quote:

Federal politics and diary allegations

In mid-2012, following the defection of Peter Slipper from the Liberals to become an Independent MP and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Brough announced that he was seeking LNP preselection for the seat of Fisher for the next federal election. On 29 July 2012, it was announced that had won the preselection for the seat, despite criticism over his contact with James Ashby. Ashby had been an adviser to Slipper who had made accusation of sexual harassment. Justice Steve Rares found that Mr Brough had acted with Mr Ashby and another Slipper staffer Karen Doane in abusing the judicial process for the "purpose of causing significant public, reputational and political damage to Mr Slipper". On 9 October 2012, Slipper resigned as Speaker following revelations of mobile phone text messages he had sent to Ashby, and was replaced by Anna Burke. In an early 2014 appeal ruling the full bench of the Federal Court found that Justice Rares had 'no basis to conclude that Brough was part of any combination with anyone in respect to the commencement of these proceedings with the predominant purpose of damaging Slipper in the way alleged or at all,' and that there was 'nothing untoward about those matters'.

Brough stood down from the Turnbull ministry and moved to the backbench on 29 December 2015 pending the completion of an investigation by the Australian Federal Police over the alleged copying of the diary of former speaker Peter Slipper. Jamie Briggs also resigned on the same day. Questions were raised over the holiday timing.

gay picnic defence posted:

How does the government plan to get student loans back from people living overseas? Can they force you to declare your income, do they have any means of verifying it, and can they do anything about it if you give them a fake number?

Cartoon posted:

I like the fact that these Neanderthals can't fathom that the strategy of burying this is completely undone by their outraged declarations of unfairness.

gay picnic defence posted:

Would other countries bother signing up if we did something like that? I can imagine nations being a bit unwilling to ignore a US or UK request to do stuff like that because those two actually have some clout on the world stage, but who would give a gently caress what a little tinpot state like us wants?

ewe2 posted:

They were in Coles on New Years Eve.

freebooter posted:

I for one thing hot cross buns are rad and would be happy to see them all year. Ditto easter eggs

Birb Katter posted:

The ABC posted:

WA Labor in election-winning position in latest newspoll

Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett's grip on power has slumped just 15 months out from the state election, a poll out today shows.

The Newspoll, published in The Australian newspaper, shows the Labor Party has increased its primary vote from 33 to 42 per cent in the past six months.

Labor now leads the Coalition 53 to 47 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.

This could give Labor a two-party-preferred swing of 10 per cent, which would allow it to claim 10 seats and form Government.

It is the first time Labor has lead the Coalition since Mr Barnett came to power in 2008.

Veteran political analyst Peter Kennedy said the Coalition had only itself to blame for the slump in the poll.

"One of the problems for the Government has been the deteriorating budget position," he said.

"I think its reputation as an economic manager, or financial manager, is on the line and that's where Labor has been making inroads.

"The good result for Labor sets the battle lines for the rest of the year and Mr Barnett will have the job ahead of him to peg Labor back."

Cabinet reshuffle, financial management key to retaining power

The Government has battled a worsening budget position on the back of a plunging iron ore price.

Mr Barnett has campaigned for the state to secure a greater share of GST revenue in order to fill budgetary black holes.

The Mid Year Economic Financial Outlook released last month projected the Government's deficit would balloon to $3.1 billion by the end of the financial year.

This will eclipse the state budget estimate in May of $2.7 billion.

Mr Kennedy said the only good news for the Government was it still had time before Western Australia went to the polls in March next year.

"Still 15 months out from the next elections, so there's plenty of time for Mr Barnett to turn the ship around," he said.

"Remember he will have a reshuffle of the Cabinet very shortly, and that will be an important opportunity to get his team in place to face the election early next year.

"I think the reshuffle of the Cabinet and also the budgetary position will be crucial in deciding who wins next year."

Labor leader Mark McGowan has also increased his popularity among voters.

He leads Mr Barnett as preferred premier, 41 to 36 per cent.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-04/wa-labor-in-election-winning-position-in-latest-newspoll/7065794

Amoeba102 posted:

Yeah, it's been there for a while but I only just saw it recently.

Anidav posted:

If you get involved in online debates about economic history, it won't be long before someone tells you that the West is rich because it stole the resources of the regions it colonized. This stolen-wealth theory is cited as the reason Britain and France are rich today, while Ethiopia and Burundi are poor. It also is sometimes used to argue that global capitalism is inherently unjust and that wealth must be radically redistributed between nations as compensation.

The problem is, the stolen-wealth theory is wrong.

Oh, it's absolutely true that colonial powers stole natural resources from the lands they conquered. No one disputes that. And at the time, this definitely made the colonized regions a lot poorer. Britain, for example, caused repeated famines in India by raising taxes on farmers and by encouraging the cultivation of cash crops instead of subsistence crops. That is a pretty stark example of destructive resource extraction.

It's also probably true that this stolen wealth helped much of the West get rich. Of course, Western countries didn't simply consume the resources they plundered -- the global economy isn't just a lump of wealth that gets divvied up, but rather relies on the productive efforts of individuals, companies and governments. The U.K., for example, was able to industrialize not by consuming spices confiscated from India, but because its citizens invented power looms and steam engines and other technologies, and because its people worked very hard at factories and plants that used those technologies.

But steam engines and power looms and other industrial machinery required raw materials like coal and rubber as inputs. When those materials became less expensive, it became cheaper to substitute machines for human labor. That means that some of the resources stolen from colonies probably did give Britain and France part of the boost they needed to jump-start the industrialization that eventually made them wealthy.

So if the West did steal resources from colonized nations, and if this theft did help them get rich, why do I say that the stolen-wealth theory is wrong? I say that because the theory doesn't explain the global distribution of income today. It is no longer a significant reason why rich countries are rich and poor countries are poor. The easiest way to see this is to observe all the rich countries that never had the chance to plunder colonies. Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Japan had colonial empires for only the very briefest of moments, and their greatest eras of development came before and after those colonial episodes. Switzerland, Finland, and Austria never had colonies. And South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong were themselves colonies of other powers. Yet today they are very rich. They did it not by theft, but by working hard, being creative, and having good institutions.

Meanwhile, poor countries have long since taken control of their natural resources. State-controlled oil companies in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Russia own far more of the world's oil than do giant Western corporations like Exxon or BP. African countries control their own mines, and Latin American countries their own crop land. The era of resource theft by rich countries is over and done.

Yet still, somehow, these countries are not very rich. Only a small handful of tiny nations whose economies are based on natural resources -- Brunei, Kuwait and Qatar among others -- are actually rich. Most are poor, despite controlling all of their own wealth. This sad fact is known as the resource curse. So it's unlikely that resource-rich countries would have become industrialized but for the depredations of colonialism. And it seems quite possible that colonial nations such as France and the U.K. would have gotten rich without their resource plunder, as did Germany, South Korea, Switzerland and Taiwan.

Does that mean colonialism was a benign institution? Definitely not. At a bare minimum, the tens of millions killed by colonial conquests and famines leave an indelible stain on the West. And while colonialism had benefits in some places, in many others it left a nasty legacy that is felt to this day. Many economic studies show that regions where colonizers focused on extracting resources were later cursed with pernicious political institutions. Those regions, even today, exhibit poor economic performance.

So colonializing nations did steal resources, and it did hurt colonies by doing it. But the real tragedy is how unnecessary that all was. Britain and France would have gotten rich without plundering Africa, India and Southeast Asia. All of that violence and conquest was probably for nothing.

Ler posted:

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Read any of Gary Johns' op-ed pieces from the past few years and you'll get an idea.

Or don't, since they're garbage.

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Barnaby Joyce: I hope we don't become too politically correct after Briggs, Dutton affairs
Deputy Nationals Leader Barnaby Joyce says he hopes Australian politics doesn't become "sterile" and overly political correct following outrage over the behaviour of…

gay picnic defence posted:

I've become too desensitised to that sort of thing to get angry about it, try harder next time.

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

Maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, we should drag these people out of bed in the middle of the night and shoot them dead in the street

Zenithe posted:

Check out the whole conversation, it's pretty amazing.

Almost as amazing as an elected leader having a conversation like this in full view of the public.

https://twitter.com/DavidLeyonhjelm/status/684128757796352000

TheMightyHandful posted:

gently caress people.

Birb Katter posted:

Came by boat no less

Unrelated:

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

I sympathize a lot with the female reporter in this circumstance: Gayle was hardly behaving like Hitler but cricket is a gentleman's game and it would have been the gentlemanly thing to show her respect as a sports journalist -she's put in a lovely situation whereby she can't really neutralize his flirting and do her job without coming across as 'bitchy' or a 'victim'.

It's an unfair situation and I can understand why many women interpret this gratuitous, public, bullying masculinity as an assault on their gender and their personhood. Unfortunately, the Progressive denial of the intrinsic differences between men and women is fundamentally absurd and if we want to avoid the nightmare scenario of our public institutions and debate being ground to a halt by dumpy cat ladies and tortured white knight virgins, then we're going to have to get serious about banning women from public life, submitting ourselves to the will of Allah and accepting the perfect order of the world he created.

Ian Winthorpe III posted:

Good when i'm enjoying the sound and spectacle of a chinese new years parade

Frogmanv2 posted:

I actually conversed with Scott Ludlam about this, and he convinced me that nuclear power is not right for Australia. It's not needed, it will take too long, the risks are too high compared to other generation methods and as long as there is humans in control of the systems, there will always be a giant glaring weak spot.

That's not to say it's not right for other nations, but it's not right for Australia.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Why are people talking about Joyce as Deputy PM today? Did people finally remember Truss existed only to check in on him and find out he died months ago?

hooman posted:

For example anyone lobbying to shut down or not replace the lucas heights reactor is an idiot because it is a vital and necessary supplier of short half life radio-medical treatment and diagnostic items.

EXAKT Science posted:

Yeah tell that to the birds you loving monster

xPanda posted:

What do you mean by this? I watched that doco and I don't remember any shenanigans regarding nuclear medicine. What I do remember of the doco are the concluding remarks, which said that we've pretty much missed the boat with nuclear and that if we have to make a decision right now (which we do) that we should go renewable.

TTDT posted:

But there are other dangerous radioactive fission fragments in there with much shorter half-lives.
And the astounding thing is some of these can be used to save lives.
In this unremarkable building, they take what makes Chernobyl so dangerous, and they make a life-saving medicine.
All right, I am all set, suited up, and ready to go into Australia's one and only nuclear reactor.
This is not a power reactor.
It is a research reactor, and here they create medicine and technology.
The medicine they make here is called technetium-99m.
-COMPUTER: Please enter and pause until counting has finishe.
-MULLER: But what's really exciting is where they make it.
-Okay.
Please proceed.
-This is a nuclear reactor.
It's actually an open-pool reactor, which means that the core is visible 12 meters underneath that water.
You can see a blue glow down there, which is actually called Cherenkov radiation, and what that is is electrons moving through the water faster than light can move through the water.
And that creates what's kind of like an optical sonic boom.
That's the blue glow of light which forms a cone behind every electron.
Down there, they are splitting uranium atoms into fragments.
It's the first step in making the medicine technetium-99m.
Technetium-99m has a half-life of just six hours.
It's a crucial medicine used to detect cancer.
Here I met up with Jason.
-MAN: It was actually 2001, and I was playing Australian rules football, and it was a pain in my leg, and it just got worse and worse, and I assumed I had a hip injury and saw an orthopedic surgeon, expecting a hip operation, and he said, "You've got a tumor about that long in your leg.
" There's a few key tests, but this one is the key test.
-MULLER: So, what do you reckon? Should you be radioactive? -BATSON: [ Chuckles ] You're gonna tell me.
[ Device beeping slowly ] -MULLER: You don't seem very radioactive.
That reading is about the same as everywhere around this hospital.
And now the highly radioactive technetium-99m is injected into Jason.
[ Device beeping rapidly ] I'm getting an alarm off that.
This is the kind of level of radiation we saw in Chernobyl.
-MAN: Injecting now.
-MULLER: And what they're injecting you with is actually fragments of uranium.
-There you go.
-MULLER: [ Laughs ] Doesn't freak you out? [ Chuckles ] -My eyes are open, and I'm breathing.
-MULLER: [ Laughs ] [ Device beeping rapidly ] As you can hear from my Geiger counter, I'm getting close to a radioactive source.
In this case, it's Jason.
He is actually emitting lots of gamma rays right now.
And in the same way that my Geiger counter picks up these gamma rays, this machine is actually detecting those gamma rays and making a picture out of them, because technetium gathers at the site of fast-growing cancers.
And that allows us to determine if there are any tumors in Jason's body because they'll be glowing quite brightly.
So this allows us to spot cancer earlier and treat it better.
But what about Jason, who's now full of radioactive technetium-99m? Well, that's where the six-hour half-life kicks in.
[ Device ringing ] -MULLER: Yeah, 240, 300! Look at that! That bit of you is going off.
-Wow.
-MULLER: I saw something similar when I was a few hundred meters from the Chernobyl reactor that blew up.
[ Laughs ] -It's amazing.
-MULLER: Have you heard about half-life? Have you heard that term before? -No.
-Half-life means how long it takes for half of the stuff they've put in you to decay.
So, when it's reading right now around 200 microsieverts an hour, the half-life of the substance that they put in you is about six hours.
So, in six hours, this should be reading 100.
-Yeah.
-In another six hours, it'll read 50, and then 25 and so on.
So it cuts in half every six hours.
-Every six hours.
Yeah.

Orkin Mang posted:

i wish graig gabtar was in a coma

BBJoey posted:

I think he was asking about your"Kind of makes the Greens leap of faith future technology argument look like the equivalent of 'clean coal'. A bit lame to be honest." statement, which I too do not understand. There's no future technology involved - currently, considering the cost and time it takes to build a nuclear power plant, renewables are a much more cost-effective and realistic proposal than creating an Australian nuclear power industry from scratch. If you're using Lucas Heights as an example of how Australia could jump to nuclear power you've missed that the HIFAR is a medical reactor which is much less complicated than a full-fledged powerplant.

Greens posted:

The Australian Greens want:

Closure of the OPAL nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights and development of non-reactor technologies, such as particle accelerators, for the production of radioisotopes for medical and scientific purposes.

BCR posted:

Because its the intro to 'the rover'

SeekOtherCandidate posted:

you're wrong about nuclear and the fact that you've paired it with gmos is a dead giveaway that you're mostly a fan because of the bizarre first world nerd fetishisation of science and new technology as a substitute for religion and australia will never need and should never use nuclear power

hth

Count Chocula posted:

I was in the audience for Doctor Karl's Challenge of Change/Intergenerational Report ad (they paid me in Coles vouchers) and during the between-take banter, audience Q&As, interesting factoids and plugs for his books I challenged his claim about the dangers of GMOs; he said he'd look into it.

That whole experience was weird - it was shot by Peter Weir's Oscar-winning cinematographer in a studio the size of an airplane hanger.

The Age posted:

Facility for sex offenders to be expanded at Ararat

The facility housing some of Victoria worst sex offenders will be expanded to hold more of the former prisoners on supervision orders.

The state government will announce on Friday the capacity of the facility - which houses offenders who have finished their sentences but are deemed to be an unacceptable risk of reoffending - will be increased from 40 beds to 55 at the cost of $3 million, and that work will begin next month.

The village-style complex, called Corella Place, is located next to the prison in the western Victorian town of Ararat. There are no walls surrounding the facility, but the offenders living there are monitored with GPS ankle bracelets and cannot leave without permission.

''The existing residential facility plays an essential role in the management and ongoing rehabilitation of Victoria's most serious sex offenders,'' Corrections Minister Ed O'Donohue said.

Mad Katter posted:

I think the most problematic part about the story is that the victims receive relatively little support from the church in comparison to their abusers.

The Peccadillo posted:

Rehabilitation of sexually abusive convicts as a public project and private payments to offenders from the body they were facilitated by are very different things, with very different rubrics and aims, and they do not replace eachother

Senor Tron posted:

Well in the government funded program it's expressly for the purpose of keeping them away from children. Is there anything showing that the Church programs involve round the clock seperation of the offenders from youth?

Birb Katter posted:

Thread has been pretty quiet lately so let's get back on track. Should sausages be called sangas or sandwiches? Can they both be sangas so you can have a sanga sanga?

Anidav posted:

People actually exist who call burgers sandwiches.

People cannot distinguish between bread and bun.

A Big Mac Sandwich please!

You Am I posted:

My first customer was Megan
She came in for a hamburger with the lot no meat
"Hey, that's a salad roll", I said
And we started going out

Vladimir Poutine posted:

That doesn't sound vegetarian at all!!

hooman posted:

I have no idea what either of those are.

hooman posted:

Goats Cheese Vegetarian Pizza with Lamb is the best you pleb.

hooman posted:

meat