Australian Politics
Monday, December 12, 2022
‘Woke’: Australia’s London embassy erases history by removing high commissioners’ portraits
Australia’s embassy in London has been accused of cancelling more than 100 years of history with the removal of the portraits of the nation’s high commissioners to the UK.
Staff at Australia House on the Strand have quietly removed the photographs of our top diplomats in London, which previously adorned the walls along the stairs.
They will now be warehoused, with the images put on a website instead.
Sources in London claimed the images were stripped because they were of “white men” who were “symbols of patriarchy”, with the embassy wanting to appear more inclusive.
“This is just another woke erasure of history. Just because someone happened to be of a certain gender or race does not mean their contribution should be hidden,” a political source said.
“It’s entirely against the idea of treating people equally, no matter their race or background.
“It’s also terrible for Australia’s global reputation to be endorsing divisive identity politics, to tell the world that we are backwards and embarrassed about our past. Australia’s diplomats should be aware that Brits do not look kindly on cancel culture these days.”
Lynette Wood, Australia’s acting High Commissioner to the UK, denied there was an agenda behind the removal of the portraits. “This is certainly not true at all,” Ms Wood said.
The High Commission said in a statement the portraits would be put online instead of being returned to the walls of Australia House. “The portraits of former High Commissioners are in the process of being digitised,” a statement said.
“Following digitalisation, the portraits will be archived on the Australian High Commission website, enabling greater access to the important historical information on all Heads of Mission who have served in the UK.”
The disappearance of the portraits has been the talk of London’s diplomatic circles, with their absence noted at a recent function.
“The excuse about ‘digitalisation’ is obviously total nonsense. They should at least have the guts to admit their true motivations,” a source added.
There were 26 portraits honouring each of Australia’s High Commissioners to the UK, honouring those who led the diplomatic mission.
Images of former High Commissioners George Brandis, Alexander Downer, Mike Rann and John Dauth all the way back to the first to take on the role, Sir George Reid and former Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher.
Foreign dignitaries walked past the portraits on the way to the High Commissioner’s office on the upper levels of the grand building.
Australia House on The Strand stitches together the fabric of expat society in London. The building hosts receptions, including welcoming Australians who were invited to the Queen’s funeral in September.
Australia’s Ashes teams are also usually welcomed at functions there, while business and political leaders from across the world are regularly wined and dined there.
The building was one of the most expensive in the world when it was built, and has featured in movies including as the set of Gringotts bank in the Harry Potter movies.
The office of Foreign Minister Penny Wong was not told about the move before the portraits were taken down.
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On potential energy solutions, too many deny the facts on nuclear
Facts and truth are loose concepts in the climate alarmists’ arsenal. As we pass one “tipping point” declared a decade or two ago, we are warned of new tipping points a decade hence.
It is an endless campaign of urgency, more marketing than science. We muddled our way through the “critical decade” only to be galvanised for the “decisive decade” ahead.
The more you examine science, the more complex the unfolding patterns and policy responses become. The more you interrogate the facts, the more the catastrophist scenarios and simplistic solutions are exposed.
Just because climate scientists predict change does not give licence to journalists and activists to fit up normal weather events as proof of their mooted climate dystopia. Meanwhile the wildest claims of the climate alarmists pass unexamined.
Last Saturday Anthony Albanese visited Renmark, in South Australia’s Riverland, which is experiencing a major Murray River flood that could turn out to be the third worst of the past 100 years, matching 1974 but falling below the 1931 flood, and way short of the 1956 monster. Yet the Prime Minister used the current high river to push his alarmist message.
“Climate change is real,” he said, axiomatically. Then came the hyperventilation: “And I’ve witnessed since I’ve been leader of the Labor Party, I’ve visited areas of tropical rainforests that have never burnt before that have burnt during the bushfires, during the summer of 2019 and 2020, that came after, of course, a period of drought.”
This is a familiar routine of blaming recent natural events on climate change, suggesting this is all worse than it used to be, and boldly ascribing the same causal factor for droughts, floods and bushfires. Most media regurgitates this stuff; like pandemic paranoia, climate alarmism fits into that vortex where media and politicians find mutually beneficial hyperbole.
I asked the Prime Minister’s office which rainforest Albanese claimed had burned for the first time, and it did not answer. Back in that terrible summer there were two prominent references to “unprecedented” burning of rainforests, both of which were quickly debunked when I checked the record.
Guardian Australia ran Australian National University climate academic Joelle Gergis in September 2019. “I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” wrote Gergis, a member of the Climate Council. “As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning.”
Soon enough media was alive with the horror of rainforest burning for the first time. Yet in October 1951 The Cairns Post had reported, “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms … The fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.”
So, nearly 70 years earlier, before global warming, rainforest burned in Lamington. Why would media run with fantasy over reality?
Around the same time climate activist and former NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins told ABC regional radio: “There are fires breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn. The west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, subtropical rainforests, it’s all burning. And this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”
A few minutes of online research put the lie to that. The South Australian Chronicle reported in February 1915 about lives lost in the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated”. And The Canberra Times in 1982 reported a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000ha of dense rainforest on the northwest coast.
This fudging in favour of catastrophism is the rule rather than the exception. The lack of curiosity or scepticism from media is astounding, but then even the weather bureau plays along.
In early 2019 when the Bureau of Meteorology proclaimed a new national record for the highest overnight minimum of 35.9C it was dramatic news around the nation. But neither the BOM nor anyone else in the media bothered to reveal that the weather station, at the western NSW location of Noona, had been in place for little more than a year – so all we really knew was that it was the hottest night in Noona for about 18 months.
That same year on January 24 the BOM proclaimed the hottest maximum ever recorded in a capital city – 46.6C in Adelaide. Again, it was big news around the country, but the weather bureau failed to mention the same site had measured a maximum a full degree higher in 1939. The only reason the 2019 record beat the 1939 reading was because the BOM’s temperature “homogenisation” had revised the early record downwards by more than a degree. You do not have to question the BOM’s methodology to wonder why it is not forthcoming with these relevant facts when it announces its new records.
Examples abound. We are constantly told Pacific Islands are about to be swallowed by the ocean when studies show the landmass of islands is growing, both through natural processes and human intervention.
The bracing predictions of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are conveniently left unexamined – remember sea levels were to rise 6m, hurricanes were going to be more common and snow would retreat from Kilimanjaro – these and other predictions remain stubbornly unfulfilled.
Never mind, because politicians and media leap on every storm, drought, flood and fire as evidence we are experiencing these dire predictions already. This aversion to reality or disdain for truth extends to the energy policies proposed to deal with climate by reducing emissions.
There is a pretence being perpetrated on the public that this nation can power itself, affordably and reliably, on renewable energy plus storage. Worse, it is often insinuated that Australia’s efforts to reduce our 1 per cent share of global emissions can somehow change the weather, even though global emissions continue to rise.
Addressing the energy cost and supply crisis this week, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said: “This crisis is caused by coal and gas prices, anybody who says it’s caused by renewables is lying, and that needs to be called out, renewables are the solution to this crisis, not the cause.”
He had better tell Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe, who had this to say last month: “It is difficult to make predictions here, but it’s probable that the global capital stock that is used to produce energy will come under recurring pressure in the years ahead. If so, we could expect higher and more volatile energy prices during the transition to a more renewables-based energy supply.”
Sounds a hell of a lot like the transition to renewables is putting upward pressure on prices. This is obvious when you consider the massive investment required in intermittent generation, regulated transmission and storage, all of which need to be funded by taxpayers and consumers.
This was made plain by Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery last month when he predicted price rises of at least 35 per cent for consumers. “The cost of the transition is going to be for a raft of reasons more expensive than it otherwise would have been a few years ago, and we need to make the public aware of the cost of transition,” he told Ross Greenwood on Sky News.
Are Lowe and Dimery telling lies? I think not. Bowen wants to pretend that a trillion-dollar transition away from fossil fuels to a renewables-plus-storage model will be cheap and painless.
In fact, the evidence suggests it is impossible. The International Energy Agency says almost half the reductions to get to net zero by 2050 globally will have to come through “technologies that are currently at the demonstration or prototype phase” – you only have to look at the energy crises facing every economy going down the renewables path to see this reality playing out.
Yet even on potential energy solutions, too many deny the facts. Bowen, Albanese and even modern Labor’s nuclear energy realist, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, argue a domestic nuclear energy industry would be uneconomic – “the most expensive form of energy” – for Australia. This too, flies in the face of verifiable facts. The IEA’s 2020 analysis of electricity generation costs found that “electricity from the long-term operation of nuclear power plants constitutes the least cost option for low-carbon generation”. The politicians cite “most expensive” when the apolitical global experts talk about “least cost” – yet our national debate fails to interrogate these issues.
On current technology the great advantage of nuclear, despite considerable capital costs, is reliability, durability (a new plant will last at least 60 years) and the leveraging of existing transmission infrastructure. By comparison, renewables require massive overbuilds (so capacity triples demand to cover intermittency across different locations), battery storage (which is inadequate and prohibitively expensive), firming generation (probably gas) and at least 28,000km of transmission lines to link generation projects across vast distances. Additionally, solar panels and wind turbines will need to be replaced every 15 to 20 years.
So the initial capital cost of wind generation needs to be multiplied four or five times before it can be compared to nuclear. And nuclear is getting cheaper and easier with the development of small modular reactors.
If we have regard for the facts, and we want to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, no politician ought be able to reject nuclear on cost grounds. But there is far too little focus on reality right across this debate.
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Australia's leaders ignoring the reality of our energy problem
Coal-fired power is being withdrawn from the system by woke public companies and gas developments have become almost impossible thanks to activist lawfare which means prices are going to keep on rising, writes Peta Credlin.
While Anthony Albanese peddled the fantasy that Labor policy could cut household power bills by $275 a year, the reality – confirmed by the ACCC on Friday – is that “the median annual bill for residential customers” has increased by $294 (or 23 per cent) since April.
On Friday, a panicked national cabinet promised as-yet-unspecified rebates for consumers, plus price caps on coal and gas. But this is robbing Peter to pay Paul, won’t make much short-term difference to power bills, and is a massive breach in the hitherto accepted principle that governments can’t dictate to businesses the prices they charge.
The Albanese government claims that households will be $230 better off, but the modelling behind the spin says that prices will still rise by 23 per cent over the next financial year, despite the deal, rather than 36 per cent otherwise.
And I am sure it’s not lost on you that the same consumers set to receive these promised energy rebates are in fact the same taxpayers paying for them!
We are in this energy mess because too many people in authority assume that because solar panels and batteries can run a house, renewables can run a whole economy too.
As a result, coal-fired power is being withdrawn from the system by woke public companies. And new gas developments have become almost impossible thanks to activist lawfare. So, prices will continue to skyrocket and widespread blackouts, or forced rationing for heavy industry, are almost inevitable because the only new power coming into the system doesn’t work when the sun won’t shine and the wind won’t blow.
This is the unavoidable result of a power system that’s been run for years to reduce emissions rather than to produce affordable and reliable electricity.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s latest green catchcry “dispatchable renewable power” is an oxymoron; a contradiction in terms.
By its very nature, wind and solar power can’t always be available – unless, of course, they’re coupled with something else like batteries, that can’t produce grid-scale power for more than a few minutes; pumped-hydro which is expensive, environmentally fraught and still years away at grid scale; green hydrogen which remains completely unproven; or gas, which has so far sustained the move to renewables, but which is going to be more and more expensive as demand explodes but supply is constricted by yet more eco-extremism.
That’s the reality that Friday’s national cabinet meeting simply refused to face. Instead, it put a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, with its price caps on coal and gas and rebates for consumers.
Capping fossil fuel prices guarantees that there will be less investment and, over time, shortages of coal and gas, even though fossil fuels will for decades continue to be needed to keep the lights on.
And, I repeat again, government-funded rebates on power bills means taxpayers funding consumers. In other words, us funding us.
Once the principle of price control is conceded for gas and coal, what about price control for other “necessities” such as rent and food? This is a massive departure from economic normality and a slippery slope towards a command economy apparently connived at by both sides of politics through the national cabinet.
No one who matters seems to be listening to the few sane voices still in our energy debate.
David Fallu, head of Tomago Aluminium, NSW’s biggest energy consumer, pointed out last week that his business would still need gas to “fill the breach when renewables aren’t generating”.
Trevor St Baker, a big investor both in renewable and in coal-fired power generation, said that the Liddell Power Station, that produces 10 per cent of NSW’s power, would have to be kept operating beyond April next year to ensure that the lights stayed on (yet there are plans to, literally, blow it up with dynamite). Even the Business Council of Australia said that “price caps will send the wrong signal to investors … when we need to be getting new supply into the market”.
And while both shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have made the obvious point that this is policy on the run, the Opposition hasn’t said what, precisely, it would do differently, such as refusing to allow the exit of coal until there’s a reliable dispatchable alternative, presumably because Liberals like NSW Treasurer Matt Kean share Labor’s coal-phobia and emissions obsession.
No one should fall for Labor’s spin that Putin’s war is to blame for higher power bills. The war started in February and in the months that followed until they won the election in May, Labor promised they would cut power bills. It is only after they won, that this promise was dropped and the war emerged as their excuse.
Rather than Putin, the real problem is the massive and accelerating shift from power from fossil fuels that’s available 24/7, to power from the wind and the sun that depends entirely on the weather and that therefore has to be “firmed” with gas. An honest conversation with the Australian public is long overdue about how we can have reliable and affordable power OR much lower emissions but not both, at least in the absence of nuclear.
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Covid vaccine mandate revoked for Queensland police
Queensland police will no longer be made to get the Covid vaccine after the direction was revoked this morning.
Queensland police will no longer be made to get a Covid vaccination, after the direction was revoked ton Monday morning.
In a memo to staff today acting Deputy Commissioner Shane Chelepy said public health advice suggested the virus would persist in the community for some time “with the severity and risk presented scaling up and down at various intervals”.
The Courier-Mail has confirmed 16 police officers and six staff members have been sacked for disobeying Covid-19 vaccination directions. A further 100 police have been sent discipline proceedings notices while 50 staff have been sent show cause notices.
It’s unclear what discipline action these officers will now face however Mr Chelepy in his memo to staff said they would still be investigated and “dealt with in line with our discipline processes”.
“While the Covid-19 public health environment continues to remain unpredictable, following the removal of the Public Health Emergency Declaration and changes to the public health risk environment, the QPS has reviewed the current Covid-19 vaccination requirements and it has been determined to revoke Commissioner’s Directions No. 13 and 14 as of Monday 12 December 2022,” Mr Chelepy wrote.
“The Deputy Chief Health Officer of Queensland was consulted as part of the review process conducted by QPS to determine the outcome of the direction.
“Following the revocation of the mandate, any conditions attached to exemptions granted by the Vaccination Exemption Committee (VEC) will no longer apply. Members who had conditions attached to their exemptions will be required to engage with their local management to arrange a return to business as usual.
“Members who were subject to discipline action for failure to comply with the Commissioner’s Directions will still be investigated and dealt with in line with our discipline processes.
“The outcomes for these employees will need to be reviewed on an individual basis, with consideration given to the nature and details of each matter.”
Mr Chelepy said there would still continue to be unknown risks for officers.
“As we transition to a different phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, all members are strongly encouraged to continue to follow all advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) and receive Covid-19 vaccines and boosters as recommended according to their age and individual health needs.
“In this new operating environment, there will continue to be unknown risks, as well as an increased risk of potential exposure, so it important to follow health recommendations to reduce the spread of this virus.
“Members should be aware and familiarise themselves with current Queensland Government Covid-19 advice which uses a traffic light system to assist individuals with what they should do to reduce the risk of catching and spreading Covid-19. The traffic light levels – red, amber, green – are based on the current level of risk in the community,” he said.
“The current traffic light level is amber – which means moderate rates of community transmission and Queensland is coming off a wave or may enter a new wave.
“We must be mindful of the virus’s ability to mutate into potentially more transmissible and serious variants. The QPS must maintain the ability to act on these developments and to issue future directions to ensure we maintain a ready workforce to meet our legislative responsibilities.
“The uncertain Covid-19 operating environment requires us all to remain vigilant, and I thank you for your ongoing commitment. Our people have already done the hard yards and should be proud of our collective effort to limit the impact of this virus on our organisation.”
A police spokesman confirmed the service would continue to assess all matters “currently initiated in relation to the Commissioner’s Directions on vaccination requirements, including disciplinary matters and proceedings before the courts and tribunal”.
The spokesman said 16 police officers and six staff members had been dismissed for disobeying the direction and would not be reinstated.
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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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Sunday, December 11, 2022
The coming crash of the climate cult
Viv Forbes
The Climate Cult worships two green idols – electric vehicles and wind-solar energy. This is part of a futile UN scheme promoting ‘Net Zero Emissions’ which aims to cool the climate of the world by waging war on CO2 plant food.
Green worship is the state religion of all Western nations. It is promoted by billionaires with other agendas, and endlessly repeated by the UN, the bureaucracy, all government media, state education, and most big business leaders.
The promotion of electric cars and trucks will cause a great increase in the demand for electricity to replace diesel, petrol, and gas.
We live beside a major highway connecting Ipswich and Boonah in Queensland and we can hear the roar of the traffic.
The road is quiet at night, but as day dawns, the real workers start moving – big diesel trucks off to pick up the day’s loads of gravel, machinery, cattle, tanks, pipes, hay, timber, bricks, and concrete. Then comes the traffic that sustains urban life – meat vans, milk tankers, and refrigerated trucks of produce to fill supermarket shelves every day. Around sunrise come the commuters heading for city jobs, and the city’s electric trains, lifts, and escalators start to run. Then kids are delivered to school and sirens announce the occasional passing of ambulances, fire engines, and police bikes and cars. Finally, the tree-change bureaucrats cruise past in their electric cars heading for their leisurely staggered starts. By 9 am the traffic falls off.
To achieve Net Zero nirvana, all of this early morning traffic rush must be battery-powered. Untold thousands of batteries will need to be fully charged overnight – well before the vast paddocks of Chinese solar panels can deliver one amp of green electricity.
Listen here to Australia’s new Prime Minister during the recent election campaign explaining how roof-top solar will charge all those Tesla batteries overnight…
Australia’s reliable coal/gas power stations could charge batteries overnight, while city demand for electricity is lower, but the green religion demands closure and demolition of anything using hydro-carbons. But Green engineers have the solution – intermittent wind power plus big batteries will re-charge millions of vehicle batteries before dawn.
But what keeps trains, lifts, hospitals, and refrigerators going if we have a still night followed by another cloudy day? More batteries or Snowy 9 Pumped Hydro? And if the still cloudy weather continues, what will re-charge the Big Batteries and re-pump the hydros? And will Greens apply the same conservation standards and delaying tactics to wind, solar, hydro, and power line construction that they now apply to coal mines?
The Queensland Premier has a $62 billion green plan to close all coal power stations, cover the countryside with wind/solar clutter, plan whole cities of battery charging stations, build the ‘world’s biggest’ pumped-hydro batteries (net CONSUMERS of electricity) and become a world leader in ‘green hydrogen’ (huge CONSUMERS of electricity and water). Soon after the last coal power plant is demolished, in a snap of still, cold, cloudy weather the lights will go out, electric trains will stop, and battery-powered food deliveries to the cities will falter. There will be uproar in Parliaments, and all Green/Teal/ALP governments will fall. The ABC will blame ‘climate change’.
Energy Realists will take over. They will immediately place orders for dozens of modular nuclear power plants.
But this energy reality will come too late. Long lines of city dwellers with bicycles, wheel-barrows, and old diesel utes will flee from the hungry cities.
Some of these power refugees may get jobs harvesting potatoes and onions with digging forks, milking cows by hand, or plucking and cleaning chooks.
Re-powering and re-building will take decades.
All this for zero climate benefits – the world has passed the peak of this interglacial and the next long glacial cycle is edging closer.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/the-coming-crash-of-the-climate-cult/
****************************************************A plague of environmentalist judges
A ‘lawfare’-laced New Year as activism reaps its rewards from environmentalist judges: that is what last month’s three ground-breaking judicial decisions that rejected fossil fuel developments on environmental and social grounds, have ensured for Australia’s major export industries – coal and gas. ‘There is now the risk of more delays and obstacles in the progression of important energy projects, postponing new supply that is needed to deliver energy security, emissions reductions and substantial economic returns for Australians’, Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association CEO Samantha McCulloch told the media.
Upheaval across Australia’s oil and gas industry is expected after Santos’ loss of a Federal Court appeal against a decision to cancel its $5.3 billion development approval due to inadequate consultation with local indigenous people; coal projects are under a cloud following both the Queensland Land and Environment Court knocking back a huge Galilee Basin development on the basis of overseas customers’ emissions and, incredibly, human rights and the NSW Independent Planning Commission’s heritage-based decision against Glencore’s plans to extend its operations.
Added to this is the uncertainty generated at the federal level by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek in responding to an environmental activist request by implementing reviews of 18 of the previous government’s approvals of proposed new coal and gas projects which include major companies like Woodside, ConocoPhillips, Whitehaven and Glencore. The Australian newspaper reports that resource analysts fear that there will be a new front opened in Australia as these 18, of which 13 are coal projects in Queensland and four in NSW, with a gas project in WA, covering $100 billion in investments and 175,000 jobs, could face legal action to block progress.
November’s three negative decisions follow repeated examples of the damaging economic consequences of judges usurping the role of elected parliaments by imposing their own activist versions of environmental law. The consequences include increased sovereign risk that puts in doubt the foreign investment essential for Australia’s future, uncertainty over the supply of vital funding for affordable and reliable energy, denial of mining approvals on grounds unsupported by legislation, and the costly delays to billions of dollars of projects through the lawfare encouraged by so many anti-mining judgements.
The Queensland Land and Environment Court’s rejection last month of a proposal by Waratah Coal to build the biggest thermal coal mine in Australia in the Galilee Basin aimed at producing almost four times as much as its neighbouring Adani mine (which is at last operational after years of legal obstructionism), prompted little public outcry beyond a perceptive article in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail under the heading ‘Is this the death warrant for the coal industry?’ and describing the judgement as reading like ‘a green manifesto that will have major ramifications for Queensland’.
But the mining industry kept shtum. The reason? Waratah’s owner is the combative Clive Palmer; instead of the much-needed principled assault on this destructive anti-mining precedent, there was an overwhelming reluctance to be seen to be effectively supporting such a divisive figure.
Yet the court’s recommendation to the state government is untenable. Its president, and former climate activist, Judge Fleur Kingham, asserted not only that climate change was a key issue but that the project’s climate impact would limit human rights. This is the first time a Queensland judge has recommended rejecting a mine based on the climate impacts of coal burnt overseas. ‘Wherever the coal is burnt the emissions will contribute to environmental harm, including in Queensland.’ It is also the first time Queensland’s Human Rights Act has been used to object to a mining project on climate change and Indigenous cultural rights grounds.
But this is not the first time that courts or tribunals have falsely asserted that Australia’s Paris obligations, its state and federal emission reduction and net-zero targets mean that no new mines or major extensions of existing ones can be accommodated. That parliaments, whose responsibility it is, have not passed laws imposing that prohibition means that there is no legislative basis for this judge-created assertion and, on the contrary, governments, which stress the word ‘net’ before ‘zero’, are involved in projects offsetting CO2 emissions so that there is no automatic link between a new coal mine or gas field and the volume of emissions.
Even more controversial is Judge Kingham’s conclusion that, ‘In relation to climate change, I have found that the following rights of certain groups of people in Queensland would be limited: the right to life, the cultural rights of First Nations peoples, the rights of children, the right to property and to privacy and home, and the right to enjoy human rights equally’, all would be threatened by the consequences of emissions-induced climate change. ‘For each right, considered individually, I have decided the importance of preserving the right, given the nature and extent of the limitation, weighs more heavily in the balance than the economic benefits of the mine and the benefit of contributing to energy security for Southeast Asia.’ This is at odds with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who, while aiming at net zero by 2050, has a stated position that Queensland coal exports will continue for ‘as long as the market dictates’.
The NSW anti-coal judgement reflects a different problem. On top of its criticism of the outcome, the mining industry expressed serious concern about the process, in which the state government has delegated decision-making to a three-person panel with no accountability either to the government or the public. But at least the NSW Independent Planning Commission did acknowledge that the proposal, which it rejected on (questionable?) heritage grounds, was, in the absence of any clear governmental policy guidance, not inconsistent with net zero or Paris obligations or Australia’s varied emissions targets and so could not be denied on that ground.
Activist judges with a penchant for creating their own unlegislated rules with which to enforce their environmental agendas, please note.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/business-robbery-etc-105
******************************************************What the federal government's coal price cap means for power bills, generators and Queensland's royalties
The federal government has announced a price cap on gas and coal to help ease the cost of energy.
While some of the details still need to be nutted out, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said parliament will move to place a temporary cap on gas at $12 a gigajoule, and that states will be capping coal at $125 per tonne.
Along with the caps, Mr Albanese said the federal government would provide up to $1.5 billion to support households and small businesses.
The PM said federal, state and territory governments were "determined to provide some relief" through "extraordinary measures".
How does a price cap lower your power bill, in theory?
Australian energy economist Bruce Mountain, who heads up the Energy Policy Centre, said the price caps may not actually work to bring down energy bills as hoped.
That's because there are a number of elements that make up your energy bill.
Professor Mountain said making the electricity is one part of the cost — as is customer service, shipping, selling, billing and marketing that electricity to the consumer.
"So in principle, decreasing the cost of any one elements of that cost stack will decrease the cost to the end customer … at least, that's the hope," he said.
Professor Mountain said because of the complexity of our energy markets, we can't be sure how capping one element of the chain is going to play out — or whether coal or gas companies will pass on the discount to the consumer.
How will the price cap affect the big coal generators?
First of all, the price caps only affect the local market and won't impact the coal we export.
In the local market, there are only a few generators that look likely to be affected, Professor Mountain said.
"The vast bulk of the coal that's burned in Australia is contracted forward," he said. A forward contract is an agreement to buy or sell an asset at a future date at a specified price.
"Those forward contracts — which are the price they're paying now — are at a substantially lower price than what we see in the market now," Professor Mountain explained.
"But we can say at this point it is only a few generators, one or two that we know, are buying coal at prices that are a premium to the $125 cap. "So they're the ones at the moment to focus on."
Origin Energy's Eraring power station in NSW's Hunter region appears to be paying more than $125 a tonne already.
The station can either accept the price cap or choose to find another market for it overseas, Professor Mountain said.
"Eraring is our important, big electricity generator in the market," he said. "It would be a loss of have a generator that's critical to the market right now, so I think the market would find it hard to actually sustain its total loss.
"If we lose all of their production, there would be pretty big price effects because you'd need to pump up a whole lot of gas-fired generation, certainly during winter and the evenings and mornings."
Will Queensland's coal royalties be affected?
This week Queensland's mid-year financial and economic update forecast new coal royalty tiers will deliver $2.95 billion this financial year.
But Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said those royalties have "nothing to do with" the price caps.
That's because the vast majority — 90 per cent — of the state's coal is exported internationally.
Stanwell and Gladstone are two Queensland coal-fired generators that provide energy to the local market. Stanwell is government owned and Gladstone is privately owned.
Professor Mountain said he doesn't believe these two generators are currently paying a premium, so they may not be impacted by the cap.
As part of its agreement with the federal government, Queensland will not impose any cap through legislation. Instead it will issue a direction to its government-owned corporations.
Asked whether state-owned generators would be out of pocket, the Premier said "I doubt it, they're in a very good situation".
"We have an abundance of coal … we are the energy powerhouse of the nation."
She also emphasised that the price caps would have a 12-month expiry date. "It's good that it's only for one year — it's a temporary measure," she said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-10/queensland-coal-price-cap-power-bills-royalties/101740538
**************************************************Parks Australia: when bureaucracy turns racist
Imagine telling a Brit of migrant origin that they’re forbidden from visiting the White Cliffs of Dover because they are a spiritually important geological feature – or that anyone with the wrong skin colour looking at them would cause distress and offence. What about if all non-white tourists were banned from Stonehenge because those who aren’t indigenous to the area are somehow violating the spirit of traditional ownership and tarnishing the land with their presence? How about a ‘welcome to country’ to all migrants every time they enter a public hall?
Yeah, I can hear the court cases and media outrage already. What unbelievable racism!!! White supremacy!!! How dare you offend migrants!!! They are just as British as anyone else!!! The press would cry, and they would be right, yet the conversation is identical to what is taking place in Australia.
White Brits are the Indigenous owners of the UK, but they’d be laughed at if they asked for special consideration surrounding their culturally sacred sites. There’s an assumption that Brits – or anyone of European descent – aren’t entitled to a connection to the land or their ancestral places. They’re stuck in racial purgatory because they – alone of all conquering civilisations – must suffer the loss of their identity as penance for dragging the world into the modern era. It doesn’t matter how terrible the sins are of other nations (plenty of which make Europe look like a panda petting zoo), the collectivists want to destroy Western dominance and they’ve decided to use imagined race politics to do it.
For a nation to maintain civil peace and cohesion, there is an understanding that all citizens are equal. Public spaces – such as National Parks – are the property of citizens to be funded by, looked after for, and enjoyed by everyone. Australians are entitled to feel a spiritual connection to their homeland, regardless of the colour of their skin. To suggest otherwise is outright racism and shame on the Liberal Party for failing to stand against Labor and the Greens on this issue that will see the children of this country ranked like a Bunnings paint chart. A sensible person would expect parents to be horrified at their children being saddled with the crimes of people who share their skin colour, but plenty of inner-city affluent families see the sacrifice of their children’s innocence as some kind of social purification. They love watching their children being punished.
The argument that a person’s DNA defines their affinity to the land is nonsense. A ‘white’ person born in Australia, who works the land and spends their whole life in the bush, will have a deep spiritual affinity. They will not have some kind of mystic connection to a country in Europe that they’ve never been to simply because, five generations ago, a distant relative was born there. It makes about as much sense as claiming Aboriginal Australians have a spiritual connection to Africa (instead of Australia) because Africa is the true origin of their genetic ancestry and a place where their elders spent millions, rather than tens of thousands, of years. After all, if we want to play the idiotic game of counting ancestors, all of us spent more time together in Africa than in any other place in the world.
Race politics is a political weapon brought out by the worst regimes as a way to divide society and scam money or power from whichever ‘race’ is being demonised. If our political class had any moral strength, this sort of behaviour would qualify as a crime.
Parks Australia was set up as a benign organisation to take care of national and marine parks, but recently they have turned into the Race Police, locking Australians of the wrong colour out of their publicly funded shared environments.
As an organisation, they have already been savaged by people old enough to remember how much better Australia’s parks did when they were open to the public and managed properly. The ‘lock up’ policies remain widely blamed by people who live around national parks for being the true cause of huge bushfires (that politicians wrongly attribute to climate change) due to poor maintenance of fire trails, the banning of grazing animals, prevention of farmers managing burn offs, and general poor upkeep by park rangers. Of course, Parks Australia gets really nasty when they are criticised by the public, but tough luck – they deserve it. Coastal areas in particular have seen the loss of their native wildflower fields due to management failing to maintain the regular burn-offs required to preserve the habitat with political concerns for ‘koala habitats’ drowning out any reasonable discussion.
Since then, Parks Australia have progressed from locking Australians out of public land due to ‘wildlife protection’ and are engaging in race-based lockouts justified by ‘honouring spiritual connections’ to the land by small Indigenous groups.
These public parks are paid for – and previously enjoyed by – all Australians, but now places like Mount Warning have been locked down. Closed during the pandemic (for reasons that are obviously complete nonsense), the park never re-opened to the public and has been renamed. Not only are people of the wrong race forbidden from walking the previously public track frequented by 120,000 people a year, but Australians are also banned from taking photographs – photographs! I bet Google Maps isn’t stopped from taking satellite imagery of the park.
As one person wrote on Facebook, ‘The whole of Australia will be deemed cultural land before too long, and we won’t be able to climb any mountain or cross any river. Disgrace.’ This sentiment was repeated by another who wrote, ‘My culture says I will climb that mountain whenever I feel like it. Sick of this over-regulated country … time to start giving the finger to authority.’
There are plenty of other similar comments. One might say that Parks Australia is one of the chief bodies responsible for sparking racial tension between Australian citizens by actively discriminating against them.
People are, quite rightly, asking why they should fund the upkeep of public parks if they are not allowed to enjoy or even photograph them. Why should a racist level of bureaucracy receive a single cent of public money?
Mount Warning is a natural geological feature. It was not built by a single Indigenous hand. As such, it is the joint property of all Australian citizens – a shared ancestral land for all who call themselves Australian. That was why national parks were set up in the first place. Any group that claims it is culturally unsafe or offensive to allow another person to visit due to their race – is racist. It is a sentiment that cannot be justified and should instead be openly shamed by all decent and moral people. Imagine if someone banned Indigenous people from climbing the Harbour Bridge because it would be ‘culturally unsafe’. Those times are gone, and allowing Indigenous groups to resurrect racism for political privilege and money is – as one Facebook user wrote – a farce.
Which brings us to what we might hope is the last straw.
Recently, Parks Australia sent out a letter of demand to the Herald Sun wanting them to remove a cartoon of Ayers Rock (Uluru). The cartoon by Mark Knight showed Ayers Rock looming over Parliament to symbolise the coming Voice to Parliament referendum.
Parks Australia attempted to say that drawing the national (and natural) geological feature violated its media guidelines surrounding ‘sensitive and sacred sites’ without a permit.
‘These artworks do not have media permits and breach media guidelines. To comply with the EPBC Act, media guidelines, ICIP (Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property) laws and show respect for Anangu land and culture, we ask that you remove any artwork breaching these conditions and showing Uluru.’
A permit. To draw Ayers Rock. Most Australians were outraged to discover that such a ridiculous guideline existed and demanded Parks Australia explain itself.
To be frank, most people told Parks Australia to ‘get f—d’ or some variation on the theme of unprintable outrage.
The permits were meant to ‘protect Anangu against inappropriate use and benefits to others from the commercialisation of their Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property’. What, like the decades of Tourism Australia ads that dug the regional community out of poverty? That kind of commercialisation? Before commercialisation, no one cared about locking people out of Ayers Rock because there was no guilt-money in it. If anything, the actions of Parks Australia is a form of commercialisation by gate-keeping licenses to draw the rock.
The Herald Sun met Parks Australia with a few scary looking lawyers and pretty quickly, Parks Australia replied:
‘Staff sent Mr Knight an email about the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa media guidelines which was not appropriate. It isn’t a request that should have been made and we apologised for the error.’
An error or an embarrassment? Legal demands are rarely sent ‘by accident’. Someone made a conscious decision to draft it, pen it, approve it, and hit ‘send’.
Telling a cartoonist that they cannot draw Ayers Rock is pretty close to banning images of Mohammad. Roping off sections of culture for ‘special groups’ is not just a slippery slope – it’s a nightmare cliff that ends in division, hatred, and animosity.
‘It made me feel like I had done something wrong. I thought it was a very nice image and low and behold, ironically, I was asked to take it down,’ said Mr Knight.
That’s the point of race politics. Australians are being made to feel like they’ve done something wrong by enjoying an afternoon on their favourite walking track – or taking a selfie in the middle of the bush. It’s the art of creating outrage out of nothing and then shaking the collection bucket for reparations.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/parks-australia-when-bureaucracy-turns-racist/
************************************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
***************************************
Friday, December 09, 2022
Chicken Little Propaganda Dressed As Science Permeates New Climate Report
The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO have delivered their biennial dose of depression about the climate in their latest State of the Climate report.
The climate has warmed by 1.5C and there is barely a single benefit – it is all disaster.
It is often said, “if it is too good to be true, it probably is” and you are being conned. What about too bad to be true? Can a gently warming climate have no significant benefits at all?
The only marginally encouraging part of the report is about northern Australia. There might have been a slight reduction in cyclone numbers, and there has been a bit more rain in recent decades.
Apart from that, the report reads like the Book of Exodus – one disaster after another. Only the frogs and boils are missing.
But it is significant that the period when Egyptians were building pyramids, which was hotter than today’s climate, is often called the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
The word “optimum” was an indication that scientists working in the era before climate alarmism could see some advantage of a warmer climate.
A sure sign that the report tries too hard to find disaster is when it discusses coral bleaching and the Great Barrier Reef.
It stresses that there have been four bleaching events in the past six years, which it implies were devastating. But for some reason, the report fails to mention that this year the reef recorded its highest amount of coral since records began in 1985.
This proves that all the hype about coral loss from bleaching was greatly exaggerated. But the report writers were obviously untroubled by the contradictory evidence.
They ignored it.
And they also ignore the fact that corals grow about 15 percent faster for every degree temperature rise, and that almost all the corals on the reef also live in much warmer water near the equator.
We should expect better coral, and it should extend further south. That is not too bad, is it?
Why doesn’t the report mention that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere improves the water utilization efficiency of dryland plants, which occupy most of Australia, and that this has caused plants to thrive?
According to NASA satellites, there is a “greening” of Australia of at least 10 percent. Overall, the world has seen the area of green leaves expand by the equivalent of twice the area of the United States in just 35 years.
In a changing climate, there will be winners and losers, and it might be that the net effect is a major problem. But if the report writers will not even mention the good bits, how can we have any confidence in its findings?
The latest report should ring alarm bells – but not just about climate. Is this an excellent tool of propaganda, or is it a scientific statement?
We should all worry about whether groupthink has taken hold of the BOM and CSIRO.
We should worry when the BOM says it has recently adjusted all the temperature records, reducing the temperatures a century ago by up to a degree. Can we have any confidence they did this with good scientific reason?
And we should worry about the BOM’s claims that the fire seasons are now much worse than in 1950. Why is all the information on huge bushfires before 1950 ignored – like the devastating 1851 Victorian bushfire and the 1939 fires?
It is not like there is no data before 1950.
Did they ignore that data for a good reason? Is this similar to the US fire statistics, which are often reported by authorities as having a major increase in fire acreage burnt since the early 60s, but fail to mention that there was almost 10 times more acreage burnt in the “dust-bowl” period in the 1930s?
In the next decades, Australian governments plan to spend hundreds of billions attempting to prevent climate change. Before we do that, maybe we could spend a few million doing an audit of BOM and CSIRO reports.
Maybe we would find that adapting to a changing climate is by far the best way to proceed. We might even find that some of what we have been told is wrong.
Why will the conservative parties not commit to an audit? Who would argue against a bit of checking of the science, when the Great Barrier Reef statistics prove scientists got something badly wrong?
And the latest report is a sure sign that the BOM and CSIRO are drifting into political advocacy rather than science, observation, and objective prediction.
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ESG superannuation funds are bad investments
This year Australian ESG superannuation funds lost over 10 per cent of their members’ wealth.
Business, where the profit motive is explicitly dominant and where the hundreds of millions of direct and indirect owners want to see it remain the crowned ruler, might be expected to reject spending that syphons off profits to political causes… And yet, nearly every firm funnels funding to politically acceptable causes, in the main involving those of a social and environmental nature.
Sometimes, pressured by governmental regulatory stances, like the soon-to-be mandatory reductions on the top Australian emitters, a growing number of firms also engage in expenditure that replace fossil fuel derived energy with more expensive wind and solar. Also important is the avoidance by superannuation fund managers of investments in firms deemed to be involved in globally harmful activities within the ‘Environment, Social and Governance’ (ESG) framework. Once targeted at avoiding gambling, tobacco, and alcohol, the hallmark of these causes is now environmentalism, particularly avoiding fossil fuel producers.
Stocks favoured by sentiment will see their values rise in relation to their underlying earnings. But can this persist indefinitely without it being matched by increased profits?
Canstar and Chant West are among the organisations that monitor superfunds’ performances. About half of the funds scrutinised adopt the contemporary ESG doctrine that involves seeking to exclude firms producing fossil fuels from within their portfolios.
For many years, firms following this approach could offer credible claims that they were also performing well in terms of their overall returns. This is no longer the case. The following table draws from the superannuation fund monitors to show the ten worst fund performers in 2022, alongside the funds’ average performances over the past five years and their ESG status.
The six funds having performed worst are all ESG oriented, avoiding investments in firms mining coal and other hydrocarbons. This year they lost over 10 per cent of their members’ wealth. Those ESG funds that previously had strong performances were heavily invested in tech and property stocks, which had experienced above average gains. Tech stocks have now seen falling prices; this may also be true of property but most property funds have extensive holdings of un-listed investments (Virgin Money is one property fund that exclusively invests in listed property and showed an 11 per cent fall in value this year). Added to this is another factor: the recent buoyancy of the coal, gas, and oil stocks that the boycotting of which leaves ESG funds disadvantaged compared to funds that are more purely focused on returns.
Most funds’ marketing material includes words that warn that past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance, while extolling their past success. Thus Unisuper, which has divested from coal stocks, still has on its site that it led the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) pack in terms of returns as at August 2021. But during 2022, Unisuper has lost 4.4 per cent of its members’ wealth. Similarly, with remarkable chutzpah, having this year lost 15 per cent of its members’ funds, Australian Ethical is running a TV promotional campaign featuring outlandish characters extolling the fund’s virtues, ‘Because I want my environment like I want my stocks – THRIVING!’
As a consumer protector, APRA has the power to force chronic under-performing funds to merge with a better-performing fund; four were forced to do so this year. However, now that the ESG funds have become demonstrably vulnerable to this sanction, industry bodies are calling for its dilution – even to prevent the under-performers being named, ‘If linked to deliberate strategies for climate change or other ESG issues.’ To buttress this protection of ESG under-performers, the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors is seeking to intensify ESG reporting requirements, the objective of which is to ensure few stand-outs. ESG reporting is already mandatory in the UK, EU, New Zealand, and Canada.
The share of wind and solar in global electricity supply has risen from zero at the turn of the 21st century to 10 per cent today (22 per cent in Australia with policies aiming at over 80 per cent). These are intrinsically high cost and low reliability energy sources. But private sector subsidy-seekers and institutional support on the back of the confected climate scare together with government subsidies have underpinned their growth. How will this be affected by newly evident financial realities in a competitive market for superannuants’ savings, where the savers’ prime concern is the returns they receive?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/esg-climate-virtue-bleeding-super-dry/
**************************************************Courage is the cure when faced with medical censorship
Kara Thomas
The Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) is on a mission to restore medical free speech in this country and ensure the loyalty of doctors and all health practitioners remains first and foremost with patients – not bureaucrats or politicians.
AMPS is currently touring the country, booking out venues, as we continue our fight to Stop Medical Censorship. This week we have our final events in South Australia and all are welcome to attend.
AMPS is refusing to silently comply with unscientific and unaccountable public health messaging. Our dedication is to advocate for our patients’ best interests as our primary concern as outlined by the Codes of Conduct. We take seriously our Code of Conduct, which is consistent with the Declaration of Geneva, and says:
I solemnly pledge to consecrate my life to the service of humanity and the International code of medical ethics, where our duties as members of the medical profession instructs physicians to help prevent national or international ethical, legal, organisational, or regulatory requirements that undermine any of the duties set forth in this Code.
Both the declaration and ethical principles were issued by the World Medical Association after the second world war when systematic gross human rights abuses took place under national laws. History does not look kindly on Medical professionals who were found to be complicit in human rights violations. AMPS doctors across the country are risking careers that took decades to achieve to question government dictates supported by secret health advice as they seek answers. These practitioners have decided the price of silent compliance when things don’t seem right is a price they are not willing to pay.
The gagging of doctors in Australia for questioning government public health campaigns such as the Australian COVID-19 Vaccination Policy and using threats to their careers and livelihood as a tool to enforce compliance, is a national disgrace.
Engagement, not censorship, with the health sector is what was recommended in our 2019 pandemic preparedness plans to understand the impact and effectiveness of the pandemic response measures reflecting the on-the-ground experience of the health sector and public concerns, and evidence of the effectiveness of approaches. Instead, our governments issued joint statements during 2021 outlining action can be taken against a practitioner that doesn’t provide health advice consistent with public health campaigns.
Questioning ‘the messaging’, even with scientific evidence, can result in investigation and disciplinary action including immediate suspension of registration.
This has culminated with what appears to be the legislating of these joint statements through the recent passage of the dangerous and dystopian Health Practitioner Regulation National Law that prioritises Public confidence over public health and safety. It appears censorship is how the Ministers of Truth (sorry, Health) in this country have decided they are going to achieve their goal of public confidence.
Having the public believe government policies are keeping them safe is apparently more important than convincing data or evidence to demonstrate safety.
The human, social and economic consequences of their policies may be demonstrating the greatest public health mistake in human history, but doctors have been and continue to be forbidden from questioning public health messaging to ensure you continue to think the government is ‘keeping you safe’.
Not only is this legislation a dangerous disgrace but likely a constitutional infringement on our right of political communication as outlined by Constitutional Law Professor Augusto Zimmermann at our recent WA symposium. Publishing his statements in an article in Quadrant titled the Menace of Medical Censorship in Australia, Professor Zimmerman concluded this law is unconstitutional.
‘Because it suppresses freedom of political communication by censoring and punishing dissenters through serious threats to careers and livelihood, as a means to undemocratically control public debate and general perception through enforced medical censorship.’
Our country is experiencing unprecedented rates of adverse reactions with excess all cause mortality now exceeding 17 per cent, a massive increase in anxiety and depression and massive impacts on our children with a recent study finding that children born during the pandemic have significantly lower IQs. Now what should doctors in Australia do after researching the available evidence and finding obvious scientific conflicts, outright absurdities and unanswered questions about our response to Covid? What would you want them to do?
The choices are: comply with government public health campaigns and keep silent; or fight for answers risking investigation and disciplinary action from AHPRA and national boards.
AMPS is taking the perspective of Dr Paul Oosterhuis, an honourable doctor who was suspended for sharing information that undermined confidence in the government Covid public health campaign. He states, ‘Censorship kills. My responsibility is to the Hippocratic Oath, as basic ethics compels me to share data that I believe is definitely in the public interest.’
Our National Tour fulfils the recommendation of our pandemic plans to discuss the impact and effectiveness of the pandemic response measures reflecting the on-the-ground experience of the health sector and public concerns. We all need our practitioners to question what doesn’t make sense for the health and safety of the public. Every practitioner that learns the truth as British Cardiologist Dr Aseem Mulhotra did, the more practitioners will use their right to refuse to comply with treatments to which they conscientiously object.
Dr Mulhotra said, ‘He slowly and reluctantly concluded contrary to his own initial dogmatic beliefs Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine is far from being as safe and effective as we first thought.’
Medical ethics and the codes we have sworn to uphold compel us to use our right of political communication to advocate for our patients as our primary concern. AMPS is seeking public health and safety based on the principles of transparent, accountable evidence-based medicine to replace the political-based medicine we are currently witnessing in this country.
Creating public confidence through enforced public ignorance is not science, it is propaganda.
Our Code that we have sworn to uphold can not be overridden by demands of adherence to National laws that have resulted in possibly the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetime. We take seriously our ethical obligation to prevent national or regulatory requirements that undermine our duty to our patients and medical ethics. History only repeats if we have not learnt from it. We cannot be complicit, courage is the cure.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/courage-is-the-cure/
****************************************************US Congress gives the green light to Australian submarine officers training on US nuclear boats
Australian submarine officers have been given the green light to train on American nuclear-powered boats in the first AUKUS law ticked off by the US Congress.
US politicians have also opened the door to leasing nuclear submarines to Australia – or even providing access to the Air Force’s futuristic B-21 stealth bomber – as part of a mammoth $1.2 trillion defence spending package.
The bipartisan 4408-page bill also includes $382m to upgrade Darwin’s RAAF Base, as the American and Australian governments finalise the details of an expanded US military presence down under.
The bill – which passed the House of Representatives and will soon be approved by the Senate – requires US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to order an independent assessment before the end of next year on the challenges of implementing the AUKUS pact.
This would cover issues including personnel and resourcing, information sharing, security protocols and export controls.
Politicians also called for the assessment of “alternatives that would significantly accelerate Australia’s national security”, such as leasing or handing over “legacy” US submarines, or “the conveyance of B-21 bombers”.
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles, who was in Washington DC this week for talks with Mr Austin, described the B-21 as a “cool looking aircraft” but said acquiring it was not on the radar. “We should just remember that literally the Americans have just announced it themselves and are getting it operational, so there’s no conversations about B-21s,” he said.
The submarine training program was developed by the bipartisan AUKUS working group led by Democratic Congressman Joe Courtney, who said it would “help ensure that Royal Australian Navy officers are ready to pilot these world-beating submarines expertly upon arrival”.
News Corp revealed earlier this month that five Australian Navy officers had already joined the US Navy’s world-leading onshore nuclear propulsion training program in South Carolina.
Republican Congressman Blake Moore said: “This is just the beginning of a new era in global maritime defence co-operation. My colleagues and I look forward to continue fostering this critical alliance in defence of the rules based international order and freedom across our nations.”
President Joe Biden’s signature is required to lock in the $1.2 trillion package, which also scrapped the Covid vaccine mandate for the military and featured up to $14.7bn in security assistance and fast-tracked weapons for Taiwan.
************************************
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
***************************************
Thursday, December 08, 2022
‘Book ban’ angers academics amid claims University of Tasmania ‘in crisis’ due to ‘all powerful’ VC and management ‘cadre’
A war on tall bookshelves?? Bureaucracy gone mad. As you would expect of a retired academic, I have tall bookshelves at home. Am I in danger? Would I be welcome in Tasmania?
University of Tasmania academics say they have been ordered to remove books from shelves and throw away their “life’s work”, all in the name of “safer spaces”.
A parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday heard senior academics allege UTAS was in “crisis” and had “lost its direction” due to an erosion of academic influence by a rampant “management cadre”.
“What we’ve been seeing in recent times is the growth in the management level and them assuming more of a role in directing academic activities,” UTAS Emeritus Professor Stuart McLean told the Legislative Council inquiry. “As an example, an edict came around recently that books were to be removed from shelves in … academic offices.”
Outside the inquiry, several academics confirmed to The Australian they had been ordered to remove books above shoulder-height, as well as all records that will not be used in the next year.
“You can’t have anything left in the office – it is deeply puzzling, and quite bizarre,” said one academic, on condition of anonymity. “Most academic offices are lined with books … and dumping much of your life’s work in the bin is hard to do.”
Academics said some had dodged the safety auditors, retaining ceiling-high books; others had been allowed to keep some above shoulder-height as long as they had an “industrially-rated step ladder”.
UTAS safety and wellbeing director Chris Arnold said any actions were about “keeping our people safe”. “Throughout 2020 and 2021, we ran a series of safety-focused clean-up days in all areas of the university, which resulted in cleaner, safer spaces for our staff and students,” Mr Arnold said.
“Some of the advice we provided included ensuring workspaces were not cluttered in ways that inhibited access or created fire and trip hazards, and that heavy items – like large books or boxes of equipment and items like glass sample slides – were not kept on shelves above shoulder height.”
The LegCo is inquiring into UTAS’ governance under state law, with peak bodies hoping it will lead to a model to restore academic freedom at universities nationally.
Senior academics are pushing for an increase in elected academic representation on key bodies.
Distinguished Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick told the inquiry even UTAS’ academic senate, of which he was until recently a member, was dominated by managers.
“So the majority of people on the academic senate are in upper level management positions and a minority are elected from the academics,” Professor Kirkpatrick told the inquiry.
“It’s not really giving an academic perspective on the courses and on the teaching programs. It’s a perspective that’s dominated by the people who are managing the university.”
Distinguished Professor Jeff Malpas told the inquiry UTAS was “in crisis” and “looking like a third or fourth rate” institution, due to the “McKinsey-ite” management model of Vice Chancellor Rufus Black.
“The governance structure has fallen into complete decay as a result of a centralised approach that concentrates effectively all power in the VC – and that’s a sure-fire recipe for disaster,” Professor Malpas said.
Former UTAS chancellor Michael Field has defended the current UTAS council as having the “right balance” and dismissed the reform push as a “harking back” by “retired academics”.
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Excess deaths in 2022 ‘incredibly high’ at 13 per cent
Almost certainly due in the main to people with other illnesses not getting treatment during the Covid panic
The Australian government should be urgently investigating the “incredibly high” 13 per cent excess death rate in 2022, the country’s peak actuarial body says.
An extra 15,400 people died in the first eight months of the year, according to new analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data by the Actuaries Institute, with around one-third of those having no link to Covid.
Karen Cutter, an actuary of more than 25 years and spokeswoman for the institute’s Covid-19 Mortality Working Group, said 13 per cent was an “incredibly high number for mortality” and that it was “not clear” what was driving the increase.
“Mortality doesn’t normally vary by more than 1 to 2 per cent, so 13 per cent is way higher than normal levels,” she said.
“I’m not aware [of anything comparable] in the recent past but I haven’t gone back and looked [historically]. They talk about the flu season of 2017 being really bad, and the mortality there was 1 per cent higher than normal. So it’s well outside the range of normal.”
She added, “In addition to Covid-19 deaths, there are significant numbers of non-Covid deaths – it is not clear what is causing these as there are many factors at play.”
“Looking at mortality and how that might be different from expectations is part of the core of what we do,” Ms Cutter said.
“A lot of insurance products rely on mortality assumptions – life insurance, death and disability, superannuation – it crosses over a lot of things. Similarly with morbidity. I tell my friends we do all the maths behind insurance.”
While sounding the alarm was one thing, Ms Cutter said what happened next was a “very good question”.
“I think the government should be looking at it – I don’t know to what extent they are or not, I don’t know what kind of investigations are underway,” she said.
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How couple's dream Tesla roadtrip turned into a nightmare after they became stranded without a charger deep in the country
Bernadette and Stephen Janson from Sydney hired a Tesla Model 3 for the recent six-day journey to Echuca in rural Victoria as a 'try-before-you-buy' test run.
But the pair ran into trouble on day three of the journey when, with 12 kilometres of battery left, they went to hook their car up to an electric vehicle charging station in the town of Leitchville on the NSW-Victoria border.
They realised their Tesla didn't have the cord they needed for that station and so they went to the next nearest charge point in the adjacent town on what battery they had left - but that one wasn't working.
'Massive drama today, we had enough charge to drive to the next town of Cohuna where there is a charger only to discover it's not working,' Ms Janson said in a video shared to TikTok.
'We've been on the phone for three hours getting the run around between the car hire company, RACV and NRMA.'
Ms Janson said she eventually spotted a tow truck that had stopped nearby and 'rushed over to grab the driver' but even he couldn't help with the correct cables or any way to charge the car.
'But he did say he knew of a lady that lives in Cohuna with a Tesla so we called her and she told us that to get enough charge to get back to Echuca would take about six hours,' she said.
'It's 2pm now and we've been at this (place) since 7am so frankly that's not ideal'.
The problem was only solved after the car hire company agreed to foot the bill for a tow truck lift to yet another charging station because they had not included the extra charging adapter they initially needed in their hire car.
'But we're going to have to extend our road trip for another day,' Ms Janson said.
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Glencore pulls plug on $2bn Valeria coal project in Queensland
Glencore has pulled the plug on a $2bn coalmine in Queensland, backing away from the major thermal coal development in the face of the state’s royalty increases and the federal government’s industrial relations changes.
The mining giant, Australia’s biggest coal producer, is understood to have written to both the Queensland and federal environment departments over the last week to withdraw applications for approval of the Valeria project.
A spokesman for Glencore confirmed the company had cancelled its plans to build the 16 million-tonne-a-year coalmine, which was tipped to create more than 1200 permanent jobs when it began production in 2024.
He said the project’s future status was now “under review”.
“This decision has been made in the current context of increased global uncertainty and is consistent with Glencore’s commitment to a responsibly managed decline of our global coal business,” the company said in a statement.
Global factors – such as the need to reduce carbon emissions, rising geopolitical tensions, and long-term uncertainty over future demand for coal – were a factor in the decision, but the spokesman confirmed domestic political uncertainty made it less attractive.
“Abrupt decisions like the Queensland super royalty hike have damaged investor confidence, increased uncertainty and raised a red flag with key trading partners,” he said.
“Genuine and timely consultation with companies on the detail of policy reforms is crucial to avoid continued uncertainty.”
Queensland’s royalty increases have been fiercely opposed by the state’s coal producers. But the federal government’s proposed changes to industrial relations laws, which will allow multi-employer bargaining, have also been criticised by the resources sector.
Valeria is also one of 18 gas and coal projects that will receive additional scrutiny from federal environmental authorities and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, after environment activists launched legal action in July aimed at ensuring their impact on climate change would be considered before any approval was granted.
Glencore’s decision is the latest sign of unrest over the extraordinary royalty increases introduced in the state’s July budget that are now expected to deliver $3bn to the state’s coffers in the current financial year, up from initial estimates of $765m.
Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick unveiled the figures on Wednesday during a mid-year budget update, and was unrepentant about the decision to introduce the surprise royalty rise. “This shows that coal royalties are worth fighting for, delivering a fair share for Queenslanders,” he said of the new royalties projections.
In response to questions from The Australian on Glencore’s Valeria decision, Mr Dick noted that the company’s public statement attributed the decision to “increased global uncertainty”. “Queensland Treasury’s report on long-term global coal demand released last month makes clear that while demand for Queensland thermal coal is set to resume its decline, demand for Queensland metallurgical coal will remain strong over coming decades,” Mr Dick said.
“Investment decisions around mining projects are ultimately a matter for proponents.”
BHP has also threatened to end future investment in the growth at its Queensland coal operations in response to the new royalty regime, and has also been a strident critic of federal Labor’s industrial relations reforms.
But Glencore’s move to scrap the development of Valeria is the first major project cancellation in the wake of either, and comes after the company confirmed on Tuesday night it expected to wind down production at other Australian thermal coalmines over the next four years, including Liddell, Newlands and Integra in NSW.
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The Left’s racism against Senator Price: The "Wrong" Aboriginal voice
In the name of equity and inclusion, Australia’s marquee satire publication, The Betoota Advocate, has written an astonishing (and some may say racist) article equating Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to an ‘Uncle Tom’.
In a piece entitled, Senator Jacinta Price Officially Promoted To ‘One Of The Good Ones’ By Her Redneck Overlords, the journalist suggests Price cannot think for herself as her intentions are to appease her ‘white superiors’.
Announcing the decision with the party leaders on Monday was Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an Indigenous woman who has made a name for herself over the last couple years by saying exactly what the rednecks what to hear on Sky News as a professional devil’s advocate.
The article attributes Price’s success in politics to her role as Sky News Australia’s ‘professional devil’s advocate’ and claims that she has been ‘promoted from her previous role as “the only one they have” to her shiny new position as “one of the good ones”.’
This decision to oppose The Voice, while extremely damaging for the Federal Coalition’s electability in 2026, has done wonders for the political trajectory of Senator Jactina [sic] Price, who has officially been promoted from her previous role as ‘the only one they have’ to her shiny new position as ‘one of the good ones’.
To be sure, this foul racial commentary is not just on Price; it robs Indigenous Australians of their true voice – the very thing Betoota is advocating for through their satirical attempts.
And yes, it is satire – but in the world of cancel culture and painfully meticulous social justice activism, this sort of race-baiting is only given a pass when it spews from a left-leaning publication that supports certain political goals. For a comparison, look at Mark Knight’s recent satirical cartoon on the Voice to Parliament, which was quickly censored.
Similar to when Biden proclaimed, ‘you ain’t black’ if you vote Republican, this kind of rhetoric puts Indigenous Australians in a position where they become anti-Aboriginal if they vote ‘no’ in The Voice Referendum, or are accused of supporting racism if they hold conservative values.
Likewise, all Australians fall into these categories if they do not subscribe to the left-wing orthodoxy.
Meritless arguments such as this are a logical fallacy known as ‘the appeal to emotion’, which the Left has weaponised to bypass fact and manipulate the public towards their side through emotional blackmail.
This tactic is used in two ways. Firstly, to defend people who are a part of the cultural elite, often by turning them into victims of the Right; secondly, to viciously label someone who offers a counter thought as one of the many ‘isms’ or ‘phobias’ which will see the target ejected from the public square, their logic-based opinions delegitimised, and their person forced into Soviet-style apologies.
Unsurprisingly, Jacinta was not offered membership into the cultural elite.
Instead of highlighting Price’s long list of achievements as an advocate for Indigenous Australians and fighting against domestic violence, the government, commentariat, media, and keyboard warriors have joined Betoota in demonising Price as the ‘devil’s advocate’ and narrowing down her success to obeisance towards ‘Her Redneck Overlords’.
Where is Paul Barry, Lisa Wilkinson, Peter FitzSimons, Clementine Ford, Louise Milligan, or Jane Caro when you need them? What about all the social warriors who have, in part, built a career out of festering public outrage, creating pseudo-victim narratives to push their ideology, and acting as Australia’s arbiters of morality? They have remained silent.
It is clear, however, the Left offers a pathway to redemption for members of conservative parties:
Central-West NSW Nationals MP Andrew Gee has been quick to point out that he disagrees with his party’s official stance and is a supporter of the Voice, as someone who doesn’t think stoking racist hot buttons amongst frustrated rural voters is really going to achieve anything other than a few Murdoch headlines and ruined Christmas dinners.
The overall logic truly is flawed on many fronts; ‘It is not racist to say an Indigenous Woman is not thinking for herself when opposing our view’; ‘We will bridge the gap between the racial divide by encouraging intolerance towards other views’; ‘We believe in every Australian’s right to vote on the referendum, but democracy has failed us if the majority of Australians vote no’; ‘Vote yes to an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and anyone who disagrees should not be allowed to enter the debate.’
With this line of thinking infecting our Federal Parliament, Australia’s democratic process is rotting. The federal government has amended tax laws to give deductions to people donating to groups campaigning for ‘yes’ to the Voice, all the while organisations pushing for ‘no’ will not receive this incentive.
Furthermore, the government will spend $75 million on educating Australians on what the Voice means and preventing misinformation. With the term ‘misinformation’ being used in contemporary times to shut down critics, it is doubtful this money will be used to showcase both sides so Australians can make an informed decision.
Instead, it will fund a monolithic view on the referendum and extinguish the contest of ideas. How is this fair or democracy in action?
Rather, we will be subjected to weak, superficial arguments, which will be allowed to flourish without question or criticism.
Just like the Betoota Advocate, which advised conservatives to heed the warning from the Victorian State Election and not to question the Voice, as the Coalition lost because they delved into the ‘murky culture wars’.
This analysis is materially wrong. The Victorian Liberals lost because they were a Labor-lite government offering no point of difference. They had budgeted for larger debt than Labor, had more aggressive climate change policies than the federal Labor government, and banned a long-serving MP from the party room because he was anti-abortion, along with a candidate whose father was a member of a conservative church.
Despite this blatant failure to accurately peruse politics, we are meant to listen to them when it comes to changing our constitution, while conservatives who ask highly pertinent questions are removed from the discussion.
Instead, they are denounced as the root cause of the Culture Wars when they respond to the Left’s attempt to radically change long-standing institutions that have generated overall net positives for society.
The attack on conservatives around the world is profound. Nevertheless, we should pay homage to the likes of Price, who are fearless in their conviction to fight for values that have made the West the greatest civilisation in human history and willingly withstand severe public backlash in this pursuit.
I suggest these concrete cowboys give up their comfortable city lives for a few days and visit a remote community with Senator Price before they try to besmirch her reputation again.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/the-lefts-racism-against-senator-price-a-voice-that-refuses-to-obey
************************************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, December 07, 2022
Courtney spent four years at uni. Two more years before she could teach was asking too much
Absurd. Even a one-year diploma is mostly a waste. Classroom apprenticeship is all that is needed
Two-year master’s teaching degrees should be abandoned in favour of a one-year course to help plug chronic teacher shortages, cut student debt and entice people into the profession, new research has found.
Schools across the country are grappling with unprecedented teacher shortages – especially in maths and science – while confidential data reported last year showed more than 100,000 students in NSW are taught by someone without expertise in their subject.
Courtney Haroon, who has a forensic science and chemistry undergraduate degree, said she would have swapped her two-year master’s teaching qualification for a heavy-loaded, intensive one-year course if that had been an option.
“An accelerated course wasn’t an option, but a one-year degree and then going into paid, supervised work in the classroom is a great solution,” said Haroon, who is in her first year of work at Gilroy Catholic College in Castle Hill and plans to teach year 11 and 12 chemistry.
“I was searching for a lab-technician job, but I realised I needed to be helping other people.”
A policy paper released by conservative think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) argues mandating a two-year requirement for postgraduate teaching is crippling supply and is a major disincentive to aspiring teachers, particularly those wanting a mid-career change.
It means students are hit with double the tuition fees, at roughly $4000-a-year, and are delayed in earning income, which in NSW public schools is $70,652 for the first year of teaching, the paper says.
Figures from October show 2458 vacant full-time teaching positions across more than 1200 NSW schools; and 75 public schools in NSW have five or more full-time teacher vacancies, with 36 of these in Sydney.
Last month Castle Hill High, Alexandria Park Community school, Northbourne Public and Murrumbidgee High had more than 10 vacancies each.
The one-year graduate diploma of education, currently held by about 60,000 teachers nationally, was phased out from 2016, and students now complete a two-year master’s course and pass literacy and numeracy tests, while undergraduate students take on a four-year degree.
The number of people gaining a postgraduate qualification in education has declined by 23 per cent in about a decade.
Glenn Fahey, education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, said the two-year master’s is a “regulatory relic”, and the longer course is no guarantee a new teacher is more prepared for the classroom.
“About 60,000 teachers hold a one-year graduate diploma. Are we implying that something’s wrong with their skill set? If we can confidently say that as the evidence suggests that these teachers are as effective and as knowledgeable in the classroom as their peers it waters away the justification for the longer qualification,” Fahey said.
“We need more teachers, but we’ve created more obstacles making it harder to become one.”
Report author Rob Joseph said the assumption that lengthier degrees produce higher standards was unfounded.
“A longer degree is no guarantee a new teacher is more prepared for the classroom. It’s the quality of time in training, not the quantity of time, that leads to teachers being classroom-ready,” he said.
Data from the Universities Admissions Centre, which only captures post-grad students who apply through UAC to some NSW universities, shows a spike in applications in the first year of the pandemic. However, it was at a six-year low for 2022 entry, with 580 applicants.
Teaching standards are set by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and the institute’s deputy chief executive, Edmund Misson, said one year was not enough time to learn how to teach well.
“Teachers need good preparation, and we don’t think that can be done in 12 months of equivalent full-time study,” Misson said.
Claire Wyatt-Smith, the director of the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at ACU, said one-year teaching degrees could be appropriate in some instances.
“If the first degree a student completes covers content knowledge and skills for the curriculum content the person will teach, then a one-year postgraduate teaching degree could be appropriate,” she said, adding that making sure students have adequate experience in classroom is critical.
A spokesperson for the NSW Education Department said the number of permanent vacancies in public schools fluctuates throughout the year for a range of reasons, but most position movement occurs towards the end of the school year.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said it was hard to switch mid-career, especially when you have a mortgage and children, which is why he has asked his teacher education expert panel to consider options such as paid internships.
Shadow federal education minister Alan Tudge welcomed the CIS report which backs the Coalition’s position on initial teacher education.
“Understandably, not many professionals can afford to take two years off work mid-career to retrain as a teacher. Shorter pathways are required if we are to make this an attractive choice for the best and the brightest,” Tudge said.
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Peta Credlin: Voice to Parliament threatening to be most divisive referendum in 70 years
Anthony Albanese wants us to believe the Voice to Parliament will be a benign body, but it will be a dramatic change in the way we see ourselves as Australians, writes Peta Credlin.
Last Thursday, our country moved a big step closer to dramatic change in the way we see ourselves as Australians, and ultimately how we’re governed, with the introduction to the parliament of enabling legislation for an Indigenous Voice referendum to be held later next year.
Not only will we be asked to change the constitution, but – for the first time in our history, if this bill is passed – we’ll be asked to vote in a referendum without the benefit of an official “yes” and “no” case, sent by the Australian Electoral Commission to every household to inform voters’ decisions. The government insists that this is no big deal because advocates on both sides can send out whatever they like online.
In fact, the government’s failure to fund both a “yes” and “no” case is blatantly one sided and unfair because also passing the parliament last week was a change to the law to give tax deductibility for donations to organisations campaigning for a Voice but no such support to any organisation opposed to it.
On top of that, there’s $235 million set aside to fund the referendum and out of that, we learnt last week, will be a massive “educational” campaign to “counter misinformation” about what the Voice means.
The legislation doesn’t specify what “misinformation” means and the government is strangely silent too, but the experienced adviser in me says this will be taxpayer money used to shut down any arguments against the Voice lest voters work out it isn’t the benign, symbolic-only change the PM claims it is.
In a sign of the ugliness to come, we saw an illustration of what Voice advocates regard as the “misinformation” that the government wants to re-educate us about. In response to the federal National Party’s decision formally to oppose the Voice, on the grounds that it’s wrong to divide Australians by race in our founding document; and that the Voice is more likely to foster a “them and us” grievance than practical improvements in Aboriginal people’s lives, Indigenous leader and activist Noel Pearson unleashed a spray at fellow Indigenous leader Senator Jacinta Price, which seemed designed to intimidate her into silence.
Pearson, who supports the Voice, said that Price – who describes herself as a proud Celtic, Warlpiri Australian woman – was only against the Voice because she’d been manipulated in a “redneck celebrity vortex” and was being used to “punch down on other black fellas”. He couldn’t accept that she’d made up her own mind, and argue against her on the merits, but had to play the “Uncle Tom” card accusing her of being brainwashed into hurting her own people.
With the Prime Minister declaring that support for the Voice is just being “polite” and implying opponents of the Voice are disrespectful of Aboriginal people if not actually racist, this is threatening to be an even more divisive referendum than the bid to ban the Communist Party 70 years back.
Will government-funded education include formal denunciations – Pearson-style – of any Indigenous person, like Price and like the former ALP national president, then Liberal candidate Warren Mundine, brave enough to stand against the mob on this issue?
This sense of unfairness associated with a bid to make some Australians more equal than others based on whether some of their ancestors were here before 1788 will only be inflamed if the government looks like it’s giving a leg up to just one side, and doesn’t play fair on something as important as constitutional change.
Unlike normal legislation, that can readily be changed by an incoming government, any change to the constitution is for keeps. Short of further change, backed by another referendum, once something is in the constitution, what it means is determined by the unelected and unaccountable High Court rather than by the elected and accountable government of the day.
So, if this referendum is carried, there will be an Indigenous Voice to advise the parliament and the government on anything that affects Indigenous Australians; it would take a “brave” government, in the PM’s words, to ignore its advice; it can’t be abolished; and exactly what it all means will have to be sorted out from time to time by the judges of the day.
As confirmed in recent days by Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney too, the Voice will be the body that gets to work and negotiates a treaty between Aboriginal Australians and the rest of us, and likely financial reparations too.
Wake up Australia, is this really want you want?
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Liberty is a conservative value
Recently-elected Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has repeatedly demonstrated a deep understanding of conservative values. By way of example, in January 2021 Meloni penned an opinion piece for the daily il Giornale in commemoration of the first anniversary of the death of the English philosopher and writer Sir Roger Scruton in which she declared that it would be her intention to promote his figure as one of the pillars of European conservatism. Among other things, Scruton was instrumental in forming underground networks of dissident academics in the old eastern Bloc, including VÃ clav Havel.
In the piece, Meloni wrote of his ‘extraordinary ability to describe and explain the profound reasons for his love of both the small and the big, that according to him are both worth conserving’. To this end, Meloni cited Scruton’s belief in ‘the protection of the traditions of small communities and the struggle for the highest social and political conquests, such as the liberty of people subjugated by the yoke of the Soviet Union, were of equal importance’. She took aim at the many European Union leaders and parliamentarians who rather than defend the liberty of their fellow citizens, pass innumerable laws and regulations that oppress them.
In other words, conservatives believe in individual liberty. History has proven that.
In America, let’s not forget it was the Republican Party that freed the slaves, and fought a civil war to ensure they stayed free. It was a Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson who, upon assuming office in 1913, mandated that the federal workforce be segregated by race, leading to the reduction of black civil service workers’ income, thereby increasing the significant income gap between black and white workers.
In this country, it was the Liberals that created the modern university system. It was the Liberals that brought an end to the White Australia Policy (created by the ALP and the unions), put forward the 1967 Referendum, and signed the ANZUS Treaty.
The conservative belief in liberty also extends to the belief in small government. As Dennis Prager wrote recently, the defining characteristic of the Left is bigger and therefore more powerful government. This extends to a critical aspect of liberty: free speech, which has never been a left-wing value. Everywhere the Left is dominant – government, media, universities – it stifles dissent. The reason is simple: no left-wing movement can survive an open exchange of ideas, therefore it suppresses it. Why else would China put on trial a 90-year-old cardinal, Joseph Zen, in Hong Kong for ‘endangering national security’ by supporting pro-democracy protesters?
Should any further evidence be required as to why liberty cannot be a left-wing value, witness how the Left conveniently ignores events in Iran, where mullahs are beating to death quietly defiant young women.
Sir Robert Menzies understood better than most the centrality of liberty in conservative values. He knew that the more liberty individuals have, the less power the government has.
The Liberal Party today would do well to recall the following words of Menzies’ Forgotten People speech of May 22, 1942:
We say that the greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit. This is the only real freedom, and it has as its corollary a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility. The moment a man seeks moral and intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a cipher.
To discourage ambition, to envy success, to have achieved superiority, to distrust independent thought, to sneer at and impute false motives to public service – these are the maladies of modern democracy, and of Australian democracy in particular.
How relevant those words are today! Elected politicians, public servants, and the corporate managerial class, thanks to, as Chilton Williamson Jr highlights, their economic incompetence, historical illiteracy, cultural confusion, and ideological delusions, have shirked their proper responsibilities and decided ‘for the common good’ to stake out a regulatory claim by meddling needlessly in every nook and cranny of, thus wreaking division and stifling individual thought. As this country’s 28th Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, stated so presciently in his maiden speech to Parliament in 1994:
In the quest to solve social problems, government reaches into our schools, our workplaces, and even our bedrooms. Government tells us what we should think, whom we should like and how we should feel […] (which is) guaranteed to tear Australians apart rather than bring us together.
Former Prime Minister John Howard in A Sense of Balance wrote that the philosophical base of the Liberal Party means valuing the individual ahead of the collective, embracing free enterprise, and supporting freedom of speech, worship, and association. Howard goes on to observe that timidity on these issues by the Liberal Party alienated many of its traditional supporters, who found ‘somewhere else to go’, thus aiding in the defeat of the Morrison government in May.
In the words of Hamlet, ‘Aye, there’s the rub!’ There are many who would argue that the demise of Liz Truss as UK Prime Minister means that conservatives need to learn to live with big government and try to make it work a bit better.
That view seemingly ignores the point Howard made: that when conservatives abandon their values, the voters will abandon them.
The fact is that Liz Truss’s departure from Number 10 is a symptom, not a cause, of what is wrong with centre-right politics across the Anglosphere.
In Britain, the Conservative party long ago decided it didn’t want to be a conservative, centre-right party.
Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, other than on Brexit, governed as a left-of-centre, zeitgeist-observing Labour leader might.
The two Conservative leaders before Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron, had accepted all of Labour’s social agenda, with Cameron’s only conservative feature being an attempt to control spending and bring the budget into balance, plus some modest tax cutting.
Now, under a Conservative government, Britain’s tax take is the highest since the sixties, soon to become the highest since the fifties.
We have been here before. Advocates for economic freedom are back where they were in the seventies as policy dissidents. Yet, they won the argument then and they can win it again. To do requires conviction.
Nick Cater stated recently that the Coalition cannot assume that the votes it lost to minor parties and independents on the centre-right will automatically come back. The bulk of the 660,000 Coalition votes that disappeared between 2019 and May this year were lost in suburban and regional Australia – the new ‘forgotten people’.
As Greg Sheridan wrote in the Australian, ‘To win in politics, you have to be willing to lose everything. You have to believe in the nation, care about the culture, believe in your own values.’ This is the reason why Howard won four elections, and in two elections Tony Abbott won 25 seats from the ALP. They believed in: lower taxes, smaller government, respect for the individual, the family as the greatest stabilising force in our society, national sovereignty, and the rule of law.
The sooner the Liberals remember that liberty is a conservative value, the sooner they might taste electoral success.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/liberty-is-a-conservative-value/
********************************************************Back to basics for NSW schools
Ailing literacy skills across Australia has triggered a major overhaul of one state's education system with grammar and punctuation the areas most in need of improvement.
The English syllabus has been redesigned in a bid to improve the literacy skills of NSW students in Years 3 to 10 following a 10 year decline.
Grammar, punctuation and sentence structure will be at the heart of the new curriculum to help students better express complex ideas and clear sentences.
A new mathematics curriculum is also due to be released this week and will focus on improving students' sequencing and reasoning skills.
The NSW syllabus refresh follows dismal NAPLAN results this year, which saw the literacy skills of teenage boys plummet to record lows.
One in six boys failed to meet the minimum standard in grammar and punctuation while 12 per cent could barely read at a basic level.
This year's NAPLAN results revealed girls performed better than their male counterparts, especially when it came to writing.
According to the results, 81.6 per cent of boys reach the minimum standard for writing, compared with 90.8 per cent of girls.
Parents who want to improve their child's writing have been urged by their teachers to encourage them to read more, and widely.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the new English and mathematics syllabuses were significant milestones in the curriculum overhaul.
'If our NAPLAN results have shown us anything, it's that we need to focus on the explicit teaching of grammar, sentence structure and punctuation in high school. Focusing on those foundational skills is key to success,' he said.
'It is vital that NSW students are developing strong skills in both literacy and numeracy so they can succeed in school and beyond.'
NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said the new mathematics syllabus would encourage students to form a deeper understanding of the concepts.
'In other words, students will need to not only know Pythagoras' theorem; they will need to be able to explain how it works in practice and why,' she said.
A new core-paths structure will replace the current three-tiered approach to better prepare students for HSC maths - which will be mandatory from 2025.
The new curriculum will be available to teachers during 2023 so they can prepare classes for students and will in implemented in all NSW schools in 2024.
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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
