drunkill posted:

Clive Palmer is suing freindlyjordies because he thinks being called "Dense Humpty Dumpty" is defamation and not in fact, a fact.

Halo14 posted:

Wikr or Signal SMS with timed message expiry is what my mate speculates.

https://amp.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/stephen-jolly-splits-from-victorian-socialists-amid-serious-allegations-20190923-p52u6b.html posted:

Stephen Jolly splits from Victorian Socialists amid serious allegations

Prominent Melbourne left wing politician Stephen Jolly has split with his party, the Victorian Socialists, amid serious allegations involving the City of Yarra councillor.

Details of the accusation against Cr Jolly, who has not been arrested or charged and denies any wrongdoing, cannot be reported for legal reasons.

The Socialists say they moved to suspend their most high profile member earlier this month after learning of the allegations, with Cr Jolly immediately resigning from the party in response.

Cr Jolly told The Age that he had done nothing wrong and lashed his former comrades for moving against him when he had not been charged or even arrested.

The Socialists say their 2018 state election star candidate chose to resign of his own volition and that his denials of wrongdoing were "not credible".

"Information we have learned ... warrants immediate suspension and that expulsion would have followed unless he presented evidence substantiating his denial," the party said in its statement.
"Instead of doing so, he chose to resign."
Cr Jolly emphatically denied that he was guilty of criminal conduct or any wrongdoing.
"I am restricted in what I can say legally about this matter," he said.
"I have not been charged with anything, I have not pleaded guilty to anything, nor have I been found guilty of anything.

"I have done nothing wrong and am most disappointed in the Victorian Socialist Executive’s decision to comment publicly on the matter."

drunkill posted:

Clive Palmer is suing freindlyjordies because he thinks being called "Dense Humpty Dumpty" is defamation and not in fact, a fact.

Breakfast Burrito posted:

it's good to see something happening on this because rumours have been swirling about this guy for years, but i am also very over every party all of humanity having a creepy dude problem

JBP posted:

Wow Stephen Jolly the cartoon communist is some kind of creeper I am gobsmacked lmao

fauna posted:

the rate of employment itt is pretty high isn't it? i just realised you might not be all getting the same targeted ads as me because you're not trawling job sites all day. my twitter, facebook, indeed, seek and adzuna are all crammed with defense force jobs and recruitment ads (like that hilarious "i work part-time and i just bought a house in sydney!" thing). like, dozens of them, they are spending a fortune on advertising and marketing right now. that's why i keep saying that trashing the dole is a soft conscription tactic, like they do in america - squeezing the most desperate sectors of society harder and harder while making the army look like an actual attractive career path in the knowledge that people will eventually jump at the bait if they're poor enough for long enough. consider the timing with iran, china, climate change etc., it's absolutely deliberate

Anidav posted:

New South Wales has been secretly exploring a highly controversial plan to turn the state’s coastal rivers inland to provide more water for irrigators.

Anidav posted:

New South Wales has been secretly exploring a highly controversial plan to turn the state’s coastal rivers inland to provide more water for irrigators.

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/business-law/battlers-and-plutocrats-how-political-connections-reward-australias-super-rich posted:

Battlers and plutocrats: How political connections reward Australia's super-rich

26 Aug 2015

Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster

A huge proportion of Australia's richest people are amassing their wealth via political connections rather than via business innovation, write Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster.

The Washington Post ran an article last week reporting that 65% of the richest people in Australia had amassed their wealth via political connections rather than via innovative businesses.
According to the quoted research, Australian residents are rewarded for their political connections about as much as Indonesian or Indian residents, with Colombia offering the biggest rewards. Notably, the Australian situation is in stark contrast to that of the US, where only 1% of the billionaires reportedly made their wealth through political connections.
Is Australia really such a plutocracy? Our own research, using different empirical methods, agrees with the conclusions reported in the Washington Post.
In fact, we put the figure closer to 80%, making Australia potentially on par with Colombia. The authors whose research was reported in the Post only counted wealth that was visibly obtained via political connections, which may explain why their number is slightly lower than ours.
Our method was to look at the industry of operations of the 200 richest Australians on the BRW list. Based on the rich list from 2009, we reported the following finding in our paper:

Over 80% of the wealthiest Australians have made their fortunes in property, mining, banking, superannuation and finance generally – all heavily regulated industries in which fortunes can be made by getting favourable property rezonings, planning law exemptions, mining concessions, labour law exemptions, money creation powers and mandated markets of many stripes.

Looking in more detail at the life histories of these people, none of the 200 richest Australians in 2009 looked like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett – namely, innovators who made their money by inventing, producing, or distributing cheaper products bought by millions.
Instead, the list abounded with mining magnates who enjoyed favourable government concessions; CEOs of superannuation funds who personally benefitted from government guarantees locking hundreds of thousands of people into doing business with them; banking and finance CEOs who received government guarantees and favourable legislation; and – the largest group of all – property developers who rely on rezoning and other favourable political decisions.
As the research reported in the Washington Post suggests, Australia's plutocracy has severe negative consequences for the rest of the economy.
For example, the overhead costs of superannuation firms are now 1% of their total funds per year. Over a whole working life, this 1% tax on total superannuation holdings each year easily amounts to 40% of total superannuation wealth accumulated by retirement age. In comparison, in Denmark the overhead costs are 0.1%, making the Danes 35% better off in terms of accumulated superannuation wealth. Another way to put this is to say that 35% of superannuation wealth is needlessly taxed away in Australia by the super-rich, on the back of favourable legislation.
Similarly, Cameron Murray calculated that some 60% of the increases in house prices following rezoning in Queensland flow to politically connected developers, which can be seen as a direct tax on the rest of the population, who would otherwise benefit that much more from rezoning.
The story is the same when it comes to high bank fees, high mortgage costs, high school fees, high health costs, high legal costs, high administrative burdens in various sectors, and high food prices: in each of these cases, political capture by a small group (such as university administrators, over-paid medical specialists, and bank CEOs) enables these groups to divert disproportionately large margins of our society's economic surplus to themselves. In short, the economic power derived from political connections in our society makes life for the unconnected much more expensive than it should be. The end result is a few who get special favours, and a vast majority who are kept poorer and less educated than they should be.
And the plutocrats are still winning, on both sides of politics. The last budget could have been written by the super-rich and the Treasurer is already making noises about more income tax cuts that will predominantly favour the rich.
The tragic part is that solutions are available. For example, we could legislatively limit the salaries of all workers whose income depends largely on the state, using a benchmark like the PM's salary as a cap. This would take away the honey pot created when the system makes it possible for the well-connected to achieve control of state-favoured institutions, and would force creative people to make their money competitively rather than via free-riding on the state.
Another avenue of reform would be to establish a national public bank that makes direct, cheap, minimal mortgage loans to the population, replacing the current system where the Reserve Bank lends cheaply to a few private banks who then lend expensively to the population.
Seeing what should be done is not the hard bit. The hard bit is the politics. Solutions like those suggested above will be bitterly resisted by the plutocrats who personally gain so much from keeping the population ignorant of their parasitic feasting.
The first step is to get the population to wake up and realise the massive degree to which they are being fleeced, and to feel outraged because it does not have to be this way.

fauna posted:

hahahaha what the gently caress

Anidav posted:

New South Wales has been secretly exploring a highly controversial plan to turn the state’s coastal rivers inland to provide more water for irrigators.

Anidav posted:

New South Wales has been secretly exploring a highly controversial plan to turn the state’s coastal rivers inland to provide more water for irrigators.

cohsae posted:

Maybe rising oceans are a good thing because we're all going to be boiling seawater soon.

Anidav posted:

New South Wales has been secretly exploring a highly controversial plan to turn the state’s coastal rivers inland to provide more water for irrigators.

quote:

CANBERRA, Australia — President Trump has admitted he feels “amazingly alone” in the midst of all his scraps with allies and snarls with undermining advisers.

But he can’t follow the usual advice for presidents suffering the vertigo of isolation: If you want a friend in politics, get a dog. As his first wife, Ivana, wrote in her recent memoir, “Donald was not a dog fan.’’ Indeed, it’s a favorite insult.

But there is someone — at the very bottom of the world in the land of Mad Max — who wants to play ball with the Mad King. In the Trump era, we can rewrite the maxim to be: If you want a friend in politics, get an Aussie.

Anidav posted:

New South Wales has been secretly exploring a highly controversial plan to turn the state’s coastal rivers inland to provide more water for irrigators.

Amethyst posted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/columnists/trump-finally-makes-a-friend.html



hahahahahahahaha. we are an international laughingstock.

JBP posted:

No one cares what we do

Amethyst posted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/columnists/trump-finally-makes-a-friend.html



hahahahahahahaha. we are an international laughingstock.

Amethyst posted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/columnists/trump-finally-makes-a-friend.html



hahahahahahahaha. we are an international laughingstock.

Seemlar posted: