Laserface posted:

What possible reason do the Australian Measurement Institute have for accessing the data?

I mean a lot of those groups dont have a good reason either, but this one stuck out the most.

open24hours posted:

Using incorrect weights and measures for trade is a serious crime.

Recoome posted:

They want to see the average Australian dong length (through CLICK HERE FOR 5 STEPS TO INCREASE DICK LENGTH)

quote:

Clive Palmer's election prospects are in freefall alongside his slumping nickel business, according to experienced political pundits.

ABC election guru Antony Green believes the Palmer United Party's vote at the next federal election will all but "disappear" while minor parties powerbroker Glenn Druery said PUP would currently attract no more than 2 per cent of the primary vote, with its only chance of success a single Senate seat in either Queensland or Western Australia.

Clive Palmer's political future remains unclear.
Clive Palmer's political future remains unclear. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Mr Green said the strife at Mr Palmer's Townsville-based Queensland Nickel refinery, which was placed in administration on Monday after sacking 237 workers on Friday, has been the biggest blow so far to the shrinking PUP.

The high point for the party was taking nearly 10 per cent of the primary Senate vote in Queensland at the 2013 election and more than 12 per cent in the WA rerun in 2014 – both after big-spending campaigns backed by Mr Palmer's business interests.

"I would guess that that vote has just disappeared," said Mr Green.

Happier times: Clive Palmer with Ricky Muir and senators from his party who were elected in 2013.
Happier times: Clive Palmer with Ricky Muir and senators from his party who were elected in 2013. Photo: Rob Homer
"The combination of his business problems and his inability to hold on to senators [Jacqui Lambie and Glen Lazarus, who both defected from PUP] suggests the party is a one-hit wonder.

"The biggest damage has been from the business side of things. The company has gone belly up but he has been making all these donations from the company to PUP."

Queensland Nickel registered a donation of $290,000 to PUP on December 31 and gave $15.2 million and $5.9 million in the 2013-14 and 2014-15 financial years, respectively.

In the months after the 2013 Coalition election win, Mr Palmer was perhaps the most powerful political figure in Australia after then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, with his bloc of three crossbench votes critical to the passage of any government bill opposed by Labor and the Greens.

But Mr Green said Mr Palmer was very unlikely to even retain his own seat of Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast if he stands again and the party's only chance of success would be if the PUP leader ran for a Senate seat in Queensland.

In August, Fairfax Media revealed Mr Palmer was weighing up a switch to the Senate after moving to lock in a powerful preference swap deal with crossbenchers David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democratic Party and Family First's Bob Day.

Mr Druery, the so-called "preference whisperer", said recent byelections highlighted the waning appeal of PUP.

The party pulled a paltry 0.5 per cent of the primary vote in North Sydney and its vote more than halved to just 3.1 per cent in the WA seat of Canning despite having pulled the so-called "donkey vote" position at the top of the ballot paper.

"I don't believe Clive's money will be enough to win him a seat. He will need to be very clever if he is to be successful," Mr Druery said.

A spokesman for Mr Palmer could not be reached. Queensland Nickel, owned wholly by Mr Palmer, was placed into voluntary administration but managing director Clive Mensink, who is Mr Palmer's nephew, said he was confident it would trade its way back to health.

Amid trouble on other business fronts, including a long-running legal dispute with his Chinese partners in an iron ore project in WA, Mr Mensink has called the PUP leader a "hero" for staking $2.5 million of his personal wealth to pay nickel workers before Christmas.

Once regularly referred to as a "billionaire", in January last year Mr Palmer fell out of the Forbes top 50 business rich list. That means his estimated wealth had fallen below $690 million.

Plunging commodity prices further eroded his fortune in 2015 and it was reported in December that he has been forced to sell two private jets while two others he owns sit idle in Brisbane.

Treasurer Scott Morrison on Monday questioned Mr Palmer's handling of the Queensland Nickel issue.

"Clive has a lot to answer for up there," he said.

"Asking the Queensland or even the federal government to bail him out is a bit rich."

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said it didn't matter if the company was Mr Palmer's or Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's. "I want to be reassured that the entitlements are there for the workforce," he said.

Despite expressing concern for the workers involved, he said he did not think it was "automatically" the government's role to bail out uncompetitive businesses.

ScreamingLlama posted:

My turn to post First Dog this time. Thumbnailed for your convenience.

Laserface posted:

What possible reason do the Australian Measurement Institute have for accessing the data?

I mean a lot of those groups dont have a good reason either, but this one stuck out the most.

quote:

Too often the Greens accept science only when it suits them. There is no doubting the science of climate change, for instance: the world is warming, the seas are rising, the glaciers are melting, the weather is getting more extreme. Sceptics, denialists, log rollers and conspiracy theorists must be rejected with scorn and loathing.

But the Greens are far more divided about science when it comes to fluoridation, or, far worse, vaccination; and a large majority are firmly against all forms of genetic engineering, which is di Natale’s current problem.

Genetic engineering is not a new idea; the Incas bred the useless (in human terms) guanacos to produce llamas and alpacas, and turned the poisonous lupin into a nourishing grain. Similar scientific selection has been routine for many generations.

But gene technology, although no more than a logical extension of selective breeding, is considered something different, and with some justification; although we are assured that the human genome is about 60% identical with the genome of a banana, there is something mildly discomforting about the idea of inserting, for instance, the gene of a fish into that of a tomato.

This, the Greens assert, is unnatural; and so it is. But that is just the point. All applied science involves the manipulation of nature: it is about changing things, not leaving them as they are. From the scientific perspective there is no real difference between splicing one gene into another genome and adding carbon to iron to produce steel. If the process improves the product, it is worth doing.

ScreamingLlama posted:

My turn to post First Dog this time. Thumbnailed for your convenience.

quote:

From the scientific perspective there is no real difference between splicing one gene into another genome and adding carbon to iron to produce steel. If the process improves the product, it is worth doing.

quote:

Genetic engineering is not a new idea; the Incas bred the useless (in human terms) guanacos to produce llamas and alpacas, and turned the poisonous lupin into a nourishing grain. Similar scientific selection has been routine for many generations.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Do you think all the big tough Border Force guys who hid in Flinders st station surrounded by lefties with signs will get medals for not making GBS threads their pants?

Count Chocula posted:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/mungo-maccallum/2016/18/2016/1453078269/di-natale-vs-greens

Count Chocula posted:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/mungo-maccallum/2016/18/2016/1453078269/di-natale-vs-greens

open24hours posted:

The reputation of the humanities isn't degraded by this any more than the reputation of medicine is degraded by the various quack doctors getting around.

Vladimir Poutine posted:

Speaking of pseudoscience:
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jan/18/chiropractic-board-australia-should-be-sacked-members-contentious-claims?CMP=soc_567

quote:

Some chiropractors were falsely claiming to be able to treat people, including babies, for non-musculoskeletal diseases such as asthma, ear infections and pneumonia, the lead author of the paper, Dr Ken Harvey, said.

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Have Clive Palmer & Friends delivered anything for the people who voted for them? What did their supporters actually want or expect them to do? Why is he there, again?

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Have Clive Palmer & Friends delivered anything for the people who voted for them? What did their supporters actually want or expect them to do? Why is he there, again?

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Have Clive Palmer & Friends delivered anything for the people who voted for them? What did their supporters actually want or expect them to do? Why is he there, again?

Kommando posted:

I'd say the PUP got the highest Senate vote in Queensland because Queenslanders

SynthOrange posted:

xPanda posted:

Wasn't Clive's MO that he'd make the right noises in the media during debate, and then when it came time to vote, and the media cycle had moved, on he'd do the opposite?

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Pretty much.

I guess what I'm wondering is, did the PUP get in purely on the protest vote (and running a candidate in every single seat) or was there an actual strategy that they can employ again next time to retain or win a few seats? Like, does it even matter that he doesn't seem to have achieved much for anyone and that his party's a shitshow?

Cleretic posted:

A fuckload of publicity money, and being insane enough to get news coverage outside of it.

I don't think it'll work for him again, because he's very evidently tried and failed, but I can think of someone in another country pulling very similar tactics.

quote:

A draft bill of new data breach laws, released in December, will also require organisations and government agencies to make compulsory notifications to the privacy commissioner.

The most serious lapse revealed in the AFP documents is a June 2012 disclosure of the middle name and surname of a victim of an assault to the alleged perpetrator.

The disclosure was accidentally made in documents released in response to an FoI request by the alleged perpetrator, which had been incorrectly redacted.

SynthOrange posted: