T-1000 posted:

No matter how bad politics may get, at least there's always tim-tam cheesecake. This one hasn't been garnished yet because we aren't eating it for a few days; imagine it sprinkled in crumbled tim-tams.

Shout out to Birdstrike for the recipe.

Gough Suppressant posted:

21% of CSIRO staff gone by June?

sidviscous posted:

Thanking you kindly.. My parents are getting this for christmas dessert this year, and if they want pudding they're getting told to love it or leave it.

Mad Katter posted:

This looks nice. I spent tonight preparing Tim Tam tarts for dessert tomorrow night. Will post pics then.

Anidav posted:

So the government actually allowed Sportsbet to release a debit card.

Anidav posted:

So the government actually allowed Sportsbet to release a debit card.

Tirade posted:

Does anyone still have scoff.gif saved somewhere?

Halo14 posted:

Yeah I tried to find it a while back but no dice.

open24hours posted:

http://www.australianracinggreyhound.com/australian-greyhound-racing/sportsbet-launches-new-cash-card-for-punters/58185

Seems fine, or at least no more predatory than anything else they do.

xPanda posted:

T-1000 posted:

Niiice, if you can post the recipe too that would be super.

Kommando posted:

Chris Bowen spoke on ABC news radio this morning in an interview about the 'barnacles coming off the budget'. He was forceful about the govt needing to abandon the budget and start again. He spoke clearly and started calling the GP Co-payment a GP Tax.

xPanda posted:

Palmersaurus posted:

Obviously he hasn't seen the song yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSSxL6FZLbc

Kommando posted:

Chris Bowen spoke on ABC news radio this morning in an interview about the 'barnacles coming off the budget'. He was forceful about the govt needing to abandon the budget and start again. He spoke clearly and started calling the GP Co-payment a GP Tax.

Gough Suppressant posted:

I'm starting to think that given his handling of pressure maybe David Johnston might not be the best choice of defence minister given our imminent invasion by assorted oriental hordes.

quote:

Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James said the rise was very disappointing.

“The system for determining Defence pay is still flawed and the under-resourced independent tribunal has again merely accepted the government case — a pay cut in real terms for every Digger.

“We will wait and see if the people represented by unions get a better deal.”

quote:

On Monday, Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith was reported as defending the pay deal, saying that the government faced a budget deficit and defence personnel "never did it for the money anyway".

Neil James, executive director of the Australia Defence Association, said while this was true, "governments shouldn't take advantage of that by unfairly remunerating members of the defence force".

Mr James also accused the government of using the below-inflation defence pay increase as a tactical benchmark to force even lower pay rises for the rest of the public service.

quote:

Yet having said all this, the controversy may not have a big political impact at the next election; at least not on its own. How can this be?

Defence personnel, more than any other sector in the community, are rusted-on Coalition voters. Most are politically and culturally averse to Labor and to its allies such as the trade union movement. It will take a lot to turn them into swinging voters.

Already there has been speculation that Labor will benefit at the next election. The Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence, Gai Brodtmann, MP for Canberra, has produced the numbers and called on Coalition MPs to stand up for ADF members in their electorates. That is good short-term politics. Allan Thomas, the national president of the Australian Peacekeeper and Peacemaker Veterans' Association, hopes that some Coalition MPs will lose their seats over the issue. But Thomas and his association are minor players.

My Australian National University colleague, Professor Ian McAllister, is right to point out that the issue will probably be largely forgotten by the 2016 election. For that not to be the case a lot more than party politics would need to change. Voters make up their minds not just on personal financial self-interest but on wider policy and cultural issues. VC winner Ben Roberts-Smith has already said as much. ADF members generally remain political allies of the Coalition when it comes to the ballot box.

Change will come only if the big and generally pro-Coalition pressure groups, like the RSL, not just "remain very disappointed with the government's decision" (which is actually code for "we are still inside the government's tent") but start campaigning actively and publicly against the Coalition government. That is unlikely to happen.

quote:

Abbott clueless on how to handle US and China

November 25, 2014 Hugh White

The PM is swinging wildly between two poles of regional power, probably mistaking insincerity for clever diplomacy.

For a long time Australia's leaders, including Tony Abbott, have told Australians that "we don't have to choose" between the US and China. But Abbott made a big choice himself last week. He chose to reject stern warnings from Barak Obama not to get too close to China. He chose instead to embrace President Xi's Jinping's vision of Asia's future under Chinese leadership, and Australia's place in it. Obama's warning came in his major speech in Brisbane during the G20. The headlines were grabbed by the remarkably direct attack he launched on Abbott's climate change policy. But much more of the speech was devoted to an even more remarkable attack on China's ambitions for regional leadership, and a stark warning about the choice that Australia and other regional countries face as we decide how to respond to it. "So the question that we face is, which of these futures will define the Asia Pacific in the century to come?" Obama said. "Do we move towards further integration, more justice, more peace? Or do we move towards disorder and conflict? Those are our choices - conflict or co-operation? Oppression or liberty?"

He left his listeners in no doubt at all which choice was which. He implied that the US offers co-operation and liberty, while China offers conflict and oppression. Overall the speech was by far the strongest attack Obama has ever made on China's claims to a bigger say in Asian affairs. Despite his own climate deal with Xi at APEC, this was probably the most anti-Chinese speech delivered by any American President since Nixon opened relations with Beijing in 1972. By speaking here in Australia on the eve of President Xi's address to Parliament, there can be no doubt that Obama's purpose was to warn Tony Abbott against accepting Beijing's vision of a peaceful and harmonious Asian future under Chinese leadership in return for a free trade agreement. Interestingly, British PM David Cameron issued exactly the same warning when he spoke to our parliament just the day before Obama's address.

But Abbott ignored both of them. Instead he enthused over President Xi's speech to Parliament, which was in its way every bit as remarkable as Obama's speech in Brisbane, and much more effective. Obama had overshadowed his message and infuriated his primary target by his riff on climate change which, important though it is, was clearly tangential to the main purpose of his speech. President Xi's speech, by contrast, was a model of disciplined statecraft. It conveyed two simple messages - strength and reassurance. Xi calmly and confidently asserted that China would be "the big guy in the room" in Asia in future. And he offered warm assurances that Australia could look forward to a safe and prosperous future under China's regional leadership - as long as "we respect each other's core interests and major concerns". Abbott took all this on trust. He spoke of that trust at the State Dinner for Xi after his speech. He praised Xi for his commitment to democracy and a rule-based international order. And in what sounded like a direct repudiation of Obama's dark warnings, Abbott went so far as to say that "when I listened to the President today, some of the shadows over our region and over our world lifted and the sun did indeed shine brightly". This is, by any standards, a remarkable thing for Tony Abbott to say. Even his warmest friends accept that Xi's commitment to democracy stops far short of tolerating any challenge to the power of the Communist Party, and his commitment to a rules-based international order is conditional on China playing a leading role in setting the rules.

All this suggests that last week Tony Abbott went a long way towards endorsing China's ambition to take over from the US as the leading power in Asia. In a telling sign, Andrew Robb has since said that Australia will join China's new Infrastructure bank, which we refused to join last month at Washington's request precisely because it enhanced China's regional leadership ambitions. Yes, this is the same Tony Abbott who has, until now, built his political career on an ideology rigorously opposed to everything Xi stands for, and who has built his foreign policy on the most fervent support for the US and Japan in resisting China's claims to regional leadership. So why did he do it? The obvious answer is the free trade agreement, but can Australia's geopolitical alignment really be brought so cheaply? For all the hoopla, the agreement is unlikely to do more for Australia's economy overall than the equally-hyped US free trade agreement has done - and that is, according to the government's Productivity Commission, exactly nothing. The government estimates the effect of a free trade agreement with Chinais a possible GDP increase of 0.039 per cent a year, which is so near to nothing that it doesn't matter.

Another answer is that he is just hopping mad with Obama over his climate change remarks, and has chosen to ignore Obama's warnings about China and cosy up to Xi just to spite him. But surely he couldn't be that petty.

So perhaps the best explanation is also the simplest. Abbott does not know what he is doing. Despite the speeches he has heard over the past 10 days, he underestimates how stark the rivalry between America and China has become, and he overestimates Australia's ability to stand above it.

He probably believes that what he said last week will soon be forgotten, and he can return to his alignment with the US and Japan against China whenever he likes, with the free trade deal in his pocket. He perhaps mistakes such patent insincerity for clever diplomacy. He thinks he has struck a careful and clever balance between China and the US, allowing Australia to maintain a close alliance with one while expanding trade with the other. In fact he is swinging helplessly between the two poles of regional power, siding with the US one day and China the next, without any clear conception of where we want to end up. In the end we cannot afford to side with either of them. Obama's speech showed that he has no answer to China's ambitions except the uncompromising but underpowered resistance embodied in the Pivot – and we know that isn't working. On the other hand Xi showed that China's aim is clearly to exclude the US from Asia entirely, and that would not work for us either. The only way to protect Australia's immense interests in the Asian power struggle that came to our shores last week is to think for ourselves about what outcome suits us best, and to act as best we can to promote it. Whether we try to do that or not is the real choice we face.

Hugh White is a Fairfax columnist and professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.

quote:

Public servant needed to stand between Eric Abetz and 160,000 colleagues

November 11, 2014 Phillip Thomson Public Service Reporter at The Canberra Times.

Talk about being the meat in the sandwich. Months into heated wage negotiations with 160,000 federal public servants, the government has advertised a job for a bureaucrat to walk into the industrial relations firestorm. The Australian Public Service Commission has an executive level 2 position available for someone to develop and implement workplace relations policies affecting enterprise bargaining, conditions and pay across the bureaucracy. Based at the commission's office in Woden, the job, which pays $117,835 to $132,471 a year, involves leading the small workplace relations group and "high-level" liaising with government employers and public sector unions.

The successful candidate will provide advice, analysis and policy recommendations "on workplace relations developments and issues relevant to the Australian government employment sector, to APSC executive, government and Australian government employers". "The successful candidate with have demonstrated leadership, policy development, stakeholder and relationship management expertise and experience," the advertisement said.

The main union representing public servants, the Community and Public Sector Union, has told members to prepare for an industrial action campaign that will not be "short and sharp". Instead many of the 117 agreements are only expected to finish after a drawn-out campaign of attrition, which will see the Employment Minister and Prime Minister Tony Abbott's spokesman on the bureaucracy, Eric Abetz, staring down public servants.

katlington posted:

Just curious, am I the only auspol poster who actually lives in rural australia? Exurbs dont count.

Anidav posted:

Labor will yell, but they're too cautious to be talking about alternatives.

katlington posted:

Just curious, am I the only auspol poster who actually lives in rural australia? Exurbs dont count.


e: lol david johnstons sincere regrets. Is there any memeber of the lnp not a human sized piece of poo poo? (no)

quote:

Indigenous stories accurately tell of sea level rises, land mass reductions over 10,000 years, research suggests

By Johannah McOwan Updated about an hour ag oWed 26 Nov 2014, 11:01am

Indigenous stories offer highly accurate accounts of events that occurred over 10,000 years ago, including known changes in sea levels and the disappearance of land mass, research shows. Associate Professor Nick Reid from the University of New England has been comparing Indigenous stories from across Australia with the scientific chronology of sea level rises over the past 20,000 years. He said Indigenous oral traditions had accurately documented known changes in sea levels and the disappearance of land mass. "People point to Cairns rainforests, and local Aboriginal people say 'Oh, well, actually a long time ago this wasn't rainforest, it was open woodland'," he said. "There are people who have done pollen analysis in recent years and it turns out that rainforest is only 7,500 years old and prior to that it was indeed open woodland. "There are also stories about mega fauna and about comets."

Professor Reid said it demonstrated the continuity of culture of Indigenous Australians and could have an impact on Native Title claims. The stories have survived through oral transmission for over 10,000 years. "If people were telling them 10,000 years ago and they're continuing to tell them today, then that's real evidence of continuity of culture," Professor Reid said. "One of the requirements under Native Title is to establish continuity of culture and when you have transmission of the same story, we might be talking about across 500 generations, that's a remarkable thing."

"You can only do that if a culture is intact."

Professor Reid said he would now look to expand the research to examine other events that scientists know occurred thousands of years ago.