- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Been waiting for the new thread before posting this (Not first dog. Sorry guys).
Employers to be offered cash to place jobseekers in roles lasting only a month
quote:Employment service providers will be offered cash incentives to place jobseekers in short-term positions as well as longer term ones under changes announced by the federal government on Tuesday.
The new “jobactive” system will offer service providers a payment for filling four week-long vacancies, as well vacancies lasting 12 or 26 weeks.
“In the past we have only paid on 12 and 26-week outcomes,” the prime minister, Tony Abbott, told reporters in Geelong.
“We know there are a lot of short-term jobs available, particularly in regional Australia, there are jobs that are seasonal and these are often the start of someone’s renewed connection with the labour market. That is why an important innovation in this new jobactive system is the four-week outcome payment.”
Abbott said short-term work was “the best possible stepping stone into secure long-term jobs”.
“The best preparation for work is work,” the prime minister said.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) said the policy would “encourage service providers to churn vulnerable jobseekers through multiple short term job contracts in order to claim multiple payments”, ACTU secretary Dave Oliver said.
“The ACTU has consistently advocated for the government to introduce a 52 week payment to incentivise service providers to place jobseekers into long-term work. This would be a much better alternative to a four week payment.”
The initiative, which comes off the back of the Howard-era Job Network policy, has been panned by Labor.
“The government’s return to the failed Job Network model, with a new name, will not help unemployed Australians into work,” shadow employment minister Brendan O’Connor told Guardian Australia.
“We are not convinced the introduction of a new four week payment will do anything to support job seekers into decent work. Instead it will lead to increased jobseeker churn and job insecurity.”
O’Connor said that the Coalition must not take resources away from jobs training.
“Labor is deeply concerned that the new employment services model will in fact leave job seekers without the support they need,” he said.
Under the jobactive scheme, money for training will be provided only if jobseekers need it to secure a position that has already been advertised. Job agencies will have to risk their own money to provide individuals with training they think will be needed to gain employment more broadly.
David Thompson from the peak organisation representing non-profit employment services, Jobs Australia, welcomed the jobactive scheme, but warned that the training element “might be too restrictive”.
He said many long-term unemployed people needed training to reorient themselves to workplaces before applying for specific jobs, and that training could help jobseekers whose industries were suffering job losses.
“The labour market of today and the labour market of tomorrow are very different,” Thompson said.
The employment minister, Eric Abetz, said unemployed people who took on short-term contracts or undertook work for dole programs were healthier.
“All the data tells us that if you are gainfully employed, your mental, physical health, yourself esteem and social interaction are all enhanced and not only for you as an individual but everybody else in your household.
“That is why, for the long term unemployed, to be engaged in work for the dole, for example, is not only an important mechanism to say thank you to your community, but it is also of untold social good to the individual,” he said.
A total of 66 job agencies have been offered contracts to deliver on the jobactive scheme, from the 184 that put in tenders. Their contracts will last for five years rather than three, a move the government said will provide certainty for service providers.
The new scheme begins on July 1 and also includes targeted programs for Indigenous jobseekers based on the work undertaken by mining magnate Andrew Twiggy Forrest, who has conducted a review into Indigenous jobs and training.
“He has been a real apostle of getting away from this training for training’s sake notion and ensuring that people are being prepared, not for training but for work,” Abbott said of Forrest.
The government will implement job targets for Indigenous jobseekers for the first time under the new initiative. The targets will vary from region to region.
“The targets will ensure that employment service providers are finding jobs for Indigenous jobseekers at the same rate as for other job seekers in a region,” a spokesman for the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, told Guardian Australia.
“Providers will also be held accountable for their performance in meeting these targets through the star ratings system. A poor performance will affect an organisation’s star ratings and this will have an impact on whether they are given any future business from the government.” 
How the hell do they come up with this poo poo? You're healthier if you're in work? Sure. But there is absolutely no promise of stability with this steaming turd of a policy, and that has the exact opposite effect on many people.
Gutting training as well. I know the training system was rorted no end with the low cost in-house training poo poo that they billed the big bucks for (I got sent through a few of them), but that is an argument for vetting these programs before releasing the funding, not getting rid of them altogether. This either makes training impossible to justify (Since it is for an advertised position that will get filled long before you complete training) or it sets up poo poo so that employers can migrate the training costs of these jobs off onto the government via JSA.
All I see here is more kicking around of job seekers, handouts to those who don't need them, and Abbott giving Twiggy a verbal handjob.
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Mar 31, 2015 12:05
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May 22, 2024 16:50
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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See 50 new posts, pop in, and it is just a torrent of abuse between a bunch of shitposters.
People: Please stop being so easy to troll. When you read something here, get up from your computer, walk around your home a few times, then sit down and ask yourself the following question: "Does what I want to say in any way add anything of value to this discussion". When you say yes to yourself, realise that you are a loving liar and walk around the house again. This provides both exercise and makes sure you actually think before you put what passes for thought into words, and maybe will help make this thread less of an absolute shithole.
The problem is not Graic. The problem is you. You are the problem. I know Fruity made the whole "Angry ranty" thing seem cool, but you are all a load of poseurs compared to the magnificence of her incandescent rage. The thread only needs one Fruity (or less), and certainly has no requirement for Gough Suppressant knockoffs. I have the first dog market cornered, and a few other people post interesting or contributive things here and there. The rest of you seem to be engaged in a contest where you see who can scream at thread targets the loudest and only appear to hit anything of substance by accident.
Please try not to act like bigger children than our government.
I confess, I wrote the above because you lot made me have to open up and actually read one of Graic's posts. I've had him on ignore for months now, and been the happier for it. Please note that I am not actually responding to him here, just using what he said because it is a clear example of how many people think:
30% of our budget expenditure goes towards welfare. Feel free. Tax me as much as you want. You'll be back here in five years bitching about how the rich aren't paying enough tax and a third of our budget will still be going towards welfare.
Welfare will always be a cost. There will always be those who cannot work, are unable to find work, or are in some way unfit for work. Yes some forms of welfare are, in fact, being rorted. The aged pension is the biggest example of this. In the end it boils down to two main competing world views.
One of them is the self centred one, where the person sees what they have accomplished and rightly or wrongly credits only themselves with having achieved their own outcome, and feels that others who have not had to jump through the same hurdles they have do not deserve to have the same or similar conditions and circumstances as they do. These people measure their self worth by how they compare to others in society. This is a more selfish and short term form of thinking.
The others are more society oriented. They recognise, rightly or wrongly, that what they have they have not just because of their own efforts but those of other people around them, and they measure the worth of themselves by the society they live in and how they have affected it. This can be selfish too, especially if you are on a lower rung than the average, but is generally a more longer term sort of thinking.
These are a gross oversimplification, of course. But it is politics, so we need to simplify things to communicate concepts in ways that don't make everyone else's eyes glaze over.
Welfare is a classic example of the divide between the two world views. One fails to recognise that they only succeed because of the work of others, without which their own work would have been meaningless. The other demands that those who have benefited the most from the system pay more to support it. I confess that I am in the latter of the two camps mentioned above. Anyway, I ramble. It is what I do when I am tired and grumpy and have a sugar high and a dozen achy injuries.
One thing people who oppose welfare need to realise is that the economy is all connected. People who receive welfare get what amounts to table scraps with which to make ends meet. This money is spent on goods and services, what little extra there is gets put away towards quality of life or emergency purchases. They do not gather up vast piles of unused capital. Every dollar that gets spent on welfare for the poor, unemployed, and disabled is put right back into the economy again. It becomes the wages that store clerks earn, the profits that drive your businesses share price, the grease that keeps the wheels of the economy turning without which the wealth that those of the selfish group would neither have existed in the first place or retain value today.
The true poison to an economy is not those who are on welfare. As mentioned, they spend pretty much everything they get thus producing economic activity and growth. The problem is those who accumulate capital and then don't do anything with it. This sucks money out of the economy. By amassing and hoarding millions of dollars for no better reason than to keep score, the selfish group cause the economy to contract. As it stands, this group are currently the ones in power, and they largely control the political discourse in the western world. They rig the tax rules to benefit themselves (Capital gains tax rates? low. Income tax rates? medium. Consumption taxes? high. Exemptions? Many if you are wealthy, few if you are poor) and serve the goal of further accumulation of wealth. The Austerity narrative is part of this.
It is very very easy to blame and vilify the unemployed. Blaming the victim circumstance for the circumstance is the easiest way to avoid acknowledging that you might actually need to do something yourself. This doesn't have to be followed maliciously. You can be too busy, or your own circumstances can be too stressful to worry about doing things for others. This whole series of complaints about the welfare system is essentially a manufactured distraction from the fact that the system that needs a major overhaul is not welfare for poors, but taxes for the obscenely wealthy (Both individuals and companies). It has become increasingly self evident that the wealthy are not paying their fair share to support the system that enabled them to be in the position they are today. Companies shift assets overseas and debts to onshore subsidiaries so they can claim a tax credit for a loss that doesn't really exist in the larger structure of the company. The wealthy hiding money away in offshore bank accounts and in ways that are taxed at vastly lower rates. The budget problem is one of income, not expenditure.
The reason welfare has not been cut entirely is not just because it is unconscionable, but also because stripping people of everything they have, and leaving them with nothing but crippling debt forces many of them into crime in order to survive. The scare analogy Gough suppressant provided comes into play at this point:
Welfare is not a waste of money. Consider it an investment in avoiding the guillotine.
Those who support cutting welfare down or off entirely either don't think it through to its logical conclusion, or they do, but believe either that they can simply flit off to another country where they don't have to worry about the angry mob, or that somehow they'll benefit from the police state required to keep order in such a society.
tl;dr: Welfare spending is not a problem, and is in fact a good thing, both socially and economically. lovely regressive taxation is the problem, and Welfare is just thrown up as a distraction by those who benefit from the status quo to prevent action being taken to meaningfully change it.
I apologise for this rambly post, but I am too tired to engage in more than a brief proofreading.
PS. Stop acting like a bunch of loving children.
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Apr 1, 2015 13:54
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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You know things have gotten pretty dire when Jonah Galtberg isn't even the fifth worst poster in the thread.
CrazyTolradi: Please stop digitising and posting your poo poo for all of us to see. If all you can post is abuse, then maybe you shouldn't be posting.
ANYWAY...
Continuing on with the theme from my last post, wherin I berated everyone for being utter shite in this thread, I must now post something of actual substance along the same lines as before. To that end:
Multinationals are avoiding billions in tax and the Coalition has no clear solution
quote:Big companies and multinationals spend millions to avoid billions in tax by staying just on the right side of the grey line between legal tax minimisation and illegal avoidance.
But next week a Senate committee will be told Australia could reap billions back in extra tax revenue by changing who gets to draw that line; that instead of being drawn by the tax office in consultation with the big corporate taxpayers and their highly paid advisers it should be a decision of the parliament, the elected representatives who are supposed to be the final arbiters of tax law, but who are now being left in the dark.
The person proposing this radical idea will be Martin Lock, until last year a “profit shifting practice adviser and non-resident withholding tax risk manager” with the tax office – a very long title which basically means his work was all about drawing the grey line.
In a confronting submission to the Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, Lock describes a system under which the tax office is outgunned and overwhelmed and the highly paid experts advising the major corporations thrive – and that was before he and several hundred other technical experts on big business taxation left as the public service job cuts hit. He sees the situation as so serious he proposes that it be investigated by a royal commission.
The “greyness” of the law hugely advantages the big corporations, he says, and “proving a large company or multinational has crossed the line is usually very difficult for the ATO: in only a handful of court cases has it succeeded”.
He says the real question is not the expensive legal dance over the meaning of the grey line, or the big question marks than can be left unanswered for a decade or more, but whether the laws themselves are appropriate and acceptable.
And Lock says this should be a question for the parliament, except the parliament is almost never told about the problems.
“Historically, [tax] commissioners have seen fit to only inform treasury, confidentially, so denying parliament access to information it is entitled to have on the workings of the very laws it enacted,” he says.
The tax office annual reports to parliament “invariably … go into great detail about the ATO’s achievements of the past year, and its vision for the future, but say nothing about the “abuse” of existing laws, the presence of grey laws or the nature and circumstances of the commissioner’s secret tax settlements with large companies and multinationals”.
“Concealing or delaying the provision to parliament of information concerning perceived tax abuse, known grey law issues and secret tax settlements, serves to perpetuate tax minimisation arrangements and tax revenue leakages that parliament may have legislated to combat or prevent, had it known about it.”
The tax office will also give evidence to the Senate inquiry. Its submission insists that “most corporates pay the tax they are required to under Australia’s law” and that while “some private groups, linked to wealthy individuals with complex group structures, display more aggressive tax behaviours and characteristics” and “some multinational enterprises engage in complex profit shifting structures”, the system is basically working fine.
Executives from Google, Microsoft, Apple, News Corp Australia, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals, BHP Billiton and Glencore are also going to give evidence, along with corporate tax experts from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst and Young and KPMG. The basic message from the corporate submissions is also that the tax system is travelling well.
But Joe Hockey has conceded there is a problem with the tax treatment of multinationals, so bad the treasurer says Australia could be “losing control of our destiny from a taxation perspective”.
“Every day someone comes up to me and says, ‘What about Google, what about Ikea, what about all these other companies that are providing services to Australia and may not be paying their fair share of tax?’,” he said.
“These large companies take the view that they’re complying with the laws, and they may well be. But the problem is, the laws have holes because the laws were designed for a Woolworths, a Coles, a Myer, and other traditional operators. They never contemplated the Googles or the Yahoos, or the emergence of Uber or Airbnb and the like. So it’s a patchwork of taxation, which means inevitably that we’re not collecting the revenue that we should be collecting and that we want to collect, that is fair.”
What the government is prepared to do about it remains unclear. It rejected a suggestion from Labor to save $1.9bn over four years from multinational companies which avoid Australian tax by loading debt into their Australian operations, although it did make some changes to the so-called thin capitalisation rules last year. And the Coalition is also moving to exempt 700 private companies from new tax transparency rules because of fears it could jeopardise their safety and possibly lead to kidnappings.
Hockey’s tax discussion paper proposes “a lower corporate tax rate” as one way to tackle the problem because it “would reduce the incentive for tax planning and profit shifting from Australia”.
“This would potentially reduce the revenue that is lost to tax planning and allow the resources devoted to tax planning and compliance activities to be used more productively in the economy,” the discussion paper says.
But that’s not really going to solve the revenue problem.
“The tax revenue at stake from ‘unacceptable’ tax planning outcomes allowed under clear law or overlooked by grey law undoubtedly runs into billions of dollars,” Lock maintains.
For those of you who are unaware, one of these tax avoiding buggers is run by former treasurer Peter Costello (Who feels no need to explain his funds actions to a senate inquiry, apparently), which puts lie to the idea that the government is entirely unaware of these problems. Mind you, with Hockey in charge, there is at least a credible concern that he knows gently caress all about what he is doing, but other treasurers were pretty well aware of the poo poo they were dealing with, even if they were being fuckwits about it.
Now, there are legit concerns in the article, like the tax laws being poorly designed in the first place, and yes they should be reformed with great vigour, but that is only part of the problem, and the major problem is that the government of the day, be it Liberal or Labor are just not interested in doing anything about it. On the one hand, they get contributions from these companies, and parachutes into nice cushy jobs afterwards (see Costello), and if they try to rock the boat... well... just look at what happened when they tried to do tax things like pokies or natural resources.
Also, I love how Hockey proposes to reduce avoided tax by reducing tax. Why yes, dumbshit: if you are reducing the amount of money you are asking for, by definition the amount of money you are not getting when you ask for it will be lower. Hockey cannot possibly be that stupid. He knows which end of the cigar to stick in his mouth. It has to just be yet another example of the ongoing "We don't want to tax the rich" horror show we have been enduring for the past few decades. They are just running out of anything approaching plausible explanations for it and they put a dim bulb in charge of trying.
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Apr 3, 2015 05:43
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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I went over to my parents place today for the traditional barbeque and taunting of the angry fearful pomeranian, and as usual I got into politics chat with my father in the car. He claimed that he read "in a paper" that the Greens were handing out fake How to Vote cards in the NSW election masquerading as the Liberal party. My request for more information has been met, repeatedly, with "use Google".
Now, while I have found plenty of examples of the opposite being done, especially in my own electorate by the LNP during the 2010 election, and some stuff by Labor in the Queensland election, I have found nothing to substantiate this claim. Is my father talking out his arse, or did something actually happen?
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Apr 5, 2015 10:26
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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I was not aware that Gina Rinehart was such a strong supporter of protecting institutionalised Paedophilia. Turns out that the Thatcher government was really big on that point (And had several paedophiles in it too).
Anyway, once again an economically inept hereditary billionaire bit-player in a dwindling market steps up anti welfare rhetoric to distract attention from the vastly more important ongoing tax reform business. Since her customers are mostly overseas, she doesn't particularly care if the Australian economy goes down the tubes and I am sure she would like there to be more money available to subsidise her company some more.
Her time would be better spent on getting the government to stop the mining giants (Of which she is not one) to cease increasing production and perhaps even throttle it back.
I think in the last thread I posted an article on how the biggest minders were increasing production in a deliberate effort to drive down the price of iron, and how businesses like those belonging to Twiggy and Rinehart were losing out badly, barely being able to break even as a result. Lowering the price of labour via union destruction (One of her pet policies, and what she actually refers to by invoking Thatcher) is only a temporary solution for them, since it would drive down costs across the board, and the bigger players who are doing this to drive their competition out of business get all the benefits of it to.
This is why I call her economically inept. She hates people so much that she can't even act in her own self interest. The world will be a better place when she swallows her own tongue and chokes to death.
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Apr 6, 2015 04:00
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Nauru staff call for closure of asylum centre and royal commission into abuse
Open Letter here (pdf)
quote:The federal government has been aware of physical and sexual abuse of asylum seekers on Nauru for more than a year but failed to take appropriate action, workers from the detention centre have alleged.
In an unprecedented move, 23 current and former medical staff, teachers, social workers and child protection staff have signed an open letter calling for the removal of all asylum seekers from Nauru to Australia. They have also called for a royal commission into sexual abuse on Nauru and into the government’s response.
The three-page letter says comments by immigration minister Peter Dutton that there was a “zero tolerance” attitude to sexual abuse “do not reflect the attitude or actual response” on Nauru.
It says Dutton’s request for asylum seekers to come forward and report sexual assaults could put them in further danger because of the close-knit nature of the detention environment.
The recent review led by former integrity commissioner Philip Moss found some allegations of sexual assault at the centre were substantiated. The review has now sparked a federal Senate inquiry to further investigate allegations of abuse at the centre.
Some of the workers were also due to appear on ABC’s Lateline on Tuesday evening.
The letter says: “We are a group of current and former employees from the Nauru detention centre who have first-hand knowledge of the conditions in which children and adults are detained.
“We would like to inform the Australian public that the government and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection [DIBP] has been aware of the [allegations of] sexual and physical assault of women and children on Nauru for at least 17 months, long before the Moss review was ever commissioned.
“[DIBP] and all service providers were informed, in writing, of several of the assaults detailed in the Moss review in addition to many other assaults not mentioned in the report.”
The letter was signed by former and current staff and workers from Save the Children and International Health and Medical Services.
Former Save the Children workers named on the letter include Jesse-James Clements, Viktoria Vibhakar, Tobias Gunn, Jarrod Kenney, Hamish Tacey and E Maree.
Named former staff from International Health and Medical Services include Dr Peter Young, Dr Rodney Juratowitch and Dr Michael Gordon.
A number of other current and former staff from Save the Children and the Salvation Army have signed the letter, but chose to remain anonymous.
The incidents it highlights include one from November 2013 in which a boy was sexually assaulted by a detention centre employee. Guardian Australia has previously reported on the case, and obtained documents that show the service provider Transfield filed an incident report at the time.
The letter says that on this and other occasions, the immigration department was made aware of the allegations through incident reports, meetings and minutes from Save the Children meetings, but that it chose not to act.
“Despite this knowledge, the DIBP chose to keep this child in the detention centre where he was assaulted and remained at risk of further abuse and retaliation. Indeed, this child was subjected to further incidents of abuse while he was in detention.”
The letter says Dutton’s comments encouraging asylum seekers to report abuse when the Moss report was released posed further risks as they continue to live in close proximity to the alleged perpetrators. The signatories allege this will place them at future risk of assaults.
“It is not safe to expect women and children to report abuse to authorities and then require them to live in close proximity to the [alleged] perpetrators,” it said.
“To do so places them at risk for repeated assault, retaliation for reporting the abuse, and exposure to repeated reminders of the assaults that they suffered which further delays their recovery from trauma.”
The letter says the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women by detention centre staff – another allegation raised by Moss – was reported to the Department of Immigration 16 months before the Moss review.
“However, DIBP refused to remove these women from the unsafe detention environment.”
The letter calls for the closure of the Nauru detention centre.
“In order to protect asylum seekers, and in particular women and children from further abuse, we immediately ask for the transfer of all asylum seekers in the Nauru detention camp to Australia. We also request the Australian people support a royal commission into abuse allegations in the Nauru detention centre.”
The Senate inquiry into events on Nauru is now accepting submissions, and is likely to hold public hearings in April and May. Some former detention centre staff are preparing submissions, which will be protected by parliamentary privilege.
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Apr 7, 2015 08:35
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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NSW Labor candidate goes to police over 'paedophile lover' smear campaign
quote:A New South Wales Labor candidate has complained to police about a smear campaign in which thousands of leaflets labelling him a “paedophile lover” were distributed throughout the electorate he was running in.
Cameron Murphy, the Labor candidate for the seat of East Hills in last month’s state election, is also planning to complain to the Electoral Commission over the anonymous campaign.
Thousands of flyers calling Murphy a “paedophile”, “supporter of child rapists” and a “convicted rapist” were distributed in letterboxes around the electorate in the weeks leading up to the election on 28 March. The night before the election 300 posters were plastered with stickers saying “paedophile lover”.
Votes are still being counted in the electorate with the Liberal candidate, Glenn Brookes, less than 600 votes ahead of Murphy with a 0.3% swing to the Liberal party.
Murphy, who was made a member of the Order of Australia last year for his services to civil rights, was previously the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. In 2009 he defended the right of the paedophile Dennis Ferguson to public housing after a law was passed specifically to allow his eviction.
Murphy said the campaign against him was “incredibly malicious, orchestrated and organised”.
“I made thousands of public comments on matters of human rights. I have had to fight for the rights of some of the most marginalised people in our community in order to ensure the rights of all of us are preserved,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on the weekend.
“... For the record, I have an unblemished history. I have never been suspected of, arrested, charged with, or ever been convicted of any offence. I have always been an ethical person and confined my views to the issues, not the people involved in any matter.”
He said the core issue was whether the democratic process could survive such negative campaigns or spur political parties to choose “wooden candidates” who have never taken a position on anything so they cannot be smeared.
“If we want strong leaders and good politicians then we have to ensure that those responsible for this are investigated and prosecuted as a lesson for the future. Otherwise election campaigns will simply become a free-for-all where anyone can make up allegations in order to smear their opponents,” he said.
Murphy said he was also devastated for his wife who had to look at them and worried about what his young son would think when he grows older and can understand what the flyers mean.
NSW police confirmed a complaint had been received relating to campaign material distributed in East Hills.
When asked if premier Mike Baird condemned the campaign, a spokesman told Guardian Australia: “The premier condemns all breaches of electoral laws, including distribution of unauthorised material”.
I also love Baird's weak response to being asked if he condemned the campaign. I guess he condemns these in general, but doesn't care to condemn them in specific instances, especially when in this case it seems to have saved a seat for his government.
Who wants to bet the investigation goes nowhere?
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Apr 8, 2015 11:40
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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white mans burping: gently caress off.
On topic:
Direct Action climate scheme has been 'neutered', says Nick Xenophon
quote:The Abbott government’s Direct Action climate policy has been “neutered” and cannot guarantee greenhouse gas reductions, according to the independent senator Nick Xenophon, who says the government has reneged on undertakings it gave to secure his vote for the scheme.
Xenophon provided one of the six votes the government needed to get Direct Action through the Senate last July, in return for assurances that its so-called “safeguards mechanism” would impose real limitations on greenhouse emissions from industry.
The mechanism is supposed to stop increases in emissions from heavy industry or electricity generators from cancelling out the emissions reductions that the government intends to buy from other sources with its $2.55bn emissions reduction fund.
But a discussion paper released two weeks ago describes a safeguards mechanism that will at best mean major polluters continue business as usual and at worst could lead to significant increases in their greenhouse gas emissions, according to experts.
Elaine Prior, a senior analyst at the global investment bank Citigroup said: “It appears to us that the mechanism, as described in the consultation paper, is unlikely to impose any significant costs or constraints on companies … it also appears unlikely to make any significant positive contribution to Australia’s emissions reduction efforts.”
The carbon and environment daily newsletter has calculated that BlueScope steel could be able to double its greenhouse emissions before it breaches its “safeguard” baseline, because of the effect of closing one of the blast furnaces at its Point Kembla plant.
An angry Xenophon said what was described in the discussion paper “neuters the whole purpose of Direct Action”.
“Direct Action has no point if it does not have an effective safeguards mechanism and what the government has released seems like a try-on,” he said. “It goes against what they promised me in the discussions before the vote. I was assured this safeguards mechanism would have real teeth.
“There is no point in the government spending $2.55bn if there is no requirement to cap or reduce emissions from industry.”
The issues paper said baselines for emissions would “reflect the highest level of reported emissions for a facility over the historical period 2009-10 to 2013-14”. If companies exceeded the baseline calculated that way, they could have their emissions averaged out of the next three years, or apply for a baseline “expansion”, or apply for an exemption, for example after a natural disaster. Only if that all failed would they be required to buy emission reductions.
Xenophon had believed the baselines would be far tougher, which would have meant more companies had to buy permits from those who had managed to reduce their emissions – something that would have quickly turned the system into a baseline and credit emissions trading scheme.
The safeguards mechanism will apply to about 140 facilities with emissions of more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 – electricity generators, mines, manufacturers – and will be administered by the clean energy regulator set up by the previous government.
The government has given stakeholders a month to respond.
According to the paper, the government will also allow some mines to have baselines higher than their historical average if the “historical high point does not fully reflect expected business-as-usual emissions”.
“These are operations where there is a natural resource or reserve associated with the operation of a facility; the grade or depth of the resource or reserve will have a direct effect on the emissions performance of a facility; the facility has limited ability to control for such emissions; and facility emissions are expected to exceed their historical baseline and the change in natural resource grade or depth is the primary reason for this.”
The Direct Action scheme passed with support from Xenophon, the Palmer United party – which at the time had three senators, two of whom have since left the party – and the crossbench senators Ricky Muir and John Madigan.
At the time Xenophon said he had “worked for several months” with the environment minister, Greg Hunt, and climate experts to secure amendments to “introduce a safeguard mechanism which will see large emitters stay within baseline levels of emissions”.
He said the “significant” amendments would strengthen the Direct Action package so that Australia was in a good position to negotiate an even better emissions reduction target in Paris next year.
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Apr 10, 2015 09:22
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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I'm pickled tink and I ride my bicycle with no pants on her py derp
Australia's climate change 'debate' all talk and no action
quote:Australia’s climate “debate” screamed itself out nine months ago and fell over in exhaustion, having smashed a workable policy and failed to produce an alternative.
People who care about the subject, which you’d think would be most people considering what is at stake, struggled to maintain a rational conversation, given that the former government’s policy had been taken down by rhetorical nonsense – Whyalla wipeouts and $100 lamb roasts and the like – and the Abbott government’s still sketchy policy was propped up by the same.
But eventually facts challenge nonsense rhetoric, and the past nine months have made it clear just how untenable Australia’s position is. Here are seven sadly ridiculous things about our current situation.
1: Emission reduction businesses that used to sell greenhouse gas abatement to polluters will start selling the same abatement to the government next week, for about the same price the polluters would be paying for it if we still had an emissions trading scheme. The first auction under the Abbott government Direct Action policy’s $2.55bn emissions reduction fund will be held on 15 and 16 April. Experts say the most likely winners are companies like Greencollar, that gather up land-clearing permits from farmers who promise not to clear the land, so the farmer and the company get paid for the emission reduction from avoided deforestation, and companies that capture methane from places like garbage dumps.
Those same companies were selling their abatement to polluters under the old ETS and its carbon farming scheme. By now the old carbon price would have been floating close to the European price of about $10 a tonne. Norton Rose Fulbright partner Elisa de Wit said she expected next week’s auction price to be between $10 and $20 a tonne. Same abatement – as far as it goes – similar price, except we pay instead of the companies doing the polluting.
2: Manufacturers, miners and electricity generators (that together produce more than 60% of Australia’s emissions) won’t have to reduce their emissions under Direct Action and may in fact be able to increase them, which could cancel out the emissions reductions the government is spending billions trying to achieve. Direct Action included something called a “safeguards mechanism” that was supposed to stop this from happening. In fact, if the emission “baselines” under the “safeguards mechanism” were tough, it could have potentially forced industrial emissions down and turned the policy into something halfway workable.
But a recent discussion paper revealed the safeguards mechanism had been designed not to safeguard that emissions were reduced, but to effectively safeguard against industry having to do anything. The Carbon and Environment Daily newsletter has calculated that the system described could allow Bluescope steel to double its emissions without suffering a penalty. The exceptions and out clauses mean it is unlikely to force any change in any company’s behaviour. The South Australian senator Nick Xenophon, who provided one of the six votes that got Direct Action through the Senate on the understanding that the safeguards would be rigorous, feels dudded, and is protesting. It’s probably too late for that, although the discussion paper is seeking feedback.
3: Successive governments have negotiated special emission reduction deals for Australia and, together with reduced electricity use – mostly because of the decline in manufacturing – this might take us close to our pretty easy emission reduction targets. But that does not mean we are pulling our weight, as we seem to be claiming. In 1997 in Kyoto, having threatened not to sign, Australia managed to get a special deal to increase our emissions by 8% in the first period – ending in 2012 – and to count changes in land use.
Almost every other country had to reduce emissions over the same period. Effectively this meant we knew we had already almost achieved the target when we signed up to it because of land-clearing restrictions already in place. In fact we overshot that super-easy target, which meant we got to “carry over” the excess to the second commitment period – ending in 2020. Both major parties promised a 5% reduction by 2020 (actually that was supposed to be a bare minimum but the pledges to do more seem to have slipped by the wayside while we were all arguing about the future of lamb roasts) but if you take away the “carry over” from the first target then the 5% becomes 1%, according to calculations by the Climate Change Authority.
And if that 1% is achieved it will be mostly because of declining electricity use. We wouldn’t be the only country claiming credit for emission changes that happened for other reasons – European countries looked good when their coal industries closed for reasons that had nothing to do with climate change – but it doesn’t mean we can claim to be model global citizens and it doesn’t mean we should be deluded into thinking we have made any of the necessary changes to reduce the emissions-intensity of our economy, because we haven’t.
4: The government appears to be working out Australia’s post-2020 emissions reduction target based on figures that assume global warming of almost four degrees, when the whole point of global negotiations is to try to limit global warming to two degrees. Its recent discussion paper does not mention the 2C goal, but does mention a scenario that could result in almost 4C global warming. Discussing Australia’s special “national circumstances”, the discussion paper says that “for the foreseeable future, Australia will continue to be a major supplier of crucial energy and raw materials to the rest of the world ... At present, around 80% of the world’s primary energy needs are met through carbon-based fuels. By 2040, it is estimated that 74% will still be met by carbon-based sources.”
A footnote confirms that estimate comes from the “new policies scenario” of the International Energy Agency’s world energy outlook 2014, which was a baseline calculation of what would happen if countries implemented only the policies announced at that time, a scenario seen as unacceptable because it would pave the way for at least 3.6C of global warming. All governments try to wrangle themselves a good deal in these kind of global negotiations, and the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop ,and her team are taking an active role in the negotiations. But Australia will have to agree to something like a fair share of the globally-accepted starting point.
5: The government will set a post-2020 emissions reduction target without a policy to get there. The discussion paper also asks what policies might be implemented to achieve a new target that were “complementary” to Direct Action. Independent modelling has suggested Direct Action might not have enough money to meet even the 5% target, and all analysis suggests it would be extremely difficult to “scale up” to a higher target. Modelling has also found that cutting emissions further than 5% would be prohibitively expensive, the same charge levelled by the Coalition minister Malcolm Turnbull when he explained in 2011 that continuing to use a big government taxpayer-funded scheme to reduce emissions in the long term would “become a very expensive charge on the budget in the years ahead”.
6: The government is not including climate change in long-term planning exercises that really should be planning for climate change. The recent intergenerational report – supposedly an economic planning document for the next 40 years – claimed that some economic effects of climate change “may be beneficial – where regions become warmer or wetter this may allow for increased agricultural output, while others may be harmful”. It was otherwise largely silent on the economic consequences of climate change, saying its focus was “primarily on government expenses that are affected by demographic change”.
Previous intergenerational reports didn’t see it that way. Global warming changes rainfall patterns, drought frequency and the frequency of extreme weather events, but the recent agriculture green paper didn’t really mention it either. “We’ve put billions of dollars on the table to try to address the issue of climate variability ... In fact, I would love to have some the money that’s been invested by previous governments in so-called ‘changing the temperature back’. If we’d had that invested in agriculture, we’d be an agricultural superpower,” the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, said at the time. And this week’s energy white paper – the long-term planning document on Australia’s energy supply – didn’t mention it as a policy driver either, even though electricity generation and transport fuels are major sources of emissions.
7: The government is refusing to accept a political compromise on the renewable energy target (backed by Labor, the renewables industry and big business) because it thinks the industry won’t be able to reach the target, but the only reason industry wouldn’t reach the target is the absence of a political compromise. This fight has been going on ever since the government accepted that it wasn’t going to be able to ram through the findings of the review by self-professed climate sceptic and businessman Dick Warburton, to gut the RET –which was supposed to ensure 41,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy by 2020.
Negotiations with Labor have been dragging on. Now Labor, the renewables industry, big business and energy users have all agreed on a compromise plan for 33,500 gigawatt hours. The industry minister, Ian Macfarlane, says he won’t budge from 32,000 gigawatt hours because the industry can’t build any more. The industry says it certainly can, but the biggest risk is the investment drought during this endless wait for some kind of political compromise.
Climate policy is complicated, but it’s also really simple. We have to find a way to gradually reduce emissions, including from industry, transport and electricity generation. Most experts think some kind of carbon price is the most cost-effective way. There are other ways – direct government regulation, for example. But trying to hide this basic goal behind a smokescreen of rhetoric or the creative manipulation of complicated concepts and numbers cannot avoid the inevitable.
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Apr 10, 2015 09:45
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Julie Bishop to lobby Iran to accept forcibly returned asylum seekers – report
quote:Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, will reportedly try to persuade Iran to take back hundreds of asylum seekers who have been found not to be refugees when she makes a visit to Tehran next week.
Iran has previously refused to accept thousands of Iranians who have arrived by boat to Australia and have been denied refugee protection.
A diplomatic source has told Fairfax Media that the question of returning failed asylum seekers has been an ongoing discussion between Ms Bishop and her Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif.
“One of the biggest challenges that we are facing with failed asylum seekers is those refusing to return home,” the source told Fairfax. Many Iranians are being held on Manus Island, where Iranian Reza Barati was killed in February 2014.
Bishop will travel to Tehran next week aiming to build closer ties with Iran in a bid to help with the fight against Islamic State extremists, against the backdrop of the recent international agreement to lift sanctions in exchange for Iran abandoning its nuclear program.
One Iranian asylum seeker went on a hunger strike in Perth for 44 days after attempts to appeal against the government’s rejection of his refugee status were also rejected.
Victoria Martin from the Refugee Rights Action Network of WA told Guardian Australia the man had received a number of offers of legal assistance, and would continue to fight to be able to stay in Australia.
The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, has said his department is still offering to repatriate the man back to Iran, where his supporters say he will face persecution.
But because Iran will not accept forced repatriations, he could remain in detention indefinitely.
Since December more than 15 Iranian men at Darwin’s Wickham Point immigration detention facility have embarked on hunger strikes.
One man, known as Martin, began his strike in November, stopping shortly before Christmas under urging from advocates, before restarting again until February when a court appeal of his case was heard. He remains in extremely poor health as a result, and is classified “high risk” in the centre.
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Apr 11, 2015 03:44
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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GST fight: Joe Hockey talks privatisation and WA brings up secessionist past
quote:Western Australia is heading into its 2015-16 budget almost $3bn poorer than it was last year, thanks to a tumbling iron ore price and a failure to convince other states that it should retain more than 30 cents in the dollar of what it collects in GST.
But the WA premier, Colin Barnett, told the West Australian that federal treasurer Joe Hockey’s attempt to link the state’s GST share to broader economic changes, such as privatising the electricity network, was a “huge mistake in my mind and he will not be popular in WA because of that”.
Hockey argued for Western Australia at an acrimonious treasurers’ meeting on Thursday, saying that to stick to the recommendation of the Commonwealth Grants Commission and drop WA’s GST share from 37 cents in the dollar to below 30 cents risked “massive damage” to the federation.
However he said WA should in turn restructure its economy by deregulating trading hours, removing anomalies – like the potato marketing corporation – and privatising its electricity network.
Hockey is expected to decide between four options – taking the commission’s recommendation, freezing WA’s GST share at last year’s rate, putting a floor in the GST share of 50 cents in the dollar, or making a one-off payment to WA – by next month.
The WA treasurer, Mike Nahan, said forcing Hockey to make the call was preferable to leaving the decision up to the states, telling the ABC that if it were left to the states he would lose not only the GST revenue but the shirt off his back.
“If I relied on my fellow state treasurers I would come out with just my underwear on,” he said.
However he supported Barnett’s comments against federally-enforced economic restructuring, saying the GST was not tied to privatisation and deregulation, and “mixing them up like Joe has is not helpful”.
Nahan referred reporters on Friday to the 1933 secession referendum where WA came close to splintering off on its own, which ironically was the catalyst for the creation of the Commonwealth Grants Commission. That was, as the commission itself puts it, “a time when the growing disillusionment of the less populous states with the policies of the central government threatened the very fabric of the federation.”
“The grants commission started as a result of Western Australia’s secession movement,” Nahan said. “Maybe we have to be more clear on this.”
WA has threatened not to cooperate with the Commonwealth on other planned tax changes if the GST distribution model is not addressed. New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland have supported WA’s push for a per capita distribution model, and WA is also pushing for a floor to be put in the GST distribution so that no state receives less than 75 cents in the dollar.
Nahan said he told other state treasurers at Thursday’s meeting that under the horizontal fiscal equalisation scheme they had “become mendicants living off someone else’s hard work”.
Further accusations of mendicancy followed. The Victorian treasurer, Tim Pallas, said Western Australia had “the mentality of an unreconstructed mendicant”. Nahan countered by saying that everywhere except Western Australia was a mendicant state, but especially South Australia and Tasmania, and that all other states were “profoundly jealous” of WA’s mining wealth.
“They see buckets of money and ignore the costs,” Nahan said. “And they’re also profoundly jealous. They have viewed Western Australia for years as the most isolated capital in the world and perceive us just to be a lucky state.
“They do not know that we have made our own luck by hard work and focusing for decades on developing our resources and putting in the policies that are necessary.”
Those policies have proved little armour against the falling iron ore price, which has dropped 80% in the past 15 months to just $US48 a tonne.
That’s a problem for Western Australia, which derives almost 20% of its revenue from mining royalties, most of which come from iron ore. The price crash has seen the WA budget forecast drop from a $200m surplus for 2015-16 to a projected almost $2bn deficit.
The falling iron ore price has already hit WA miners. Australian-owned company Atlas Iron Ore shut up shop this week, announcing on Friday that it would stop production at its three mine sites in the Pilbara.
Atlas’s share price had fallen 90% in the past 12 months to just $0.12 on Tuesday, when it requested a voluntary suspension from the ASX. In a statement released on Friday, it said its Mount Webber, Abydos and Wodinga minds would be wound down by the end of April and “put on care and maintenance, pending future iron ore market conditions.” It said 575 employees would be affected.
The junior miner said it needed to sell its iron ore for about $US60 a tonne to break even. On Friday the price was less than $US48 a tonne.
Another miner, Citic, is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with joint venture partner Clive Palmer over allegations he misappropriated $12m from the project to allegedly spend on the Palmer United party election campaign.
John Nicolaou, chief economist for the WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told Guardian Australia that while the state had been able to predict and prepare for a slowing down of its resource sector as major projects moved from construction into production, it had neither predicted nor been prepared for the swift fall in iron ore prices.
And, he said, the three-year average used to calculate GST relativities was not able to accurately reflect that shock.
However he said Hockey’s call for economic restructuring would not be unwelcome in the business sector, saying that despite leading in growth, WA lagged behind when it came to some basic market deregulation.
Sunday trading is just three years old in Perth and is still restricted to 11am to 3pm – even at the supermarket. The taxi-industry is highly regulated, potato growers can’t go above their quota, there’s state-owned lottery and insurance companies, the electricity and water networks are state owned and the state still owns a gold refinery.
Nicolaou said there was “no reason in a 21st century economy” why most of those things should be publicly run.
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Apr 11, 2015 08:58
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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I'm a doctor (though not a GP or public health specialist) and I'm not really convinced this is good or useful policy, even though I'm very pro-vaccination. My reasons are as follows:
1) Family Tax Benefit A (the one they're planning to withhold if you don't vax your kids) is means tested and is only available to families with a taxable income less than ~$50k. Some of the worst offender regions for poor vaccination uptake secondary to "conscientious objection" have a mean income substantially higher than this. So it's probably going to disadvantage poorer families (and low socio-economic status is almost certainly a stronger correlate for poorer health than being unvaccinated is) and have no effect on the richer ones (who weren't getting the benefit anyway).
2) This policy is designed to inflict a financial penalty on those who refuse to undergo a particular medical treatment. I see a fundamental ethical issue with coercing anyone into accepting medical treatment. It raises questions about the validity of any consent given for vaccination. Even when the greater good is so obviously served, there is an underlying principle in medicine that we must respect the autonomy of a patient. You can argue of course about whether the autonomy of the child (and their best interest) overrules that of the parent, but none of that argument will escape the coercive nature of this policy.
People need to vaccinate their children because they want to have them vaccinated, not because they feel they are forced to.
The benefits of population-wide vaccination are immense and essential to maintaining our good standards of public health, but we should get there via an honourable and ethical route, or I fear we'll pay the penalty in other ways.
There are other circumstances where we have exceptions to the basic ethical rules of medicine (eg, breaking confidentiality to do contact tracing with infectious diseases, restricting someone's freedom if they're psychotic, treating someone involuntarily, etc), but those are shrouded and encased in complex and detailed legal frameworks that manage the numerous competing ethical principles, complete with built in review, oversight, security, and protocols of practice. The proposal to restrict welfare to those who don't vaccinate is, by comparison, a very crude method that sidesteps all those things.
If they feel this issue is a serious enough public health matter that it requires coercive treatment, then they should establish a specific legal framework to directly address it; not do it with a "back door" like this. If you want to punish people for not vaccinating, punish them with the law and the courts, out in the open, where it can be subjected to proper scrutiny. Don't do it like this.
If it was only about the individual in question, then there would be a problem with coercing vaccination (Let the stupid weed themselves out, etc), but people who refuse to vaccinate are in our society. They not only put themselves at risk, but through their stupidity they put others at risk as well, and the developed world has seen far too many outbreaks of preventable disease since Wakefield's trash to leave it to uneducated and irrational people who buy this bullshit, especially when many of those who can't get vaccinated for much of this poo poo are the ones most at risk of disease (Newborns, Immune compromised, etc).
Their right to make their own choices on health issues ends at the point where it harms others.
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Apr 12, 2015 03:15
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Police called to immigration detention centre in Darwin amid reports of protest
quote:Police have been called to an unfolding incident at a Darwin immigration detention centre on Wednesday afternoon.
Up to 50 detainees have allegedly broken down a fence between a camp section of the Wickham Point facility and an interview area where some detainees are being held, a source inside the centre has told Guardian Australia.
The group then sat on the ground in protest against impending transfers of at least two families to Nauru, he said, including a pregnant woman who allegedly attempted to take her own life on Tuesday.
Ben Pynt, spokesman for a Darwin advocacy group, cited his own sources and claimed fights were also breaking out and doors kicked in.
A police spokesman confirmed officers were called and both members of the metropolitan patrol group (MPG) and the dog squad were on site and assisting, but any further information would have to come from the immigration department.
A spokeswoman for the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, was not immediately able to confirm the unfolding incident.
There have been spate of self-harm incidents and alleged suicide attempts in recent weeks.
On Tuesday afternoon a woman who is five-months pregnant allegedly tried to take her own life but another detainee intervened, Guardian Australia was told.
Three others also attempted self harm, and an older Iranian woman suffered a heart attack later that afternoon.
The older woman was taken to hospital and the other three were taken to medical support rooms inside the centre where they were kept under guard overnight, according to both Pynt and a source inside the detention centre.
The immigration department did not provide confirmation of any information.
The detention centre source has since said the pregnant woman and her husband were separated from other detainees in an interview room ahead of a possible transfer to Nauru on Wednesday night or Thursday morning.
It is this area that the detainees are allegedly trying to get to through the fence.
“The people are so angry and they are trying to break the fences and help them,” he said.
A message obtained by Guardian Australia and purported to be from the husband of the pregnant woman, said his wife suffers depression.
“Her doctor said and wrote that she has to leave detention and must go to community but nobody care about her situation. Unfortunately today she [tried to take her own life], if my friends [did] not come and help her she was die.”
According to Pynt there have now been 19 self-harm incidents inside the centre in the past three weeks, and he said they were often sparked by impending transfers of detainees to Nauru.
“On the Thursday afternoon people are really beside themselves,” he told ABC on Monday. “Last week I was in there on a Thursday and people that I visited told me that nobody had slept on the Wednesday night because everyone was scared that they would be next.”
Pynt called for the immigration department to give people notice if they were going to be transferred in order to relieve some anxiety.
It was revealed on Wednesday the Australian government has chartered a plane to move the first group of refugees from Nauru to Cambodia within days, according to sources on the island.
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Apr 15, 2015 09:45
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Time for something cheerful!
New immigration powers would let guards 'beat asylum seekers to death'
quote:A former Victorian supreme court judge says new powers proposed for guards in immigration detention centres would in effect authorise them “to beat asylum seekers to death”.
In extraordinary evidence to a Senate hearing on Thursday, Stephen Charles SC said the migration amendment (maintaining the good order of immigration detention facilities) bill 2015 would substantially expand the powers granted to guards in detention centres in a way that would “inevitably encourage violence by guards against asylum seekers”.
The new powers would allow immigration officers – which may include private contractors – to use “reasonable force against any person” if the officer believes it is necessary to protect the life, health or safety of people in detention or to maintain the good order, peace or security of a detention centre.
Such powers potentially give staff with a low level of training a greater level of immunity than that granted to state and federal police forces.
Charles, who sat on the Victorian court of appeal until 2006, said the standard proposed in the bill would introduce a similar test to those that have been considered in the US, and drew parallels with the recent shooting of Walter Scott by the police officer Michael Slager.
“Time and again police in the United States have been acquitted in circumstances such as these,” Charles said.
“These amendments to the Migration Act will in effect authorise guards to beat asylum seekers to death on the basis they reasonably believe it is necessary … to do so.”
He said the fact there would be “no effective way to take proceedings against the commonwealth” would further encourage guards to use excessive force in detention centres, and described the training requirements proposed in the explanatory memorandum of the bill as a “joke in extremely bad taste”.
The bill will give the commonwealth, private companies and guards immunity from civil and criminal liability unless it could be demonstrated that the use of force was not in good faith.
The president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, said the bar on proceedings would make it “virtually impossible” to bring forward an action, because of the difficulty of demonstrating bad faith in legal proceedings.
“Senior courts have ... explained the very high threshold that you must prove to demonstrate bad faith. It’s very hard to show a subjective intent of bad faith of a serving officer acting in the course of their employment,” Triggs said.
She said the language in the bill surrounding the scope of the powers “need to be significantly tightened up.”
Triggs added that if the powers were to be included into the Migration Act then the limits to the exercise of the power should also be clearly spelt out.
Gabrielle Appleby, associate professor at UNSW, said “the individuals authorised under this bill are not department officers, they are contractors”.
Appleby raised concerns about the training requirements for guards, which are not expressly set out in the bill and will instead be left up to the minister. The explanatory memorandum suggests the standards will be a certificate II in security operations, which are a base level training requirement for security operations.
“The determination by the minister is not a disallowable instrument. This means it’s not subject to parliamentary scrutiny,” she said.
The Senate inquiry follows reports of unrest at the Wickham Point detention centre in Darwin on Wednesday.
Such a law would in effect legalise the implementation of a Final Solution™ to the refugee problem.
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Apr 16, 2015 10:49
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Darwin detention centre families taken to Nauru in early hours, say advocates
quote:Families at the centre of protests inside a Darwin detention centre have been transferred to Nauru in the early hours of Saturday morning, advocates and detainees say.
The reports of the transfer follow a week which saw dozens of people protest inside the Wickham Point facility, and numerous instances of self harm and alleged suicide attempts.
Spokesman for the Darwin asylum seeker support and advocacy network (Dassan), Ben Pynt told Guardian Australia that after protests began for the second time on Thursday transfers to Nauru were cancelled. People who had been separated were returned to their usual accommodation in the family compound at Wickham Point, a claim also made by a detention centre source.
However on Saturday morning they told Guardian Australia several people including families with at least one three-month-old baby were put on a flight out sometime after 5am.
It’s not known how many people may have been transferred out of Darwin, but a flight from Brisbane to Nauru left at 7am.
The centre had been on lockdown on Friday night, Guardian Australia was told. Guards were not allowing anyone to leave their rooms, which has not been the case during the past year at least.
One person reported hearing a woman screaming and items being smashed somewhere in the centre in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The immigration department did not respond to a request for comment.
An NT police spokesman told Guardian Australia: “police assisted in an operation out there, but the nature of the operation or what it was all about needs to come from the immigration department.”
He could not confirm whether the assistance related to further protests or not. Police media have been previously able to confirm details about call outs to the protests.
Northern Territory police had been called out to respond to unrest at the centre over recent days, including the first protest on Wednesday, in which an internal fence was allegedly broken down so detainees could stage a sit in.
The protesters were demonstrating against what they believed were imminent transfers of families to Nauru, including a woman who is five months pregnant. Some detainees had been separated into rooms at the centre, which is widely considered a sign of a transfer in the next day or two.
The department of immigration said there was never a scheduled transfer of a pregnant woman from the centre.
Thursday’s incident included a number of people allegedly on a roof at Wickham Point, a claim dismissed by a spokeswoman for immigration minister Peter Dutton as “mischievous and inaccurate claims made by advocates and detainees” in a statement to the ABC.
A spokeswoman for NT police told Guardian Australia that police attended Wickham Point on Thursday at the request of security engaged by the department of immigration.
She said the “disturbance at location was not to a level that required a handover to police, so police left at approx 6pm”.
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Apr 18, 2015 18:04
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- Pickled Tink
- Apr 28, 2012
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Have you heard about First Dog? It's a very good comic I just love.
Also, wear your bike helmets kids. I copped several blows to the head but my helmet left me totally unscathed.
Finally you should check out First Dog as it's a good comic I like it very much.
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Fun Shoe
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Victoria police defend force used during terrorist raids despite claims of injury
quote:Victoria police have defended their use of force during weekend raids in Melbourne after one teenager said he was kicked in the face by police, another said his arm was broken, and allegations emerged of racial abuse.
The secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Kuranda Seyit, told Guardian Australia the pre-dawn raids by 200 police were “clearly over the top”.
The acting chief commissioner of Victoria police, Tim Cartwright, said an investigation would be held into the allegations of derogatory language and excessive force during the raids, which police said were necessary to thwart a terrorist plot planned for Anzac Day commemorations. Five men were arrested.
“We will be meeting with each of the families today to talk to them about what they have seen and if they have any concerns,” Cartwright said on Monday.
He said capsicum spray was used on at least one man and “there would routinely be force used in these arrests” to ensure people did not have weapons. Knives and a sword were confiscated.
Earlier, Cartwright said the raids “were carried out in high-risk situations, 3.30 in the morning. We believe at least some of these people will be armed and will have a strong motivation to hurt police. I’m not surprised there are some minor injuries as a result.”
Sevdet Besim, 18, of Hallam, was charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act and remains in custody. Another man, also 18, is being held under an interim preventative detention order (PDO), and cannot be named. PDOs are a controversial counter-terrorism measure under which a person can be held without charge for 14 days. It is the first time such an order has been used in Victoria.
One man has been charged with weapons offences and released on bail, and two men have been interviewed and released without charge. All are aged 18 or 19.
Eathan Cruse, a 19-year-old Indigenous man, has alleged police kicked him in the face when they burst into his house in Eumemmerring, in Melbourne. He said he suffered extensive bruising and spent six hours in hospital.
His mother, Anja, told the Herald Sun that police “flogged him pretty bad because there was a pool of blood on the floor”.
[b]“There was no reason why they got treated like this ... My son wasn’t charged or anything. What was the reason? All that for questioning? It’s not on.”
Cruse’s father, Glen, told Fairfax Media that [b]police yelled, “Shut up, you Abo” during the altercation. Cruse gave a statement to police and was released without charge on Saturday afternoon.
The father of the man being held under a PDO has also claimed that his son’s arm and ribs were broken during the raid.
Police have released few details about the alleged terrorism plot, but have said it was inspired by the radical terrorist group Islamic State (Isis). Some of the men were associates of Numan Haider, an 18-year-old Melbourne man shot dead after stabbing two police officers last September.
Haider and the five arrested men had attended the Al-Furqan centre in Springvale, known for its radical preaching. On Monday, Junaid Thorne, a self-styled Islamic preacher who regularly speaks at the centre, voiced support for the five men, tweeting that the “young kids” were arrested “over mere speculation and the usual nonsense”.
Asked whether Al-Furqan should be shut down, Cartwright said police had concerns about the group, but “association doesn’t mean guilt … People do have a democratic right to come together and express their views.”
Saturday’s raids were the latest in a series of counter-terrorism operations in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane designed to prevent Isis-inspired violence in Australia, which authorities say is a growing threat.
Some Islamic leaders have said the new laws unfairly target Muslims and that the federal government has given mixed messages about tolerance.
Seyit said he had “very serious concerns” about the raids.
He questioned the need for “raids in the middle of the night when families are asleep and traumatising women and children, and using excessive force. These are the things we need to reconsider.”
He questioned why the teenagers could not have been brought into the police station during daylight hours.
“I understand national security is important, but we need to keep it in balance. I think 200 police officers in the middle of the night for very young men is a little bit over the top,” he told Guardian Australia.
Cartwright said the interim PDO was due to expire on Tuesday and police were likely to apply for it to be extended in the supreme court if the man had not been charged. The orders are meant to be granted to preserve evidence relating to a planned terrorist attack, or to stop an imminent attack being carried out.
They deployed 200 officers to arrest 5 people (40 per person).
1 has been charged with terrorism stuff. 1 has been charged with weapons offences and released on bail, probably relating to the knives and sword in the article. 2 were released without charge, and 1 is being held without charge under a law that shouldn't exist.
There is no indication any of the suspects engaged in violence. If they had, it would have been all over the news. Meanwhile, these people seem to have had the poo poo kicked out of them. Also suffered racial abuse.
Furthermore, there's no details on this alleged plot except what it is supposed to be targeting.
Honestly, it looks like they used overwhelming force to go after a soft target, and employed counter terrorism laws they don't need in order to justify their (the laws) continued existence, just like they did here in Sydney last time there was a "huge raid".
I wonder if this sword is plastic too?
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Apr 20, 2015 10:30
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May 22, 2024 16:50
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Mar 31, 2015 12:05
right?
