Murodese posted:

Gough Suppressant posted:

How many wars has Japan gone and picked resulting in mass displacement recently?

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

The same ones we did doofus.

http://journal.unair.ac.id/filerPDF/global6%20mt.pdf

Freudian Slip posted:

Yeah - we know now from the latest FOI request that when Hockey/Shepherd/Dutton were all talking about on average Australians see a GP 11 times a year they were lying. They were quoting the average number of times an aged pensioner sees a GP a year.

They are dishonest and stupid as it left anyone who studies this area scratching out heads going

quote:

Audit chief Tony Shepherd pushed traffic forecasts on Lane Cove Tunnel
August 12, 2014 - 8:25PM
Jacob Saulwick
Transport Reporter


Tony Shepherd, one of the key business advisers to the Abbott and Baird governments, was one of a group of ''big wigs'' trying to drive up traffic forecasts on the ill-fated Lane Cove Tunnel project, the Supreme Court has heard.

Mr Shepherd now chairs the WestConnex Delivery Authority, the organisation in charge of building the biggest motorway project in the country's history, and was the head of the Prime Minister's National Commission of Audit.

But in a former role as an executive at Transfield Holdings, Mr Shepherd ran the consortium that won the right in 2003 to build the Lane Cove Tunnel – a project now the subject of a $144 million legal battle between one of its investors and traffic forecasters.

According to documents read into court by counsel for AMP, the manager of two funds that lost money on the project, Mr Shepherd was one of several executives on the project in late 2002 trying to make the traffic figures more optimistic.

''I feel another loss coming on,'' Mr Shepherd was quoted as writing to a colleague in late 2002, just months after Transfield had lost a separate bid to win the rights to build the M7 motorway through western Sydney.

According to AMP, which is suing forecasters Parsons Brinckerhoff and Booz Allen Hamilton for $144 million, one of the ways Mr Shepherd's consortium avoided ''another loss'' was by inflating the number of motorists they said would drive through the tunnel.

In notes of a meeting she took with ''big wigs'' working on the consortium, one of the forecasters for Parsons Brinckerhoff, Gillian Akers, recorded the pressure they were applying to ''pump up the base'' forecasts for the tunnel.

Ms Akers recorded Ray Wilson, working for construction company Thiess, as saying they needed to ''get the traffic high then get the banks to build it''.

Mr Shepherd, meanwhile, was ''very upset by lack of growth 2006-2011'' and wanted to ''get to the bottom of it'', according to Ms Akers' notes.

''What else can we do to the network to get more traffic on the network into the tunnel?'' AMP's counsel Tony Bannon quoted the meeting notes as saying.

The consortium had an incentive to push up traffic forecasts for the Lane Cove Tunnel to lure investors, and also to be able to promise a large payment to the state government.

The promise of this payment would help the consortium win the bid to build the tunnel, which opened in 2007 with traffic figures drastically below forecast.

In another email quoted in front of Supreme Court Judge Michael Pembroke on Tuesday, Mr Shepherd wrote to consortium members that ''at a minimum'' they should try to sell investors on the basis of the upside, or more optimistic, forecasts.

Ms Akers and Parsons Brinckerhoff did manage to increase the traffic forecasts, despite several warnings by another employee, Raymond Golzar.

One of the ways they did so was by discarding modelling they had earlier performed for periods out of peak hour.

Instead, Parsons Brinckerhoff used only modelling results for the morning and afternoon peak hours, and applied an ''expansion factor'' to project how many cars would use the road in off-peak periods.

But according to a file note of a conversation read by Mr Bannon, when an AMP executive asked Ms Akers about modelling off-peak times, he was told the ''middle of the day not modelled''.

Parsons Brinckerhoff received a $333,000 success fee for working on the project.

ABN Amro, the investment bank working on the project, and Transfield sold their investments in the Lane Cove Tunnel before it opened. The tunnel entered receivership in 2010 and was bought out by Transurban.

The trial continues.

Gough Suppressant posted:

You are seriously going to compare the role of Japan to that of the US, UK and Australia?

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

Yes, they were part of the coalition of the willing and their presence helped legitimize the war. And regardless of that we take refugees from Sudan or kosher and Iran and Sri Lanka.

I realize we have a shoddy and often heartless approach but I don't understand why our imperfect policies are held as black stains against the nation's soul while Japans openly xenophobic and ethnocentric approach is excused

quote:

In Japan, the year 2012 saw the highest number of asylum applications to date (2,545), with progress made in the handling of asylum cases. For instance, alternatives to detention are being arranged for asylum-seekers. The Government has also reiterated its commitment to continue offering resettlement places after the current pilot phase of the resettlement programme ends in 2014.

Soag posted:

why would you try and "reform" a religion why not just fucken quit religion we live in the 21 st century and mobile phones and space ships not pagan times

you dont need to belive in the big floating YHWH up in the sky these days

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

How many refugees has Japan taken in recently?

We are often told that Australia's policies on boat people makes us a racist pariah in Asia, a bit hard to swallow when you look at what Japan or Thailand does. A western country with the wealth and demographics of Japan would be regarded as an ethnocentric relic yet few people level this at Japan. Why?

Fruity Gordo posted:

Not mine Reform Judaism owns

Soag posted:

why would you try and "reform" a religion why not just fucken quit religion we live in the 21 st century and mobile phones and space ships not pagan times

you dont need to belive in the big floating YHWH up in the sky these days

adamantium|wang posted:

Lizard Combatant posted:

We critique Australia first and with the most scrutiny because we are Australians and it's our loving job as citizens. Arguing relative privation or tu quoque is lazy at best and at worst, wilfully obfuscating.

BlitzkriegOfColour posted:

Maybe you ought to take a second to consider that for every 50 Western-born Moslems who grow up to become radical, there are 5000 who grow up to become atheists (whether they declare that publicly or not) but who then remain silent on the matter. For every 5 Western Moslems who were barracking for ISIS to genocide the Yazidis, there are were 5,000000 who were hoping the Yazidis survived. All Moslems in the West face systemic and overt prejudice, but their Western experience dilutes the amount of belief in god in their community, and that can only be a good thing, because emigrant culture does eventually, in some ways, affect the culture of their place of origin.

quote:

And for gently caress's sake, stop treating Islamic cultures as though they were monolithic. Not even Arabic cultures are monolithic.

Murodese posted:

IWC willfully obfuscating an argument? Well I loving never

Nibbles! posted:

Who defends Japan's immigration policies?

Nibbles! posted:

Who defends Japan's immigration policies?

Haters Objector posted:

*Religion can sometimes be cool and lead to positive social benefit, and sometimes it does not.

Soag posted:

but net social bad

Murodese posted:

Moreover, who defends anything related to Japan? The country made possession of child pornography illegal this year (2014). With a one year grace period. Also has sky-high rates of sexual assault.

Nibbles! posted:

Who defends Japan's immigration policies?

Laserface posted:

I have been told on a few occasions that China is stupidly racist also, especially towards Indians.

rudatron posted:

Ethnic fascism is the same wherever you go, if it's not suppressed then you get a rerun of poo poo like yugoslavia.

BlitzkriegOfColour posted:

Japan sent construction and engineer corps. They didn't do any actual killing. They didn't even have weapons on them. Their constitution specifically prohibits them from engaging in foreign wars.

When Australia has such an upright and noble constitution, then we can claim the moral high ground.

Haters Objector posted:

*Don't engage IWC
*Religion can sometimes be cool and lead to positive social benefit, and sometimes it does not.
*Australia is a worse international citizen than Japan
*Death Is Certain
*Fart

Dubs posted:

Watch us Newcastle retards re-elect LNP, because jobs.

Endman posted:

Who the gently caress says "tu quoque" seriously in an internet argument.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Pretentious wankers.