Splode posted:

Yeah Brittany and I are in a weird race between me finishing my degree and us running out of money.

We're going to lose.

gently caress Sydney.

Negligent posted:

its okay if you just think he's a human being but don't actually call him that to his face, right drugs

starkebn posted:

I actually think Negligent is right by saying that just because someone is gay, they don't have to be vocal supporter of marriage equality. The conversation is about a human rights commissioner though, so I think it falls in his portfolio.

nockturne posted:

I haven't been keeping up with the Auspol thread lately so forgive me if this has been mentioned but...

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/06/08/government-stands-citizenship-changes

Amanda Vanstone thinks this goes too far. Amanda Vanstone is the good guy. Amanda loving Vanstone.

My head just exploded.

bowmore posted:

Democracy Auspol Mafia, a game for 13 players is now open for signups.

Trapezium Dave posted:

It's not too surprising, that's pretty much how I would have expected a Liberal cabinet minister from a decade or two to react for pretty much the reasons she gives (libertarian streak with a strong respect for cabinet procedures). There did use to be more to the Liberal party ethos than acting like a cross between Thatcher and a Captain Planet villain, no matter how hard Abbott tries to prove otherwise.

bowmore posted:

I'll just bump this once

need 10 more btw

Goffer posted:

She wrote an article about it here: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/lazy-sneaky-or-both-what-were-you-thinking-prime-minister-20150607-ghho0v

She's been hanging around the lefty lovies at the Age too long, her brain is going to mush.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

The guardian on the yarra.

Cleretic posted:

Yeah, I think both of the big two parties have suffered some pretty bad drift in recent years, to the point where neither of them are really catering to Real Australians.

I said it before a long time ago, but I still think genuine conservative voters are the most screwed out of things here. Left-wingers disenfranchised by what Labor does can turn to the Greens or some of the more focused microparties (whether they do is another question), but someone who genuinely believes in conservative economic and social policies is kind of screwed, since the Liberals are scheming, self-serving bastards, and Labor may have drifted to the right but not in a way that has actual right-wing policies. Their only real hope are the conservative microparties, but those seem to have a pretty high rate of either imploding between election cycles or being up to extremely shady poo poo.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Awww, poor Tony didn't get to award any knighthoods today.

open24hours posted:

This problem isn't limited to any particular type of voter. The current system is designed to benefit politicians and give them a great deal of freedom to impose their 'vision' on the country. It's a bad system for anyone who actually wants to know what they're voting for instead of blindly trusting someone who is far more interested in keeping their job than doing anything helpful.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

The guardian on the yarra.

quote:

Could Budj Bim in western Victoria be Australia's 20th World Heritage site?
Kitty Wallaby was a woman who left an impression.

My grandfather, a boy in the late 1800s, often came across her camped regally on the bank of the Fitzroy River below his family's farmhouse near a place called Tyrendarra on the windswept south-west coast of Victoria.

He and his brothers tried to sneak up on her with intention to tease, for she smoked a clay pipe. They'd never seen a woman smoking a pipe. She always heard their approach and buried her pipe in the ashes of her campfire.

Kitty Wallaby was a woman who left an impression.

My grandfather, a boy in the late 1800s, often came across her camped regally on the bank of the Fitzroy River below his family's farmhouse near a place called Tyrendarra on the windswept south-west coast of Victoria.

He and his brothers tried to sneak up on her with intention to tease, for she smoked a clay pipe. They'd never seen a woman smoking a pipe. She always heard their approach and buried her pipe in the ashes of her campfire.

"This is my country, you know," she once told my grandfather. He was affronted and told her his family owned the land. He'd been born there.

"No," she insisted. "It's my country, but you're welcome to stay."

My grandfather never forgot it, chuckling at the memory into old age.

He should have listened harder.

Kitty Wallaby's life linked the Dreamtime with what became, for her and her people, a much grimmer modern Australia.

Her people, the Gunditjmara, had built on their country something unique: sprawling villages of stone houses and an aquaculture system that pre-dated Egypt's pyramids by at least 4000 years and even Stonehenge by 1400 years.

And though in her late years she followed the seasons along a river in search of food, her people had never needed to be nomadic.

Kitty Wallaby could not have imagined it, but the entire world may yet recognise the world she had lost.

The Commonwealth government is currently studying a proposal backed by the Victorian government to begin the process of recognising Kitty's country – Budj Bim – for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The proposal for such a status follows years of archaeological work, painstaking documentation and plain hard work by the traditional owners, the Guntitj Mirring Aboriginal Corporation, that identifies the area as a marvel of prehistoric engineering: the site of an Aboriginal settlement so large as to be almost suburban, its houses constructed of stone walls, and an ingenious system, at least 6600 years old, of trapping eels and fish.

It would be the 20th place of such international significance to be recognised in Australia, along with such jewels as the Great Barrier Reef, ancient rainforests, Kakadu, the Tasmanian wilderness, convict settlements, marine wonderlands, the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building.

Kitty's Gunditjmara people always called their country Budj Bim.

The name means "little (or high) head", and refers to the old volcano near Macarthur that is known as Mt Eccles. Seen from a distance, the mountain rears above the forest as if it were the forehead of a man.

The Budj Bim landscape, however, is vastly more than a volcano.

When it erupted some 30,000 years ago, Budj Bim spewed out a river of molten lava that flowed west before turning south to the coast, continuing for 15 kilometres into what now are the waters of Portland Bay between Port Fairy and Portland.

As it cooled, forming a landscape of rough stony rises, the lava flow dammed water from the north, forming Lake Condah, and released a stream known as Darlots Creek, which joins the Fitzroy River at Tyrendarra before flowing into the sea.

It is up these waterways that millions of eels migrate each year.

Some thousands of years ago, the Gunditjmara engineered an ingenious system of using stones from the lava field to form a system of weirs that trapped eels and other fish, providing them with a year-round supply of fresh food, even in drought. The eels were smoked in hollow trees. There was enough for trading with other indigenous peoples. The Gunditjmara became settlers, and defended their rocky citadel fiercely.

Kitty Wallaby was born Gunditjmara.

She suffered, however, the misfortune of being born in 1840, just as white squatters with sheep and guns began to spread across the edges of her country.

Her journey from birth to womanhood and marriage to a fellow named Billy Wallaby, born in 1834, took place in the shadow of a war. The Gunditjmara took squatters' sheep and the squatters and troopers took Gunditjmara land and lives.

Kitty and Billy lived through it all, watching their people being destroyed, until, starving, the remnants of the Gunditjamara were swept into a mission station set up at Lake Condah. They were on their own land, but it was no longer theirs and they were treated as children, the old ways and language forbidden, handed rations only if they "behaved".

Kitty and Billy Wallaby rebelled and joined others who shifted regularly to a nearby camp known as Dunmore, which was not sanctioned.

Billy and Kitty Wallaby, fumed the mission boss, the Rev Heinrich Stahle, in 1899, "have always been at the bottom of the mischief with regards to the blacks who made for Dunmore whenever they became unruly on the station".

Undeterred, Kitty regularly struck out on her own, catching her own fish down the river. She outlived Billy by 10 years and died, aged 70, in 1910, leaving only her words: "This is my country".

And now, it could become Australia's 20th World Heritage site. She'd never believe it.

Bloomberg posted:

China Smog War Seen Dooming Coal on ‘Cheap But Dirty’ Purge

China’s battle against pollution is threatening the recovery of coal prices from the lowest level in almost nine years.
Installations of new coal-fired power capacity in the world’s biggest polluter are set to halve as “cheap but dirty” plants get eliminated, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
...
China is turning to alternative energy sources as it races to meet emissions targets and eradicate the smog that’s enveloped cities and become a major cause of social unrest.

Guardian Au posted:

Victoria proposes forcing suspected radicalised teenagers into programs
Attorney general Martin Pakula confirms he is considering curfews, including an internet ban, for teenagers deemed to have been radicalised

Victoria police are seeking powers to force those they identify as potential terrorists into deradicalisation programs, restrict who they associate with, and ban them from using the internet under a proposal before the state government.

The Victorian attorney general, Martin Pakula, confirmed on Monday that under the proposal, curfews would be imposed on those teenagers deemed to be radicalised, regardless of whether they were planning to join conflict overseas or carry out a terrorist attack.

“At this stage it’s only a proposal from Victoria police being considered,” Pakula told Radio 3AW.

“It’s really about trying to get to young people before they become unduly radicalised and trying to engage them in conduct that would prevent their radicalisation. We know a lot of young people are being radicalised over the internet, it’s also known some community-based programs and interventions can help.”

In February, a foreign policy and international relations scholar and former member of the US national security council, Hillary Mann Leverett, told CNN that Islamic State issued about 90,000 social media messages every day as part of its propaganda campaign.

These messages are seen as key to the organisation’s recruitment efforts. In March it was revealed that 18-year-old Jake Bilardi, from the northern Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn, had used internet forums to gather information before joining the Middle East conflict, where he was reportedly killed.

In April, two Victorian teenagers were charged over their alleged involvement in a plan to carry out an attack during Anzac Day commemorations.

Pakula acknowledged that trying to restrict people from accessing these messages through banning them from the internet and restricting who they associated with would be a significant legislative move.

An independent review of the proposal would occur, he said.

“The government understands that in a free society, it’s quite a move to restrict who people associate with, and that’s why there needs to be an independent discussion,” he said.

“You should be very, very reluctant to get to a situation where people’s rights are removed by ministerial fear. That’s why we have an independent judiciary to make these determinations, and it’s an important check and balance and safeguard to peoples’ basic rights and freedoms.”

A spokeswoman from Victoria police declined to comment, saying “Victoria police do not comment on proposed legislation.”

Jonah Galtberg posted:

Abbott when the polls fell

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Sun Herald, for all your white powder news.

hawaiian_robot posted:

Hockey, his waist wide

hooman posted:

Certainly puts all those loving horrible "Aboriginal Memes" pages into perspective.

Civilisation runs for 50,000 years
Builds stone towns and invents aquaculture while England still trying to figure out "farming".

Nibbles! posted:

Does this sorta thing make it into schools these days? Certainly didn't when I went through.

Even more impressive considering the isolation and lack of domestically available animals.

Nibbles! posted:

Even more impressive considering the isolation and lack of domestically available animals.

Cleretic posted:

Shin Megami Tensei taught me more about aboriginal culture than I learned from school at all past about year four.