ScreamingLlama posted:

we have actual economic policies as opposed to the Greens just belching out clouds of weed smoke like the factories they profess to hate

Graic Gabtar posted:

I just need you to explain to me how I won't be paying more tax under that proposal.

Graic Gabtar posted:

Interesting, but anyone over $80K is worse off you say? That's still a lot of punters.
To be honest although it may seem obscene to you most people making that kind of coin don't just turn up. A lot of those "rorts" are poo poo you need to set up and maintain for that earning capacity.

Fruity Gordo posted:

And remember that that's taxable income, so add $18,000 to all of those incomes on the list for the full annual salary before tax.

Graic Gabtar posted:

I'm just letting you know I only work in bullet points after a few dinner beers.

So you probably don't need the two pages.

Should I get my accountant on the line? He can probably answer questions about my financial affairs better then I.

katlington posted:

Link please, the character assassination of Triggs is shamefull.

"Guardian AU" posted:

Gillian Triggs says Coalition chose to challenge Basikbasik report via media

Gillian Triggs, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, has said the government has rarely challenged her findings and recommendations, while facing heavy questioning from Coalition senators.

In estimates on Friday, Triggs was again grilled by senators over a recommendation she made that John Basikbasik receive $350,000 for the time he was held in detention without charge following the serving of a prison sentence for manslaughter.

Triggs has faced sustained attacks from the government – including Tony Abbott – in the lead-up to a damning report released by the commission on children in detention.

Triggs told the estimates committee: “My job as president is to make findings and recommendations, which are discussed with government and a report is finally made to parliament, along with scores of other such reports.

“The government has the option of appealing against my findings and recommendations and has chosen not to do so, and in fact very rarely does.”

“Normally it would be for members of parliament to read my reports, to question them if they chose to, and if appropriate, for the attorney to appeal against them.

“That has not been done and unfortunately the choice has been made to do so in the pages of a particular newspaper, where the facts and legal reasoning were grossly misstated.”

Basikbasik is a West Papuan activist who opposed the Indonesian occupation of his country. After being granted refugee status in Australia, he was charged in 2000 with the manslaughter of his partner.

He remained in Villawood detention centre after serving his full sentence, because he cannot be returned to Indonesia.

The Liberal senator Ian Macdonald repeatedly questioned Triggs on the case, and asked her to provide specific details on the length of time of the investigation. Triggs said it “would take months” but she did not believe it had taken years.

She told the committee that after serving his sentence he had now been held for “close to eight years without charge and without trial”.

“While the government of course has an executive power to detain someone … that executive power must be exercised in a way that is necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate aim,” she said.

“I think most fair-minded Australians would say that holding someone for eight years after he has served his prison sentence is something that does require at least the regular consideration of his case, and regular consideration of whether or not alternative forms of detention or supervision might be used.”

After the release of the children in detention report it was revealed that the government had sought Triggs’s resignation.

The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, wrote to the Australian federal police to ask them to examine whether the attorney general, George Brandis, had committed an offence by offering Triggs a job in exchange for her resignation.

"Guardian AU" posted:

Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs hits back at the critics

Gillian Triggs has hit back at critics in the government and the media, accusing Coalition politicians of “profoundly” misunderstanding the role of the Human Rights Commission, and the Australian newspaper of running a concerted campaign to achieve the commission’s abolition.

In an interview with Guardian Australia, Triggs also called for the Coalition senator Ian Macdonald to explain the “badgering” and “belligerent” nature of questions to the commission in the Senate committee he chairs and revealed a new direction for the commission’s future work.

Ongoing tensions between the commission and the government came to a dramatic head in February when Triggs said the attorney general, George Brandis, sought her resignation as its president and Tony Abbott said the government had “lost confidence” in her. The prime minister also labelled the commission’s report on children in immigration detention a “blatantly political, partisan exercise” and a “political stitch-up”.

After eight hours of questioning at a Senate estimates inquiry in February, Triggs and the commission were called back last Friday for a further three hours. Questioning returned to a commission report brought down last June on the case of John Basikbasik, a West Papuan activist and refugee who served seven years in jail for the manslaughter of his partner, who was reportedly pregnant at the time. Basikbasik has been held in detention for a further eight years because he cannot be sent back to Indonesia, but is considered a risk to the community.

Abbott said the commission’s ruling that Basikbasik “be released” was “pretty bizarre” and demonstrated “extremely questionable judgment”. The social security minister, Scott Morrison, said this week the decision was “absolute nonsense”. The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said suggestions that “wife killers should be released back into the community with a cheque from the taxpayer are so far removed from the public view, it is just offensive”.

‘We didn’t say Basikbasik should be released’
The commission report found “the failure of the minister to place Mr Basikbasik into community detention or another less restrictive form of detention (if necessary, with conditions) was inconsistent with the prohibition on arbitrary detention in article 9(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”.

But Triggs told Guardian Australia the basis of this finding was not that Basikbasik should be released, but rather that he was being detained without any regular review.

“We did not find that Basikbasik should be released into community detention,” she said.

“If Basikbasik were to be held forever on the basis that he is a dangerous man, we would not object to that so long as there were regular and independent reviews of his situation.

“We had to determine if the detention was proportionate to the legitimate aim of protecting the community. If alternative types of detention had been at least considered by the minister and then rejected on reasonable grounds, it might have met the test of proportionality.

“But if the minister has not put his mind to it at all, or allowed any review, then the detention becomes arbitrary under international law.”

“I do not think the government is responding to the report on the basis of any understanding of the statutory authority the commission has under legislation. They ignore the reality that no democratic government can hold a person indefinitely without some form of independent and regular review.

“... the key word is arbitrary, which means to hold without regular review, without access to the courts”.

She said the government could have appealed against her report, but had not. It had also ignored the recommendation regarding compensation, which governments almost always did.

Senator Ian Macdonald ‘has another agenda’

At the February hearing of the legal and constitutional affairs committee, which was primarily about the children in detention report, Macdonald, the chairman, said: “I haven’t bothered to read the final report because I think it is partisan.”

He told Sky news at the time this was because “I’ve got better things to read ... I don’t waste my time reading documents that I am going to take no notice of because, as I said a year ago, I thought the enquiry was partisan, so naturally the report would be and I have to say from bits and pieces that have come up in the last couple of days, that’s been an accurate expectation.”

Triggs called on Macdonald to explain himself.

“He needs to explain himself. He needs to explain his role. He needs to answer why he allows the level of badgering at committee hearings, the length of the hearings and the belligerent nature of the questioning,” she said.

“... it seems they are searching for anything that they can find to damage the commission and me. [Macdonald] consistently allows the senators’ questions to be oriented towards attacking the commission.”

And she said the most recent estimates committee hearing “appears to have been set up exclusively to attack us” with other agencies told at the last minute that they would not be required to give evidence.

“There is obviously another agenda here other than the normal role of estimates, which is to make good-faith enquiries into how we manage our budget.”

‘Failure to understand’ the commission’s role
“There has been a genuine and profound failure to understand that our mandate is in international law and that ministers are implementing domestic law,” Triggs said.

However, she excluded Brandis from this criticism, saying she had had “rational discussions” with the attorney general.

“He has taken a reasonable and lawyerly approach that we should have a stronger emphasis on fundamental human rights, freedom of speech for example, but we both know that the Coalition would never agree to legislation which would give effect to those rights because that would come close to a bill of rights.”

The issue of arbitrary detention, central to the Basikbasik case, is also the reason for other adverse findings by the commission, including in a recent report about two intellectually and cognitively disabled Aboriginal men who were unfit to plead, but held in prison for four and six years.

Taking the commission further into the public arena
Triggs said she did want to concentrate more on “mainstream issues”, for example employment discrimination.

“I think we have to work more in the public arena to demonstrate to thinking Australians that we are working for everyone and to move our work more into mainstream issues like employment discrimination.

“There are a growing number of complaints about pregnancy discrimination, for example, many more than I would have imagined when we began our research. And there are older men who are discriminated against by employers because of their age.

“If we can work with employers and encourage different attitudes in the community it would help national productivity – there is a powerful business case for this.”

The Australian
“There has been a concerted campaign by the Australian to demand my resignation and the abolition of the Human Rights Commission for years.

“It is a very clear campaign by that newspaper and it has been leaping on anything that could be used to try to attract negative public attention. They have been very willing to distort the facts to continue their campaign and that campaign has been picked up by some ministers and some members of parliament.”

The Australian declined to respond to Triggs’s comments.

Macdonald said he was “disappointed with Triggs’s partisan approach” and that the committee had not taken evidence from other agencies last Friday because it was clear it would run out of time to do so after senators had finished questioning the commission.

Triggs said she had no intention to resign from her post, despite the government’s criticism.

i got banned posted:

There will be none of that talk here mate

*drinks the blood of christ via transubstantiation*

thatfatkid posted:

It's almost as if liberals are only for a "free market" when it works in their favour.

i got banned posted:

It's pretty loving common sense. The more disposable income you erode from citizens the more you erode consumer confidence.

Orkin Mang posted:

are u nigel small

GoldStandardConure posted:

west coast best coast, east coast least coast

BBJoey posted:

There was just something different about him compared to Obama that made republicans more willing to accept him as a True American. Can't quite put my finger on what it was though

hiddenmovement posted:

Ok guys but what if the free meal is like, really good?

Like really really good?

Lid posted:

The Abbott government found $4m for the climate contrarian Bjørn Lomborg to establish his “consensus centre” at an Australian university, even as it struggled to impose deep spending cuts on the higher education sector.

A spokesman for the education minister, Christopher Pyne, said the government was contributing $4m over four years to “bring the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology to Australia” at a new centre in the University of Western Australia’s business school.

norp posted:

As a graduate this can not be quoted enough

Kim Jong ill posted:

Not only is this not illegal, it's incredibly common. I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion?

Kim Jong ill posted:

Yeah that's at best a recommendation on behalf of the university, not a legal requirement. We have several lecturers in our school that don't have graduate degrees. Hell one of them is so highly sought after he was just poached by another uni in the state.

Kim Jong ill posted:

The aforementioned highly sought after lecturer has consistently taken topics that the academics suck at teaching and completely turned therm around. A postgraduate degree is in no way a certification that someone is capable of effectively teaching and vice versa.

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

http://www.mamamia.com.au/news/luke-lazarus/

Les Affaires posted:

If he's getting paid $5 per cartoon he can pump out as much of them as he likes.

Sludge Tank posted:

Bestiality is legal in Cambodia FYI

open24hours posted:

That's a pretty utopian view.

katlington posted:

Why do you want to punish their success? They've worked hard to earn everything they have. Sounds like leaner talk to me.

Endman posted:

Be thankful, you've rid the world of another white person. Because I'm pretty sure your posting has given me cancer.

"Guardian AU" posted:

Taxpayers should not have to subsidise childcare, says David Leyonhjelm

Taxpayers should not have to subsidise childcare because having children is a lifestyle choice, crossbench senator David Leyonhjelm said.

The Liberal Democrat senator, who holds one of the key crossbench seats in the Senate, said he would not support any increase to childcare payments because it is unfair to childless people.

“Having kids is not a social service that governments should subsidise, it is a choice,” Leyonhjelm said.

The statement echoes prime minister Tony Abbott’s comments that Indigenous people living in remote communities represents a “lifestyle choice”. Abbott was criticised for the comments by Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander community leaders, who said they were simplistic and did not reflect the connection many felt with their ancestral land.

The social services minister, Scott Morrison, is expected to release the government’s families policies, which includes the childcare package, before the May federal budget.

He is considering scrapping the $7,500 cap on childcare rebates in exchange for cutting back the rebate for wealthy families.

Morrison has received feedback from well-off parents that the cap was an inhibitor to workforce participation.

“For higher income earners, people earning over $180,000 in family income, what is more important to those families ... is the inflexibility of the cap rather than the level of subsidy,” he told News Corp Australia.

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

Why would he support those, he's a libertarian.

open24hours posted:

Do Libertarians really assume that, or do they just not care?

GoldStandardConure posted:

Parrots are usually more intelligent and articulate than that.

Gough Suppressant posted:

There is no possible problem which actually or theoretically exists to which this is part of the right solution.

Vladimir Poutine posted:

Tirade posted:

Don't pretend that this toxic loving thread could be redeemed by the use of the ignore feature.

Unless you put everyone on ignore I guess.

Jumpingmanjim posted: