Oz Politics.

[WX]

Yes.

[skuthorp]

Re Lismore and Firzroy Crossing floods and other that could be mentioned.
The towns need to move, and the only thing to be decided is whether it's a planned move, or the town as is is flooded out of existence. Parts of Merwillimbah may also be on the list.
Then thre'd parts of Ais where the tempertures will increase to the point that practical living may be quite difficult.

[Lugs]

Re Lismore and Firzroy Crossing floods and other that could be mentioned.
The towns need to move, and the only thing to be decided is whether it's a planned move, or the town as is is flooded out of existence. Parts of Merwillimbah may also be on the list.
Then thre'd parts of Ais where the tempertures will increase to the point that practical living may be quite difficult.

Practical living in many remote Indig communities is quite difficult. What do you propose?

[Lugs]

And Thorpe quits the Greens. Don't know why the ABC bothers giving her a voice, but they do

[WX]

Re Lismore and Firzroy Crossing floods and other that could be mentioned.
The towns need to move, and the only thing to be decided is whether it's a planned move, or the town as is is flooded out of existence. Parts of Merwillimbah may also be on the list.
Then thre'd parts of Ais where the tempertures will increase to the point that practical living may be quite difficult.

In 2017 the council bought back and demolished a number of houses on the south side. Friends bought and renovated a workers cottage on the south side in 2020 or 2021. In the 2017 flood the water came half way up the backyard, and in 2022 the water came in the front door. A difference of over 3 metres of water.
The community centre was built to be above a one in a hundred flood. In 2017 the water came up to the top step. The town is protected by levee walls, but a pump failed and some of the town flooded. In 2022 the river overtopped the levee walls and the water rose to around a metre in the community centre.
Many towns were built by rivers because the rivers were the supply routes. To penalise the people living in these towns because living by rivers has now (due the increasing extreme weather events) become a liability is both narrow minded and heartless.
In 45 years, I have not seen the level of devastation that we saw in Feb 2022. The word unprecedented has been used a lot since the 2019 bushfires, but the floods of 2022 certainly were.

[WX]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-...andt/101935866

"It has become clear to me that I can't do that from within the Greens," Thorpe said at a press conference where she took no questions.
"Now I will be able to speak freely on all issues from a sovereign perspective without being constrained by portfolios and agreed party positions."
Prior to her departure, Thorpe was the Greens' First Nations spokesperson.
For weeks the party has been trying to work out how it could support the Voice to Parliament, while its spokesperson on First Nations didn't.
A deflated sounding Greens leader Adam Bandt, standing alongside deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi, later expressed his disappointment at the resignation.
"I am truly sorry to see her leave our partyroom," he said, before dubbing Thorpe a "fighter for her people".
He said the party's constitution would have allowed for Thorpe to advocate a different position to the party, a scenario that would have led to him taking over her portfolio.

[Lugs]

In 2017 the council bought back and demolished a number of houses on the south side. Friends bought and renovated a workers cottage on the south side in 2020 or 2021. In the 2017 flood the water came half way up the backyard, and in 2022 the water came in the front door. A difference of over 3 metres of water.
The community centre was built to be above a one in a hundred flood. In 2017 the water came up to the top step. The town is protected by levee walls, but a pump failed and some of the town flooded. In 2022 the river overtopped the levee walls and the water rose to around a metre in the community centre.
Many towns were built by rivers because the rivers were the supply routes. To penalise the people living in these towns because living by rivers has now (due the increasing extreme weather events) become a liability is both narrow minded and heartless.
In 45 years, I have not seen the level of devastation that we saw in Feb 2022. The word unprecedented has been used a lot since the 2019 bushfires, but the floods of 2022 certainly were.

Unprecedented? Hardly. Can I refer you to the link in post 29748 again? You obviously missed it the first time

[Lugs]

I suspect a mate of mine is going to be busy. He works for the mob that supplied the firefighting 737 that just crashed in Western Australia (as did Brian W a few years ago, IIRC). Funnily enough, he lives in the same block of apartments that I'm currently couch surfing in. He's not long back from the firefighting season in the USA.

[WX]

Unprecedented? Hardly. Can I refer you to the link in post 29748 again? You obviously missed it the first time

Worst flood in recorded history.

[Lugs]

Worst flood in recorded history.

17 floods above the levee height in 150 years before that one. Hardly unprecedented

[Hallam]

I think this just about covered it……Richard Flannigans article in the Age responding to The liberals defeat…….I like his writing style. On the subject matter,
time will tell.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/m...25-p5aod6.html

As the results rolled in it was difficult to grasp: the Liberals of the 2020s, eerily like the Soviet communists of the 1980s, were suddenly an anachronism. Like the Politburo, they too had become entrapped within their fervent ideologies and grown so distant from reality that they lost the moral legitimacy to govern. Power was now haemorrhaging away in a death agony of lost seats.
Morrison was widely credited as the architect of this annihilation. But perhaps he was no more than the sinister final act of a larger story that began decades earlier when John Howard was elected prime minister in 1996.


Of all Australian prime ministers, it is Howard who can rightly claim to be the most transformative, reshaping the nation so completely that, other than a Labor interregnum of six years, it has been conservative governments largely in his image ever since. Every issue that defined Morrison’s downfall had deep roots in Howard’s prime ministership.
It was Howard, after all, who from 1996 on campaigned internationally against binding global carbon emission reduction targets. His reasoning for doing so, he told cabinet in 1997, was that Australia was “a major exporter of energy”. His advocacy to key world leaders, cabinet papers reveal, proved “influential”. And so, we led the world backwards.

He similarly turned back a historic tide of national progress on everything from the republic to reconciliation, refused to even use the word multiculturalism in his early years of prime ministership, and set the dogs of xenophobia onto Australian politics, transforming refugees into a threatening invasion force.
He revelled in fomenting culture wars while gutting institutions and corroding civil society, attacking it whenever it stood up for the environment, the rights of citizens, workers, or of the weakest. He purged the Liberal Party of what were then called wets, the moderates of the day, paving the way for the far-right fundamentalist clique it has now become.
His success lay in speaking to what was smallest and worst in Australia’s breast: fear, greed, apathy and racism. It was a template for all that followed.
Howardism was to be taken up with a new aggression and misogyny by his self-declared love child, Tony Abbott; continued, despite his postpartum revisions, by Malcolm Turnbull; until there came its final decadent phase: the Morrison government, a rabble characterised by sleaze, scandal and self-interest.

Cont next post…….

[Hallam]

By then, Howardism resembled a degenerative disease. What once had been merely cynical gestures to win votes or wedge opponents had transformed into a terminal cancer of mystical doctrine. They had come to believe their own baseless babble, and they did not get that harassment in the workplace was not part of the culture wars but lived experience. So too human-induced fires, floods and cyclones. They never realised that their ideology did not stand the test of reality: whether it be rain or flame or allegedly being raped metres away from the prime minister’s office.
It was widely noted that they didn’t get women, though, as Samantha Maiden noted, it was women who finally got them. At root, the problem was that they didn’t get people: not the old, who were left to dieunnecessary, wretched deaths while they went to the cricket. Not anyone under 40 who would never own a home, nor the trans kids they damaged or the poor they may have driven to suicide with the illegal and evil “robodebt”, wasting nearly $2 billion of our money in the service of persecution.
They didn’t get kindness or decency, that the suffering in the theatres of cruelty they called border defence not only distressed but shamed many Australians. They didn’t get that their ceaseless rorting and corruption offended people who built lives around trust and honesty.
While our artists were loathed, our scientists belittled, and our journalists pursued by a politicised federal police for exposing alleged war crimes, party hacks and corporate drones were routinely rewarded with sinecures and board seats and the bling of yet another Order of Australia, a currency now more debased than the Iranian rial.
And as though it were the play within the play, Andrew Hastie, rising star of the Liberal Party, described a recognisable moral hell in recent testimony to the Ben Roberts-Smith trial.
Confirming comments he had made to journalists about being a SAS soldier in Afghanistan, Hastie said: “There were days where I felt it was a closed universe, where you can make up your own morality on the grounds you wanted to and it was a dark and haunting and incredibly unnatural feeling”.
Invoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, famously about a man’s descent into murderous tyranny, he said, “some guys went up the Congo.” Hastie spoke of dreams he’d since had where “we have killed one of our own guys and covered it up”. He said it spoke to “moral trauma”.
Hastie’s dream strangely resonates with a larger, national moral trauma that has played out over decades, reaching in Morrison its feverish apotheosis. Australia was an increasingly illiberal democracy in which we were ever more unsafe and more unequal. We were both inured to and haunted by the idea that politics without a moral basis was the only politics possible.


On Saturday, that nightmare abruptly ended. It turned out politicians couldn’t make up their own morality to explain away their crimes without consequence. The historic significance of the election is that it was the people who put an end to not only the Morrison government but also the Howard ascendancy and with it, the two-party system.
Many weren’t voting for a party or a program. Many had lived the Armageddon of climate change as flood and fire and drought. They were not afraid of change for the better. Trusting in each other, in the idea that politicians should answer to them, they held to the principle that they no longer would be told who their member would be and what that member would stand for. They were standing up for a future they were brave enough to believe we should, and we can, address. They dared to hope.

That night, a post popped up on my phone showing a photo of two small girls, each with an arm around the other, smiling at a TV screen depicting the election result. It was the Murugappan children, Australians both, imprisoned with their asylum seeker parents for years at a cost of millions of our dollars. A caption said it all: “Thank you, Australia. It is finally time to bring Priya, Nades, Kopi and Tharni home to Bilo.”

The Murugappans were finally going home to Biloela and it felt that we were going home with them, that Australia was returning to its best instincts and away from its worst.
But those who had chosen to go up the Congo were not returning, not now, not for a very long time, and perhaps never.
Richard Flanagan is an Australian writer. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

[WX]

Still a long way to go, it's going to take a while to undo the damage.

[Lugs]

Meanwhile, Albo's popularity rating is starting to nosedive. Ready yourself for broken election promises as the budget looms large.

[WX]

Voters have backed the federal government on more than a dozen key policies ranging from economic management to jobs and wages while giving Labor a convincing lead of 42 to 29 per cent over the Coalition on core political support.
An exclusive survey shows voters regard Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Labor as the best side of politics to manage every major policy issue except for national security and defence, where Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Coalition hold a narrow lead of a single percentage point.

[WX]

Watching the ABC news and a story about how migrant health goes down once they are in the country. Anyone the ABC used an image of a 737, but they used an image of the one that crashed in WA.

[WX]

"Prime Minister John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer were forced to support something they had long tried to prevent – an independent East Timor. Like their predecessors, they refused to contemplate independence for that territory because Australia's diplomats had put 30 years of work into getting control of its oil."ABC RN contacted DFAT about these claims but did not receive a comment.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-...isis/101944736

[WX]

The morning after the Liberals' election drubbing last May, Senate leader Simon Birmingham was candid about what went wrong.

After losing 17 seats to "teal" independents, the Greens and Labor, Birmingham frankly admitted the "real turning point" for the party was its failure to lock in a climate and energy policy "that could have achieved a degree of bipartisanship". This cost the Liberals "a significant price down the track".
Two months later, when surviving Liberal MPs gathered back in Canberra for the first time, federal director Andrew Hirst and former strategist turned pollster Tony Barry delivered a detailed election debrief.
They backed up Birmingham's point. Climate change was a "critical" issue in the election wipe-out, Barry argued, symbolic of a "deeper values disconnect" with the electorate. The path back to victory would be "very difficult" without flipping some of the "teal" seats.
Yet since then, there's been little sign of any shift on climate policy.

The first opportunity to demonstrate a fresh approach came a few months after the election, when the Albanese government sought to legislate promised climate targets. The Coalition dug in and voted "no".
This week came another chance to send a signal to lost voters that the Liberals had heard the message on climate. Once again, the opportunity was lost.
The Coalition has decided to vote against strengthening what's called the Safeguards Mechanism, the main weapon in the government's armoury to bring down emissions.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-...wars/101947454

[WX]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-...club/101915486

Gina Rinehart's company, Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd, was behind a $150,000 payment to the Liberal Party, transferred via a third party, and not declared by the mining giant by the November 17, 2022 deadline.Key points:

• Payments from Hancock Prospecting to the Sydney Mining Club have been largely passed on to the Liberals over two years
• Emails show there were plans to continue the arrangement for two more years
• Experts have called for reform to Australia's federal electoral laws to increase transparency

An ABC investigation has uncovered a series of payments, which a leading barrister and anti-corruption expert believes is a "scheme" to bypass political donation laws.
The ABC understands payments made to the Liberals by the Sydney Mining Club followed a funding deal struck by Hancock chief financial officer Jabez Huang and SMC chairman Julian Malnic.
The money was transferred to the Liberal Party by the Sydney Mining Club by Hancock Prospecting, but not disclosed with their declared donations that year. After questions from the ABC, Hancock said it had now fixed a "deficiency" in their disclosure.
The Liberal Party formally acknowledged it received a total of $144,000 from the mining club, but Sydney Mining Club has not declared the payments. Experts say the transactions expose a possible "loophole" in the laws covering political donations.

[Lugs]

Loopholes in donation laws. Ha ha. Labor are the grand masters of that

[sandtown]

Your discussion here is pretty civil, and fact based, compared to ours . . .

due, I am thinking, to your decent campaign finance laws.

MAGA !!

[skuthorp]

Gina finances the IPA, and that alone is reason enough to know that there is dirty doings still in LibNat finances.
But they are not alone, short circuiting electoral laws is yet another example of legal 'guns for hire' in a moral free zone. And why should the Unions comply when business does not?
I do not expect either major to enact effective HC prooof laws in this area.

[WX]

Loopholes in donation laws. Ha ha. Labor are the grand masters of that

I think the reality is they are all pretty good at it.
Donation is just another word for bribe.

[skuthorp]

Your discussion here is pretty civil, and fact based, compared to ours . . .

due, I am thinking, to your decent campaign finance laws.

MAGA !!

We have our moments. One is occuring quietly at present……..

[skuthorp]

It seems that some candidates in various electoral fields have indulged in exercises of deception of their electorates when standing as Greens candidates for election.

[skuthorp]

..and on 7.30 we have a Vice Admiral slinging us BS re Aussie Nuke subs….
I'd take bets but I'm unlikely to be around to collect.

………and Pumped Hydro? bogged!

[WX]

..and on 7.30 we have a Vice Admiral slinging us BS re Aussie Nuke subs….
I'd take bets but I'm unlikely to be around to collect.

………and Pumped Hydro? bogged!

Judging by the hole, the tunnel collapsed.

[Lugs]

I used to think Noel Pearson was smart. Strewth... I was wrong. Watching him on 7:30 and he's lost the plot

[Lugs]

Seriously... he doesn't think we recognise the indigenous as the original occupants? What gets me is people continually referring to the Oz Indig. as being the oldest continuous culture. Take a look at any Indig community and give me a rating out of 100 as to whether you'd like to be part of the culture you see there now.

[Lugs]

There's 11 Indig in the Parliament. They have a voice. Idiot.

[WX]

Idiot, is one of those words that can get you banned.

[Lugs]

Idiot, is one of those words that can get you banned.

He's not a forumite.

He really is out of touch to how middle Australia views the issue. I spent a day discussing it with a pollie recently. Our basic conclusion is that the proposal is divisive, not inclusive. Pearson sounded like some sort of snake oil salesman saying that the voice will fix everything. Nope. The Gap will only ever be closed when the Indig take responsibility. That will never happen with the "give me" ethos that exists now. It's not far removed from the Cargo Cult.

[Lugs]

btw Gary, I liked your patio photo the other day

[WX]

btw Gary, I liked your patio photo the other day

Thanks, I seem to be getting more motivated as I age. At the age of 70 I'm starting to feel the countdown.

[skuthorp]

I got a 70th birthday card today Gary………….. 10 years shy…..

I take it as a compliment………...