs of Balaclava, Caulfield and Elsternwick, which have large Jewish communities, said the doxxing of Jews had led to death threats and vilification and, in extreme cases, forced people into hiding.
“Social media is the new frontier for antisemitism and attacking Jewish people,” he said.
“I completely understand that people are distressed about the conflict in the Middle East, but this is no excuse to target Jewish Australians at home. This activism is misdirected and dangerous.”
There is already a provision within the Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence, with penalties of up to five years’ jail, for someone who uses a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.
The proposed anti-doxxing provision would take the law one step further and make it possible to prosecute not just those who harass people online, but those who facilitate and encourage the harassment by disseminating the names, workplaces, contact details and social media accounts of those being targeted.
Doxxing emerged in the 1990s as a form of online attack by computer hackers, where documents or “docs” containing people’s private information were uploaded and disseminated. It became a potent weapon within the anti-fascist movement, which has used doxxing to expose the identities of neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
‘The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.’
In the US, the state of Washington last year passed an anti-doxxing law with bipartisan support. However, that law makes it a civil offence, rather than a criminal one. Washington is the most recent of a dozen US states to prohibit doxxing to varying degrees, but there are no federal laws in place.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, KC, said that since Israel’s war against Hamas began, Jewish people living in Australia have felt unprecedented levels of fear and anxiety about their physical safety and livelihoods.
“In the last few days this has been caused by the publication of lists containing the names, faces and other personal information of hundreds of individuals, whose only common trait is that they are Jewish,” Aghion said.
“This has been done with co-ordination and with malice, in many cases resulting in harassment, death threats directed to named individuals and their children, professional and financial loss, vandalism of premises, and extensive psychological harm.”
Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich said pro-Palestinian activists had declared “open season on our community” in publishing a “hit list” identifying all members of the WhatsApp group. “We know that people are often inspired to do crazy things when they are radicalised online and this doxxing is dangerous and will have real-world consequences,” he said.
“The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.”
Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni said that rather than worry about doxxing, the Australian government should respond to the escalating crisis in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where the Israeli government has issued its latest evacuation order.
“We implore the Australian government to immediately end its ‘friendship’ with genocidal Israel, cut ties with the regime and to do all it can to stop the slaughter,” Mashni said.
This masthead last week reported that pro-Palestinian activists had published links to a spreadsheet containing the names, occupations and social media accounts of hundreds of members of the J.E.W.I.S.H WhatsApp group and separate documents containing their images and a leaked transcript of their group chat.
The transcript revealed that some members of the WhatsApp group wrote letters to broadcasters, media companies and publishing houses raising concerns about pro-Palestinian writers, journalists and presenters.
One of the presenters targeted by the group, Antoinette Lattouf, was stood down by the ABC for breaching the broadcaster’s social media policy after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on the Gaza conflict. She is suing the national broadcaster for unlawful dismissal.
Victoria Police confirmed it was examining whether charges could be brought against people who had doxxed Jewish people and businesses in Melbourne.
“Police are investigating following reports that a number of people who belong to a private social media chat group appear to have been released online,” a spokesperson said.
The mass doxxing prompted Liberal senator David Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, to write to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus urging him to request a federal police investigation.
“We would not accept such silencing or intimidation of any other group of Australians, and nor should we accept or condone it for Jewish Australians, no matter how strongly people may differ in their political opinions over this conflict,” Sharma wrote in his letter.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week called for greater leadership from the federal government to tackle antisemitism and said he would support any changes needed to “beef up” the current laws.
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Property Investors Won’t Lose Tax Deductions: Treasurer
And his word is his bond, no doubt
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has ruled out changes to negative gearing and capital gains.
Property investors are under the spotlight as the tax reform debate shifts to wealthier Australians.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton are both under mounting pressure to revisit tax breaks on investment properties.
The Greens are proposing limiting negative gearing rules to a single investment property.
But Mr. Chalmers says any changes are off the table.
“That’s not something that we’re proposing, not something that we are considering, not something that we are working up,” he told Sky News on Sunday.
Negative gearing allows investors to claim deductions on losses, while the capital gains tax discount halves the amount of excise paid by people who sell assets that have been owned for 12 months or more.
Asked if he had ever sought advice on changing the tax breaks, Mr. Chalmers said he had discussed all aspects of the tax system with the treasury department.
He agreed a person earning $160,000 a year was in “middle Australia.” “I think of middle Australia as the people who get up and work hard to provide for their loved ones and get ahead,” Mr. Chalmers said.
Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has called for negative gearing reforms to be considered as part of a wider debate about how tax changes could address housing affordability.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/property-investors-wont-lose-tax-deductions-treasurer-5584776
***********************************************Ethnicity and crime
The internet is currently awash with the video of four youths of Somali/Sudanese appearance leaving a car. Police want to talk to them in connection with the alleged murder of a 71-year-old woman in Brisbane. At the time of writing, three of the group have been arrested. While the police and the ABC are making no comment on the ethnicity of the group, keyboard warriors are certain that the four youths should be ‘sent back’ to East Africa. How the police and the press discuss the ethnic identity of criminals is fraught with Woke obstacles.
In London six years ago, a car ploughed into a group of people outside a museum. One journalist, Katie Hopkins, leapt to the conclusion that the attack was Jihadi terrorism and published a statement to that effect. The police refused to release the name of the driver of the car, and initially declined to provide an opinion as to whether or not it was a terrorist incident. The driver of the car was arrested and subsequently released as the police did not believe the incident was terror-related. The left-wing British press jumped on Ms Hopkins, accusing her of racism.
With characteristic delicacy, Rod Liddle weighed into the controversy, noting that the police had not released the name of the driver. If, Rod argued, the name of the driver ‘turns out to be John Christian Whitechap’ one can accept the police’s interpretation of the cause of the crash. However, if the name of the driver ‘was something more like Muhammed al Kafarkilla’ then Rod would be inclined to accept Ms Hopkins’ interpretation of the incident. He also noted that if the driver does have an Arabic name, and, if the BBC reports the story, ‘they will almost certainly describe the man as “Norwegian” because he spent a few months in Bergen’. Rod argued that ‘the BBC and the filth do not quite tell us the truth and instead feed us soma’. (Blame the grownups for the safe-space tribe.)
More recently Lionel Shriver made a similar claim when discussing the recent riots in Dublin following the refusal of the Garda to release the name and nationality of a man who had stabbed a woman and three children. ‘The Garda Siochana’s refusal to release the nationality of the man who triggered the unrest … has been worse than coy: try contemptuous. Were the culprit a native-born Irishman, his nationality would have been released in a heartbeat.’ (Fatalism is a bad way to run immigration policy.)
The same strange cosy alliance between the Police, ABC, and the left-wing press exists in Australia. Recently the Sydney ‘Snoring’ Herald published an article about human trafficking in Australia by Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin (Human Trafficking on Rise and ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.)
Clare and Perry claimed that, ‘Child trafficking, sexual servitude, forced labour, and exit trafficking – when a person is forced to leave Australia against their will – all marked significant increases in reporting since 2018-19. Forced marriage is consistently the most common type of human trafficking, making up 90 of the 340 reports of 2022-23.’
They told the story of ‘Ayra’ who ‘was one of an unknown number of mostly young women taken from Australia by their own family to be married off against their will’. We were not told where Ayra was taken nor the ethnicity of her parents. I wrote to the authors to ask why, in an article trying to educate the public about human trafficking, sexual slavery, and forced marriages, they could not mention the details of which countries are involved in this activity. There was no reply.
Apparently an ‘increase in public awareness’ cannot extend to identifying the countries involved in human trafficking and forced marriage. Thus the public has no way of knowing whether we should be watching out for concupiscent Scandinavians trying to abduct innocent Aussie sheilas, or peace-loving Islamic fathers trying to ensure that their daughters don’t marry infidels.
We see the same tendency towards obfuscation when the authorities release data discussing social problems within Aboriginal communities. Recently the ABC published a story stating that ‘Alcohol-related instances of family violence were 49.8 times higher outside metropolitan areas in Western Australia and there were 18.8 times as many calls for police assistance’. (Derby Wiluna top list of WA towns where police want hard-line liquor restrictions to fight alcohol-fuelled violence.) It failed to mention that the violence was mainly in Wiluna’s Aboriginal community.
Wiluna sits on the edge of the Western Deserts which were the home of the Martu people who, in the 1960s, who were among the last Aboriginal groups living a traditional way of life and had never seen a white person. In 1964, travelling in ‘rocks that moved’, white patrol officers began contacting the remnants of Martu people and moving them to settlements in places like Wiluna. The inevitable result was complete societal collapse from which the Martu culture, like all other Aboriginal cultures, will never recover. With the best will in the world Aboriginal social structures, cultural traditions, and beliefs, the initiation ceremonies, and above all, traditional law, cannot survive in the face of the fatal impact of Western Civilisation.
A similar reserve is evident in the ABC’s coverage of criminal activities among the young in rural areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory. We are told there is an epidemic of break and enter, car theft, and vandalism but when reporting these daily events we are never told the ethnicity of the criminals. They are simply referred to as ‘youths’. Should an Aboriginal be a victim of a crime or an assault we can be sure that the headline will be ‘Aboriginal boy/man/girl assaulted/robbed’.
We know that there are massive problems within Aboriginal communities due to the complete destruction of traditional culture. I happen to believe that there are no solutions at the present time. For the foreseeable future drunken Aboriginal men will continue to beat up their wives and put them in hospital. Aboriginal kids will continue to steal cars and anything else they can get their hands on. Above all, alcohol will continue to create chaos and ensure the continuance of poverty within Aboriginal communities.
And, also for the foreseeable future, the ABC will continue to present a hopelessly shallow, dishonest account of the causes and consequences of the destruction of Aboriginal culture. Presenting such inadequate accounts of problems in minority communities helps no one.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/ethnicity-and-crime
************************************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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Sunday, February 11, 2024
Wife’s battle for Redland Hospital MRI after husband put on six-day wait list for crucial scan
This is the sort of bureaucratic nonsense you have got to expect of Qld Health. Note that non-urgent MRI scans were routinely and promptly referred to Cleveland X-Ray, just across the road from where the guy was, but because he was classed as urgent he couldn't be sent there. So he had to wait days for a scan. Being classed as urgent DELAYED his care. That's bureaucratic logic for you
I am fortunate to be able to go private for all my medical care so I get scans as quickly as the day I ask for one. Note that what priviliges me is NOT the availability of better facilities. The guy below could also have had prompt treatment except for the rigidy and buck-passing of the public health bureaucracy. What gives me better care is that I bypass the wooden heads of an uncaring government bureaucracy
A bayside woman has started an online crusade to get an MRI machine for a busy regional hospital after her husband spent an agonising week waiting for a crucial scan.
Capalaba’s Kirra Conlon started a petition calling for the scanner for Redland Hospital where her husband Matthew, 38, was bedridden after a catastrophic migraine left him unable to walk, speak or function properly.
Mr Conlon spent six days lying in a ward before his distressed family took action and invoked a Queensland law known as Ryan’s Rule to get him a scan appointment at another hospital.
Mr Conlon was initially rushed to Princess Alexandra Hospital on January 30 after suffering a debilitating headache, stroke-like symptoms including being unable to speak or move his arms and legs.
However, after a night in the emergency ward without seeing a doctor, Ms Conlon decided to move her husband closer to home and took him to Redland Hospital.
Mr Conlon was admitted to the hospital’s four-bed stroke ward where his paralysis and headache were treated as the side effects of a suspected stroke.
But after six days and partly regaining some mobility in his arms, he was still unable to speak.
Ms Conlon claimed the week-long delay was due to a range of reasons including that the MRI at the Princess Alexandra Hospital was fully booked.
Her husband was also denied admission to PA hospital because its inpatients got preferential treatment, she claimed.
She said a lack of ambulances to transport her husband from Redland to PA or Logan hospitals also delayed his scan.
“My husband’s GP sent out an urgent referral for an MRI to all hospitals and clinics in the region, but that request went nowhere because my husband needed a nurse to go with him because he was incapacitated,” she said.
“Incapacitated patients on the southside are limited to only using MRIs at Logan and PA Hospitals, where there are always line-ups.”
Non-urgent MRI scans were referred to Cleveland X-Ray, across the road.
Under Queensland Health guidelines, MRI scans were scheduled according to clinical need.
A QH spokesman said that could result in varied waiting times.
But doctors were not able to offer Mr Conlon a diagnosis until after he had an MRI scan, Ms Conlon claimed.
She said she started a petition after a week of “sheer hell”.
“There is no MRI machine at Redland, which is a disgrace for a hospital which is supposedly undergoing a $62 million upgrade so it can treat more critically-ill patients,” she said.
“My husband was left lying in a hospital bed for six days and could not access the appropriate treatment from a neurologist or psychologist until he had an MRI.
“It was only after the MRI (which Mr Conlon eventually had at Logan Hospital) that the specialist doctors were then able to give a correct diagnosis and start the proper treatment – which we hope was not too late.
“Even staff at Redland Hospital are going to sign the petition because they also believe that not having an MRI machine on hand is a barrier to providing proper care.”
Ms Conlon said hospital staff had reassured her of an MRI scan at Logan Hospital on Friday, February 2.
However, Mr Conlon was still waiting on Saturday, February 3 when doctors told the couple that the head neurologist had agreed to an MRI and consultation for Monday, February 5.
But the devastated couple were told on Monday, February 5, that the PA MRI was unavailable.
Mr Conlon was finally taken in an ambulance to Logan Hospital on Tuesday, February 6.
A day after having the MRI scan, Mr Conlon was diagnosed with a functional neurological disorder and treatment tailored for his condition began.
Ms Conlon said she was told another patient in the ward was taken to her scan appointment at Logan by taxi under the supervision of a nurse.
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Young, woke left hateful new face of anti-Semitism
For years the right-on have been warning about the rise of racism. Beware red-faced white men who moan about mass immigration, they say. Watch out for populist politicians and their witless supporters in the masses, they cry. For it is from within these ranks, from within this army of the unwoke, that fascism is likely to emerge.
Watch out, the 1930s are coming back – that’s been the constant cry of the politically correct these past few years.
And yet when fascist-like language really did re-emerge, it came not from some old white bloke but from a youngish and very left-wing woman. When 1930s-style talk really did rear its ugly head, it wasn’t courtesy of an ageing conservative with a chip on his shoulder about illegal immigration, but a hip politico beloved of the smart set.
I am referring, of course, to Jenny Leong, the Greens MP for the state seat of Newtown in Sydney’s inner west.
This week a video emerged showing Leong speaking at a “pro-Palestine” forum in Sydney in December. What she said at that meeting was genuinely chilling. She raged against the “Jewish lobby”. These people, she said, “rock up to every community event and meeting” to try to make a “connection”.
Then came her killer line, a line that will have sickened everyone who has even the faintest acquaintance with the bleak history of anti-Semitism. They meddle in everything, she said, because they want their “tentacles” to reach into every nook of society in order that they might “influence power”.
There it was. “Tentacles”. The old, obscene vision of the Jewish people as an octopus-like monstrosity straddling the world, interfering everywhere. This is the most racist thing I have heard a mainstream politician say.
Yes, it’s good that Leong has walked back her comments. She now admits the word “tentacles” was “inappropriate”. That’s one way of putting it. I prefer “disgusting”. It has direct echoes of Nazi-era cartoons that likewise showed the Jews with “tentacles” encircling the globe.
Leong’s expression of (half-hearted) regret for her remarks should not detract from what a serious situation this is.
To my mind, for a public figure to speak ominously of Jewish “tentacles” is no better than if a public figure compared black people to monkeys or branded Chinese-heritage people a “yellow peril”. Just imagine if an Aussie politician uttered such vile slurs. There would be uproar from the right-on. That politician would be cancelled into oblivion.
This hasn’t happened for Leong. That the self-styled anti-racists of the woke left just carried on sipping their macchiatos is so revealing. It confirms their staggering double standards. They’ll hit the streets over certain kinds of racism, but turn a blind eye to the world’s oldest racism.
“Jewish tentacles” were a key motif in Nazi propaganda. As Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre says: “The nefarious Jew/octopus was a caricature deployed by Nazis as a staple in their hateful campaign.”
The rehabilitation of this vile image should horrify everyone. And strikingly, it was rehabilitated not by some hard-right loudmouth, but by a self-described anti-racist. Leong is a loud and proud critic of racism. She supports Black Lives Matter. “If you’re sick of us talking about racism, imagine how sick we are of being subjected to it,” she once said.
What is going on here? How do we explain this bizarre phenomenon – what we might call “anti-racist anti-Semitism”?
Leong is not the only “anti-racist” who seems to have a colossal blind spot when it comes to anti-Jewish racism. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter praise Hamas. BLM Chicago even tweeted an image of a Hamas paraglider, celebrating those who flew into Israel on October 7 to carry out the worst slaughter of Jewish men, women and children since the Holocaust.
This week it was revealed an “anti-racist” member of staff at the BBC once tweeted about Jews being “Nazi parasites”. At demonstrations across the West, we’ve seen supposed anti-racists march alongside radical Islamists who holler for “jihad” against the Jewish state. Here in London, posh leftists have chanted in support of the Houthis, the Yemeni movement whose flag literally has the words “Curse the Jews” on it.
And, as violent anti-Semitism has soared, anti-racists have looked the other way. The kind of people who scream at white men with dreadlocks (that’s “cultural appropriation”) and damn those who ask ethnic-minority people where they are from (that’s a “racial microaggression”) have been schtum as synagogues in Europe have been firebombed and even when a man with a knife threatened Jews outside a kosher shop in London recently.
Anti-racists flirting with racism – it feels surreal. But here’s the most troubling thing: it’s more than a blind spot. It’s more than hypocrisy. Rather, the strange spectacle of “anti-racist anti-Semitism” speaks to how rotten the politics of identity has become.
This left-wing ideology dolls itself up as “anti-racist”, but it is the opposite. It doesn’t seek to deliver us into a post-racial world, a la Martin Luther King, where true equality reigns. No, it divides us by our ethnic heritage, separating us into boxes marked “oppressed” or “privileged”.
The “oppressed” get the left’s love, while the “privileged” get their hate. And who’s in the “privileged” box? White men, naturally. Heterosexual men. “Cis” people. And, you guessed it, Jews.
Indeed, in the warped worldview of these racial authoritarians who masquerade as progressive, Jews are the most privileged of all.
A recent Harvard/Harris poll in the US found that 67 per cent of 18-24-year-olds – the woke young – view Jews as an “oppressor class”. This, too, echoes a feverish belief of the 1930s – namely, that Jews love to stomp their oppressive boot on the peoples of the world.
Today, entire ethnic groups are demonised, not by the ranting far right, but by a mainstream left that ruthlessly sorts us into the categories of “good” or “bad”.
Identity politics is the enemy of equality. It is the new means through which Jews in particular are singled out as suspect, branded as wicked. Tackling this bigoted left creed should be the top task of everyone who opposes racism, in all its devious guises.
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Vaping out of control in schools, warn principals
School principals are calling for an immediate crackdown on vape sales in shops and online, as the Coalition refuses to back the Albanese government’s plan to confine sales to pharmacies.
At least one in three Australian teenagers has tried vaping, the Cancer Council revealed on Friday when it released a survey showing 93 per cent of parents want vapes banned without a valid prescription.
Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andy Mison called on both sides of politics to back a ban on vape sales.
He said teenage students had sworn at him and threatened to bash him when he confiscated their vapes.
“They’re fixated on getting their next hit, are very disruptive and distracted from learning,’’ he said. “We see the behavioural effects of withdrawal, as kids disappear from the classroom so they can get nicotine hits.
“When you confiscate them, some kids act angrily. I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been threatened with bashings.’’
Mr Mison said manufacturers were targeting children with brightly coloured vapes made to look like highlighter pens.
“The vapes are bright and colourful and clearly designed to attract kids,’’ he said. “They have sweet combinations of flavours like mango and pineapple, and they’re so addictive.
“Kids will be more likely to be using vapes much more frequently than they might have smoked cigarettes.’’
A Senate inquiry into classroom disruption this week identified “strong links between vaping, nicotine withdrawal and classroom disruption’’.
The NSW Primary Principals Association told the inquiry of “increasing evidence of vaping being a problem in primary schools’’. “Vaping should be urgently addressed as a health problem, not a school discipline problem to solve,’’ it said.
Cancer Council chief executive Tanya Buchanan said vapes often contained nicotine and carcinogens such as formaldehyde and metals, which are not declared on the label.
Professor Buchanan said nicotine harms children’s developing brains, affecting the part of the brain that controls attention, learning, moods and impulse control.
“Retailers are still knowingly selling nicotine-containing vapes in local shops near schools, with enticing displays of lollies lining the entrance, attracting the attention of young people,’’ she said.
“Without the Parliament’s support for the federal government’s upcoming reforms, purchasing e-cigarettes will remain alarmingly common and easy for young people.’’
Retailers are banned from selling vapes to children, but enforcement is lax.
The Albanese government banned the importation of single-use vapes on January 1, but retailers are allowed to sell any vapes they have in stock to adults.
The government plans to introduce legislation this month to limit the sale of vapes to pharmacies, with a prescription, for use by smokers trying to quit.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler called on the opposition to back Australia’s “world-leading vaping reforms’’.
“Once the legislation passes the parliament later this year the only legal way to buy vapes will be therapeutically, through a pharmacy,’’ he said.
The federal opposition refused to commit to the reform, with Nationals leader David Littleproud insisting that retailers be allowed to sell vapes to adults without a prescription.
Mr Littleproud – whose party has received donations from tobacco companies – refused to say if he would support the ban on vape sales in shops.
“We need to protect children from vaping and crack down on the uncontrolled black market,’’ he said.
“The Nationals support a process to develop a comprehensive regulatory framework for e-cigarettes to keep them out of the hands of children.
“We believe that regulating e-cigarettes is also crucial to weakening the illicit black market.’’
The federal Opposition’s education spokeswoman, Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson, said that vaping in schools was “rampant and educators need every possible support to combat this scourge’’.
“With over a quarter of young people aged 14 to 17 admitting to having tried or regularly use vapes, Australian schools need tough action from this government to prevent vaping spiralling out of control,’’ she said.
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NSW to Introduce Legislation to Ban OFFSHORE Oil and Gas Exploration
One wonders why offshore drilling is singled out and why both parties support that. I guess the oceans have an image as pristine. They are more accurately seen as a biological soup. They teem with both life and pollution
On Feb. 6, the state Labor government announced that it would introduce a new piece of legislation to amend the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.
Under the changes, all sea bed petroleum and mineral exploration and recovery activities in the state’s coastal waters will be banned.
In addition, the bill will make it impossible for energy companies to carry out other developments related to offshore oil and gas exploration (such as pipelines) within the state.
The NSW government cited the risks of “major environmental disasters” such as oil spills, as well as greenhouse gas emissions associated with petroleum extraction as the main reasons for introducing the legislation.
“The NSW government’s bill is designed to prevent the severe environmental impacts that can result from offshore exploration and recovery of petroleum and minerals,” it said.
Nevertheless, the exploration ban will not apply to activities that the state government deems beneficial to the environment, including the recovery of sand for beach nourishment or beach scraping to help protect against erosion.
Similarly, dredging activities for purposes such as removing sediments or pollutants, and laying pipelines or submarine cables will also not be subject to the ban.
NSW Climate Change and Environment Minister Penny Sharpe believed the new legislation was the right move by the government.
“We know an overwhelming majority of people in NSW do not support offshore mining. The passage of this bill will give certainty that our government is prioritising environmental protection and our own local interests,” she said.
“This bill is a sensible amendment to our legislation to protect NSW against the risks of offshore mining.”
Echoing the sentiment, NSW Central Coast Minister David Harris said local communities would be better off under the new bill.
“This is about providing communities with certainty that is in the best interest of NSW as well as protecting the NSW coastal waters and marine environments,” he said.
State Opposition to Support the Bill
It is expected that the bill will receive support from the state opposition, which introduced a similar bill in June 2023.
While Shadow Environment Minister Kellie Sloane welcomed the announcement, she questioned why the state Labor government did not take action earlier.
“Pleased to see that Labor has finally seen the light when it comes to protecting NSW coastal waters—and has agreed to legislate Liberals and Nationals policy to stop offshore drilling of oil and gas,” she said on social media.
“I’m not sure why they didn’t just do this 7 months ago when the Coalition introduced.”
Despite the looming prospect of a total ban, some energy producers have expressed the intention to continue their exploration activities.
On Feb. 6, Advent Energy Executive Director David Breeze stated that his company would maintain its commitment to exploring and securing gas resources in the Commonwealth waters under the Petroleum Exploration Permit 11 (PEP-11).
“Numerous reports show that NSW faces a gas supply shortfall within the next four years,” he said, as reported by ABC News.
“PEP-11 has the possibility of supplying NSW with the bulk of its gas needs for 20 years.”
Meanwhile, Samantha McCulloch, the CEO of the Australian Energy Producers, a peak industry body, criticised the new legislation, saying it ignored the critical role of gas under the net zero transition and the importance of new gas supply in ensuring energy security and reducing pressures on prices.
“Report after report from independent agencies such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator have warned of approaching supply shortfalls and identified the need for new east coast gas supply–especially in NSW and Victoria,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Blanket bans unnecessarily limit sources of gas when existing regulations provide an appropriate framework to determine conditions for exploration and development.”
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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
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
