Chris Pynes Knob posted:

please yes and just make it all about canada

its the auspol thread we deserve

Chris Pynes Knob posted:

please yes and just make it all about canada

its the auspol thread we deserve

quote:

Parliamentary CCTV used to spy on Labor staffer over leaks to journalist
May 30, 2014 - 3:49PM
Philip Dorling
Exclusive


Federal Parliament's internal security cameras have been used to monitor contacts between political staffers, bureaucrats and journalists, according to former parliamentary staff.

Fairfax Media has confirmed that Australian Federal Police investigators hunting leakers of government information have accessed images and information from the Parliament's closed circuit television cameras located throughout the building, including the corridors of the press gallery.

In one instance during the former Rudd government, Parliament House security cameras were used to monitor the movements of a Labor staffer suspected of leaking cabinet secrets to a prominent journalist.

According to former Department of Parliamentary Services staff, CCTV cameras were used to monitor the staffer's visits to the press gallery as well as contact between the staffer, who worked for a cabinet minister, and the journalist in other parts of the building, including the cafeteria. Surveillance extended to monitoring the journalist's movements while he worked at Parliament on weekends and at night.

Former DPS officials familiar with security operations say the AFP considers the Parliament's CCTV system to be a legitimate investigatory tool and have used the surveillance system to track bureaucrats, political staffers and journalists in leak investigations over the past decade.

The CCTV system became a matter of controversy when it was revealed at a Senate estimates committee hearing on Monday that DPS officers had used video surveillance in an internal disciplinary investigation of a senior member of the parliamentary Hansard staff. The official was recorded by CCTV cameras placing an envelope under the door of the office of veteran Labor Senator John Faulkner.

The clerk of the Senate Rosemary Laing has advised Senator Faulkner there is "a reasonably strong possibility" that contempt of the Senate was committed by DPS officials and the incident has been referred to the Senate privileges committee for an investigation.

"[U]se of the CCTV system to conduct surveillance of a senator's office and to identify persons providing information to that office could be seen as an attempt to deter the senator from pursuing a matter of public importance by restricting the flow of information to the senator," Dr Laing wrote.

However, the Parliament's code of practice for use of the CCTV system does allow images and video footage to be accessed by the AFP in criminal investigations and for undefined "intelligence purposes".

Approval for AFP access must be given by senior parliamentary officers if images include a senator or member of the House of Representatives. However AFP access to images of other persons only requires approval from a DPS middle manager – the assistant secretary, building services.

At the Senate estimates hearing on Monday, independent senator Nick Xenophon asked DPS head Carol Mills whether the CCTV cameras could be used to investigate offences under sections 70 and 79 of the Crimes Act that deal with unauthorised disclosure of government information, including the receipt of leaks by journalists. Ms Mills replied "That is potentially true, yes."

Senator Xenophon said on Friday that the AFP's easy access to the Parliament's CCTV system "ought to alarm every journalist because even face-to-face meetings with whistle-blowers aren't safe from government surveillance and investigation".

At a meeting on Wednesday, DPS first assistant secretary Neil Skill assured Press Galley president David Speers that the security cameras in the press gallery corridors "are not being used inappropriately". However Mr Speers later observed that DPS officials "weren't too keen to go into details".

An AFP spokesperson confirmed that Federal Police accesses the Parliament House CCTV system "from time to time to conduct criminal investigations," but declined to elaborate beyond saying that "access is in accordance with existing protocols".

Ms Mills did not respond to questions submitted by Fairfax Media.

Hypation posted:

See below from CNBC - The Rich do not pay the most taxes, they pay ALL the taxes:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101264757

In the USA top 20% pays 94% of income taxes.
In the USA top 40% pays 106.2% of income taxes.


In Australia the numbers are more [insert adjective here]

There is a chart here showing the top 20% pays roughly 60% of all taxes in Australia.
http://www.taxreview.treasury.gov.au/content/Paper.aspx?doc=html/publications/papers/report/section_3-03.htm

Which is discussed in more detail here: http://cis.org.au/images/stories/policy-monographs/pm-63.pdf

open24hours posted:

Does anyone seriously have a problem with the rich paying most, or even all, tax? Seems pretty reasonable to me, it's not like anyone is forcing them to remain rich.

Hypation posted:

I don't have a problem with that.

urseus posted:

Is there a country around the world currently (or historically) that is similar to how you would ideally want Australia to be? Socially and culturally etc.

Hypation posted:

Norway.

Hypation posted:

As an investment banker, adjunct lecturer in accounting and finance, fellow of FINSIA and all-round financial whiz/nice guy; I did want to ask one question: WTF do you mean by this?

Hypation posted:

The point I am making is that those cases are not representative. I gave the typical reason why some people get paid more than others - more skill, harder work, etc. You think that doctors and plumbers get paid more than garbologists or architects more than builders' labourers because of nepotism then go for it.

link above posted:

AU$38,241 - AU$87,498

link just above posted:

$42,000 P/A - $58,000 P/A

Cartoon posted:

*snip*

When you first plopped your clown shoes into AusPol I checked your rap sheet and was utterly unsurprised to learn that you were a possible IWC rereg. The same disingenuity and obvious C/P trolling was his (on a bad day) meat and drink. The name and avatar were uninspired but IWC had also twigged that he needed to do better at his cover. Despite XyloJW's assurances I remain unconvinced (VPNs and proxies (etc)).

Cartoon posted:

'Garbologists' get

quote:

Christopher Pyne's pledge sparks fears public schools will be ignored

Date
May 31, 2014

64 reading now

Alexandra Smith
Education Editor

View more articles from Alexandra Smith


-



Education Minister Christopher Pyne has told Christian school leaders that his government has an ''emotional commitment'' to private schools, prompting fears the Abbott government will abandon public schools.

Speaking at a Christian Schools Australia national policy dinner in Canberra this week, Mr Pyne assured the school leaders he did not want to sever long-held ties with Christian and independent schools.

''I want to have a direct relationship with the non-government sector, as I believe we have had since 1963,'' Mr Pyne said. ''Having talked to the Prime Minister about this matter many times, it is his view that we have a particular responsibility for non-government schooling that we don't have for [state] government schooling.''

Mr Pyne assured the Christian schools he could not ''see those circumstances changing''.

Mr Pyne made the comments after fears were raised by the National Commission of Audit, which recommended funding and control of the non-government school sector should be handed to the states.

Commonwealth funding for state and independent schools will be provided under the Gonski formula designed to give funding to schools most in need. The government has committed to four years of ''Gonski'' funding, but there are fears independent schools would be favoured over state schools in a new deal for 2018 onwards.

Mr Pyne's comments follow his statements - quickly quashed by the Prime Minister - that higher education fees for university students would still need to be paid even if the student died.

''The emotional commitment within the federal government is to continue to have a direct relationship with the non-government schools sector. I think the states and territories would prefer that as well,'' Mr Pyne said.

The president of the NSW Secondary Principals' Council, Lila Mularczyk, warned that Mr Pyne's comments signalled a commitment to directly fund non-government schools at the expense of public schools.

''Students most in need of additional learning support have seen Minister Pyne turn his back on them again,'' Ms Mularczyk said.

''We cannot rest easy when the educational gaps between schools, and often schooling systems, are entrenched and will grow because of a dismissive, dangerous budget and an Education Minister who openly claims to be emotionally driven in maintaining a relationship with the non-government sector.''

The Australian Education Union deputy federal president, Correna Haythorpe, said Mr Pyne's ''divisive view of schools'' was contrary to the needs-based principles of the Gonski funding model. Ms Haythorpe said federal funding of government schools was crucial to the quality and equity of the schools system.

''Federal governments have funded government schools for over 40 years, recognising the need to support state governments who do not have the same revenue base,'' Ms Haythorpe said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-polit...l#ixzz33Fh3ZHys

Endman posted:

It's tempting to start my new career in the exciting world of garbage disposal with that salary.

Lid posted:

Privatise the schools.

quote:

it is his view that we have a particular responsibility for non-government schooling that we don't have for [state] government schooling.'

quote:

it is his view that we have a particular responsibility for non-government schooling that we don't have for [state] government schooling.

CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:

loving hell. They are not even trying to hide it any more.

quote:

Joe Hockey's change of mind not proof of hypocrisy

There’s just so much to love about the Nine News report on the student protests against higher education fees from 1987 that suddenly re-emerged this week. Peter Harvey, for example, with his celebrated, impossibly low, authoritative tones coming (as they almost always did) from Canberra. His awful brown suit, matched only by the dated fashion of the student protesters he was covering. But the star turn comes undoubtedly from a young Joe Hockey, pledging to “go out onto the streets and to protest … in our campaign for free education”.
Touche. As archival footage goes, it’s a good get. But here’s the question: beyond the obvious entertainment value, why should we care about this?
The implicit charge – frequently made explicit by an array of internet warriors – is one of hypocrisy. There’s socialist Joe the student unionist who thought deregulating tertiary fees was “suicidal for student welfare”, and there’s cigar-smoking Joe the Liberal heavyweight who now presides over such homicidal policy because it doesn’t affect him.
We’re being asked to conclude that one of them is disingenuous or has sold out to the other. What we’re not being asked to conclude is that someone’s position might change over the course of 27 years. Or that the world might have changed sufficiently in that time to make someone feel a change in position is justified. In short, we’re being asked to hold Hockey to an inhuman standard that demands he adopt one position on all things throughout his life irrespective of circumstance.
On that score Labor’s Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh might empathise. He has spent a good chunk of this week sitting in Parliament watching the Abbott government throw his own prose back in his face.
Leigh, it appears, was once a fan of deregulating university fees in precisely the way Joe Hockey wasn’t. This he committed to print in book form in 2004, a year after he had written an op-ed spruiking co-payments for GP visits much as the Coalition has now proposed. The government seems to think this is some sort of miraculous, decisive gift.
But, again: why should we care? Like Joe Hockey, Andrew Leigh was a student at the time. Is it possible that a decade of exposure to new ideas, experiences and information might have led him to change his view? It’s a substance-free, opportunistic way of arguing that the Abbott government has chosen here, and now that the Hockey-as-free-education-warrior vision has emerged, we can expect the Labor opposition to return the favour. If they do, it will be equally opportunistic and substance-free.
Neither Leigh’s nor Hockey’s volte-faces are scandalous. In fact they both sit comfortably with the broader worldviews they have most recently expressed. Leigh writes incisively about inequality and the stubbornness of privilege in exactly the manner you might expect of someone who has since abandoned ideas like university fee deregulation. Hockey famously spoke about ending the “age of entitlement” even as his party was defending middle-class welfare. You might not like their respective positions, but there is little to indicate they are insincerely held.
The idea that they should be embarrassed to have once thought differently, or that this exposes them as partisan hypocrites, merely exposes our political culture as one of confected warfare, where changes of heart are automatic evidence of dishonesty rather than of reflection. We should instead be demanding that our representatives change their views over time. We should expect them to be open to persuasion. And it follows they should have the freedom to be persuaded without attracting some kind of summary judgment for it.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t crass hypocrisy and opportunism in politics. Of course there is. It’s possible we saw an example of it this week when Martin Hamilton-Smith, a Liberal stalwart and former party leader, stunningly joined the South Australian Labor government with no prior warning and scant explanation.
It’s possible we saw it in the previous federal Labor government on asylum seekers when it first insisted boat arrivals had nothing to do with domestic policy, then shifted dramatically to a policy not merely of offshore processing, but offshore resettlement.
And it’s also possible we’ve seen it for years in Tony Abbott’s position on climate change policy, where, as Malcolm Turnbull has so famously put it, he “in the space of a few months held every possible position on the issue, each one contradicting the position he expressed earlier”.
Yes, we should be awake to backflips of convenience. Certainly, we should be holding politicians to account for them, particularly where the political calculations are so short-term and transparent. But not all changes of mind are equal. Not all are poll-inspired and politically cynical. What we need is the capacity to distinguish between the two.
A public culture that rushes to judgments of hypocrisy, that fails this test of discernment, is an impoverished one destined for an endless cycle of adolescent sparring that masquerades as a policy debate. It’s a kind of gotcha politics that is more entertaining than edifying. Politicians should be allowed to be people whose positions swing and evolve. If we have inhuman demands of them, we might just find that inhuman brutes, impervious to thought and reflection, are the only ones capable of meeting our requirements.

d3rt posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1ggMgjYev4

Amethyst posted:

d3rt posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1ggMgjYev4

Captain Pissweak posted:

Was about to come here and post this.

Ragingsheep posted:

That's awesome.

Ragingsheep posted:

That's awesome.

Mithranderp posted:

For some reason the "schoolboy Pyne" just disturbs the hell out of me.

quote:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott took his budget sales pitch to a prominent Sydney heart research institute on Saturday to extoll the virtues of a $20 billion research fund established in the budget.

Mr Abbott, visiting the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney's east, described the research fund, which draws almost all its funding from the proposed controversial $7 GP co-payment, as "world leading" and a "significant part of this budget".

When asked about the prospect of passing the co-payment through a hostile Senate, Mr Abbott said he expected budget measures to "gain a passage" regardless of whether they are contentious.

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"Governments get their budgets through," Mr Abbott said.

"Sometimes there might be a little bit of refinement here, a little refinement there, but governments get their budgets through."

Health minister Peter Dutton, who was accompanying the Prime Minister on a tour of the heart research clinic, said the fund delivers an extra $1 billion to be spent on medical research each year.

Mr Dutton would not be drawn on whether the $7 co-payment would be dumped if the government could not find Senate crossbench support for the reform, and instead blamed Labor for ensuring Medicare would become unsustainable.

"If the expenses continue to mount in what we spend on Medicare then Medicare will topple over, and Labor has no account at all as to how they are going to provide for Medicare going foward," he said.

d3rt posted:

Their previous Wrecking Ball video is great too.

Lid posted:

Governments budgets pass! Its what happens!

Stage 1: Denial.