Solemn Sloth posted:

Tasmania wouldn't have enough money to buy their own apples under that system, so it's no surprise the premier came out swinging, Turnbull doesn't vote for him.

Turnbull appears to be doubling down though, now he's talking about removing federal funding and oversight for the public school sector (while of course maintaining funding for the private sector).

Jumpingmanjim posted:

MALCOLM TURNBULL: If we need more money, then they go, the state would go to their parliament, raise the money, go to the people and persuade them of the merits of it.

MATT WORDSWORTH: Not according to the Treasurer.

SCOTT MORRISON, TREASURER: The Prime Minister made it pretty clear today also that we have no appetite for states to be able to increase taxes.

SKY NEWS JOURNALIST: The Prime Minister did say today that in the future states would be free to increase their income tax rates, which would in fact increase the overall tax burden.

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, the Prime Minister has - I don’t think has gone that far, ultimately.

MATT WORDSWORTH [REPORTER]: It’s another example of a communication breakdown between the PM and his Treasurer after the Budget was brought forward by a week.

ewe2 posted:

If he was doing this regularly months ago, maybe. But as a tactic this close to a Budget and a possible DD, it's suicide.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-polit...401-gnw4pc.html

Endman posted:

That would be a dangerous move, though. Federal govt doesn't want the states in revolt against them because it makes life super difficult.

turdbucket posted:

They most certainly did have agriculture, it was widespread as well. There's a good map of the "grain belt" used for farming pre-invasion and it covers a massive area across the continent. I'm not saying we should idolise pre-industrialisation life but people really don't give them enough credit for cultivating this harsh dry dusty continent. There's evidence of farming in pretty much all indigenous societies as well as large settlements but these were mostly all destroyed by the British. Far from a perfect life but their land management practices and agricultural techniques were actually pretty incredible when you compare to how quickly the imported European agricultural work has annihilated the soil and ecosystem of this country. Getting as much food as they did out of such a harsh environment is something that should be praised, not forgotten or dismissed like we do to every part of indigenous culture.

It's only in the last 80 years that life has really improved to be honest, I'm pretty sure most people would take 4 hours of work just to provide comfortably for your family and friends while spending the majority of your time in leisure and freedom in a clean, healthy environment over being locked in a coal mine or factory for 16 hours a day before sleeping in a small room with 4 other families. It's a dumb misconception that people pre-industrialisation died in their 30s, if you made it past childhood you'd live a pretty long life. Again not idolising their society but the argument the British somehow brought magical life improvements with them is idiotic.

Anidav posted:

The Prime Minister says the states cannot any longer credibly ask the federal government to raise taxes for them if they are not prepared to raise taxes themselves.

The Prime Minister has hit back at the rejection of his income tax plan, painting its defeat as a "moment of clarity" that revealed the states lacked the stomach for reform and must live within their means.

Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday brushed off suggestions that the failure of what he hailed as only days ago as "the most fundamental reform to the federation in generations" marked a major humiliation for his government.

He instead recast the outcome of this week's Council of Australian Governments meeting as showing up the inconsistencies of the states, which had appealed to the federal government to give them the proceeds of increases to the GST and income tax.

"The important thing is that what we have seen is the states making it very clear that they are not prepared to contemplate being responsible for levying a share of income tax," Mr Turnbull said.

"What that means is they cannot any longer credibly ask the federal government to raise taxes for them to spend if they were not prepared to raise those taxes themselves when they were given the opportunity."

The proposal, branded "double taxation" by Opposition leader Bill Shorten, would have seen a reduction of the federal government's income tax collection in favour of allowing the states and territories to collect the remainder to fund services like hospitals and schools.

Leaders instead agreed to consider a counter-proposal that would give states direct access to a fixed percentage of a growing income tax pool, replacing tied and special-purpose grants from the Commonwealth.

Mr Turnbull said the defeat of his government's plan was a "wake up call" for the states, which had made it clear that they did not want to put up taxes and "neither do we".

"So this has been a very important moment of clarity, and what it says to us is that we must live within our means," he said.

Friday's meeting otherwise ended with state and territory leaders accepting an extra $2.9 billion for health and hospital spending to 2020.

Mr Turnbull's comments about the states and territories were echoed in Melbourne by his Health Minister Sussan Ley, who denied the proposal's defeat was an embarrassment.

"They're quick to ask the Commonwealth to do their dirty work," Ms Ley told reporters in Melbourne on Saturday.

"We should never make an apology for having big ideas and the courage to make a difference."

Mr Shorten, who appeared at a shipbuilders' rally in Adelaide on Saturday, branded the unsuccessful tax proposal a "humiliating farce".

"He doesn't even have the courage of his convictions," said Mr Shorten said.

Defence Minister Marise Payne, who appeared alongside Mr Turnbull in Sydney on Saturday following an inspection of the HMAS Canberra, separately lashed out at the opposition's shipbuilding record.

Labor had not placed a single order to build a ship in Australia during six years in government, she said.

"It is hypocritical in the extreme and they should be exposed for the absolute hypocrites that they are," Senator Payne said.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Bob Ellis leaked the Panama papers.

Comstar posted:

I've heard that both ANZ and NAB were using the Panamanian dodgy lawyers. Why would they need them, don't they have people who do that sort of thing?

asio posted:

Ok so lets make this simple:
Qld needs tourism to live
This mine will kill the reef which is most of where our tourism money comes from.
More jobs lost than gained as a result.

quote:

Question. When is libertarianism not liberating? Answer: When it's really a feudalistic patriarchy, a trompe l'oeil of birds and flowers hiding a hardhead pile-driving agenda. In particular, when it's the low-profile but remarkably influential Institute of Public Affairs.

The IPA is usually described as a "radical libertarian think tank" but it's not libertarian, since its freedoms for the few spell oppression for the many. It's also not-thoughtful and so not-public it's almost clandestine.

This is no semantic thing. We're used to weasel words. Australian politics is like one of those World War II towns with its street signs turned awry to confuse the dreaded Hun. We all know that the Liberals are not liberal, the Nationals are not national, and the IPA is not some august public-interest watchdog stamped with official gravitas.

No, this is about who and what is driving the national political agenda.

Four months from election and the people scratch their heads. Why, again, are we destroying the Reef for some billionaire Indian coalminer? Why fund private schools and de-fund public ones? Above all, how did Australia go from a country where the poor occasionally stole the goose from the common to one where the rich are consistently rewarded for stealing the common from the goose? The answer, at least in part, appears to be the IPA.

The IPA has three member senators, David Leyonhjelm, Bob Day and James Paterson, and a fourth-in-waiting with ex-human rights commissioner Tim Wilson running in the lower house. It also has several state MPs and members with regular media gigs – like IPA senior fellow Chris Berg (The Drum and Fairfax) and board member Janet Albrechtsen, whose recent column in The Oz puffed Paterson and Wilson as "outstanding warrior[s] for the freedom cause". They all talk a lot about warriors – which is also what Abbott called Credlin.

But the IPA's real power is the charisma of wealth. At its 70th birthday gala dinner in 2013, Rupert Murdoch gave the keynote. NewsCorp's Andrew Bolt was MC and opposition leader Tony Abbott called the IPA "freedom's discerning friend". Gina Rinehart, George Pell, George Brandis and Alan Jones were guests.

I first encountered the IPA's passionate retrograde years ago, in a city-planning debate at ABC TV. I'd expected cut-and-thrust, but was amazed by the aggression and the import of IPA director Alan Moran's defence of car-dependent sprawl. Sprawl had been the world's bad guy for over a decade but Moran's fossil-based fury was intense.

Still, the IPA then seemed like harmless cranks. Now it seems they're all but writing government policy. Even that's not bad in itself. The wealthy are allowed their clubs, and governments must get ideas from somewhere. But when the private interest of Big Money consistently presents as public interest, it's time to worry. Big time.

We've heard much lately of illegal developer funding, which caused the NSW Electoral Commission to withhold $4.4 million from the NSW Liberals. But developers aren't the only group who might seek influence, and brown paper bags are not the only vehicle.

The IPA has long insisted NGOs should be transparent, but it's notoriously secretive about its own sources of money. (Executive director John Roskam says its donors get intimidated). But revealed sources include all the bad boys of Big International Money: media, oil, tobacco, genetics, energy and forestry. Who benefits from IPA policy? They do.

In 2012, the IPA published "Seventy-Five Radical Ideas to Transform Australia". I haven't done the math, but I'd say over a third are now law or seriously discussed.

The ideas included: privatise the CSIRO, abolish the Clean Energy Fund and Climate Change Department, cut company tax to 25 per cent, remove all barriers to international trade, end government funding to the arts and return income tax powers to the states.

They'd also: dismantle and sell the ABC, sell SBS, allow all banks to merge, eliminate media-ownership restrictions and abolish local content requirements. Repeal the mining tax, means-test Medicare, privatise Medibank, end compulsory food labelling, abolish plain-packaging for tobacco, allow opt-out from superannuation and voting, and repeal the Fair Work Act and section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The IPA brands itself strongly around freedom. Free market, free media, free speech are its constant rhetoric. But freedom is not simple. Libertarianism turns on prioritising individual judgment – for everyone, not just the rule-making few. If one person's freedom is another person's cage, is it really freedom? Or just privilege?

The IPA's Freedom Watch blog, for example, calls itself a "civil liberties project" but insists, inter alia, on picketers' rights to confront desperate pregnant women outside clinics with aborted fetuses. Whose freedom?

On free speech the air is comparably murky. This week, the Fair Work Commission reinstated a Centrelink officer sacked for criticising his employer online. The man's criticisms, over some weeks, highlighted the unconscionable processing time of Austudy payments (tardiness for which I can personally vouch).

But regardless of veracity, if the IPA prevailed, the Fair Work Commission would vanish; the employer would have every freedom to gag but the employee would have no freedom to speak openly as a citizen.

Then there's racial vilification, a free-speech category beloved of the IPA. James Paterson told ABC radio recently that as senator he'd focus on sorting that "disgraceful" section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Section 18C – under which Andrew Bolt was forced in 2011 to apologise and to which George Brandis then devoted much attention – makes it illegal to insult, humiliate or intimidate anyone because of race, colour or ethnicity. Freedom? Does the freedom to repudiate on racial lines even deserve the name?

As to press freedoms, the IPA would free Murdoch, or whoever is biggest on the block, to own every media outlet in the land. Sky or, well, Sky. He's free. We're in a blank-walled plasma box.

My advice? Ideas themselves are not dangerous, but when money and "ideas" hold hands, get suspicious. Then get cracking. Fight for our freedom to see the strings and who's at the pulling end.

asio posted:

I reckon can-do could have made it happen. The alp is under the assumption that the mine won't be built anyway to save face - how insulting to the environmental, indigenous, community etc groups that fought the miners and helped bring it to this point. But the mines size is historically massive and the port would be sitting right on top of the reef. I don't think that's a stretch.

Lizard Combatant posted:

PissCat pissed the bed again, moving on...

Have the Panama Papers turned up anything juicy here? I've been working flat out this week and haven't had a chance to read up on it.

quote:

Wind and solar have grown seemingly unstoppable.

While two years of crashing prices for oil, natural gas, and coal triggered dramatic downsizing in those industries, renewables have been thriving. Clean energy investment broke new records in 2015 and is now seeing twice as much global funding as fossil fuels.

One reason is that renewable energy is becoming ever cheaper to produce. Recent solar and wind auctions in Mexico and Morocco ended with winning bids from companies that promised to produce electricity at the cheapest rate, from any source, anywhere in the world, said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board for Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).


"We're in a low-cost-of-oil environment for the foreseeable future," Liebreich said during his keynote address at the BNEF Summit in New York on Tuesday. "Did that stop renewable energy investment? Not at all."

Here's what's shaping power markets, in six charts from BNEF:

Renewables are beating fossil fuels 2 to 1


Investment in Power Capacity, 2008-2015 Source: BNEF, UNEP


Government subsidies have helped wind and solar get a foothold in global power markets, but economies of scale are the true driver of falling prices: The cost of solar power has fallen to 1/150th of its level in the 1970s, while the total amount of installed solar has soared 115,000-fold.

As solar prices fall, installations boom

Source: BNEF

The reason solar-power generation will increasingly dominate: It's a technology, not a fuel. As such, efficiency increases and prices fall as time goes on. What's more, the price of batteries to store solar power when the sun isn't shining is falling in a similarly stunning arc.

Just since 2000, the amount of global electricity produced by solar power has doubled seven times over. Even wind power, which was already established, doubled four times over the same period. For the first time, the two forms of renewable energy are beginning to compete head-to-head on price and annual investment.

An industry that keeps doubling in size


Renewables' share of power generation. Scale is shown in doublings. Source: BNEF


Meanwhile, fossil fuels have been getting killed by falling prices and, more recently, declining investment. It started with coal-it used to be that lower prices increased demand for fossil fuels, but coal prices apparently can't fall fast enough. Richer OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have been reducing demand for almost a decade. In China, coal power has also flattened. Only developing countries with rapidly expanding energy demands are still adding coal, though at a slowing rate.

Coal phases out in wealthier countries first

What does that look like on a country-level basis? The world's first coal superpower, Britain, now produces less power from coal than it has since at least 1850.

Canary in the coal mine: Britain

Source: BNEF

More recently it's the oil and gas industry that's been under attack. Prices have tumbled and investments have started drying up. The number of oil rigs active in the US fell last month to the lowest since records began in the 1940s. Producers-from tiny frontier drillers to massive petrol-producing nation-states-are creeping ever closer to insolvency.

"What we're talking about is miscalculation of risk," said BNEF's Liebreich. "We're talking about a business model that is predicated on never-ending growth, a business model that is predicated on being able to find unlimited supplies of capital."

The chart below shows independent oil producers and their ability to pay their debt. The pink quadrant at the bottom right represents the greatest threat to a company's solvency. By 2015, that quadrant starts to fill up, and Liebreich warned, "It's going to get uglier."

US oil patch heads to the insolvency zone

The y-axis shows the the ability to pay debt interest from earnings, and the x-axis shows how much a company is leveraged (debt to capital). The size of the circle represents the amount of debt held by each company. Source: BNEF

Oil and gas woes are driven less by renewables than by a mismatch of too much supply and too little demand. But with renewable energy expanding at record rates and with more efficient cars-including all-electric vehicles-siphoning off oil profits at the margins, the fossil-fuel insolvency zone is only going to get more crowded, according to BNEF. Natural gas will still be needed for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, but even that will change as utility-scale batteries grow cheaper.

The best minds in energy keep underestimating what solar and wind can do. Since 2000, the International Energy Agency has raised its long-term solar forecast 14 times and its wind forecast five times. Every time global wind power doubles, there's a 19 percent drop in cost, according to BNEF, and every time solar power doubles, costs fall 24 percent.

And while BNEF says the shift to renewable energy isn't happening fast enough to avoid the catastrophic legacy of fossil-fuel dependence-climate change-it's definitely happening.

Anidav posted:

Hillary is in them with cash tied to a Russian bank lmao.

MysticalMachineGun posted:

For the first time in my life I wish I'd seen ACA last night because how the gently caress do they spin this

KennyTheFish posted:

I would love to see some numbers on the source of the "HELP bad debt blowout". how much of it is from universities, and how much from dodgy private VET providers?

quote:

It speaks volumes about the challenges facing the coal industry when most of the established players seek to exit while the value of their assets are depressed.

Prices for thermal and coking coal have been falling for five years, and by the end of 2015 about 65 per cent of the world's coal mines were loss-making.

With debt challenges and climate-conscious shareholders pushing them to reduce their fossil fuel exposure, the big corporate miners decided to bite the bullet; Anglo American, Rio Tinto, Peabody Energy and Brazilian miner Vale moved to liquidate their Australian coal portfolios.

Seven coal mines have been sold across New South Wales and Queensland within the past nine months, with this week's sale of Anglo's Foxleigh mine to Taurus Funds Management the latest and arguably the most curious.

But Sydney-based Taurus, better known as a lender to high-risk miners unable raise funds elsewhere, has not been the only buyer from left-field.

The Salim Group, an Indonesian conglomerate that controls the world's biggest noodle manufacturer, agreed to buy Rio Tinto's Mt Pleasant deposit under the moniker "Mach Energy" in January.

Clean coal aspirant Exergen agreed to buy Peabody's Wilkie Creek mine for song, while a consortium calling themselves "Batchfire Resources" registered a company in July 2015 and by January had agreed to buy Anglo American's Callide mine in Queensland.

While all seven mines were sold cheaply, ASX micro-cap Stanmore Coal got the deal of a lifetime late last year when it bought Vale's Isaac Plains mine for the princely sum of $1.

"It just goes to show that as hard as you might think it is to sell a coal mine right now, you can still sell a coal mine. There are buyers out there for coal irrespective of how bad you think the sentiment may be," says Shaw and Partners analyst Peter O'Connor.

Many of the transactions have been typified by a lack of transparency; two of the transactions were agreed for undisclosed sums, Taurus refused to name its partners in the Foxleigh purchase, while Batchfire has declined to speak publicly about its plans.

"When things start selling for undisclosed sums you know they are not fetching much," quips one industry insider.

The exception to the trend was Rio's Bengalla mine, which sold for $865 million in September 2015 to New Hope; an established miner with a billion dollar market capitalisation.

Of the seven mines "sold" over the past nine months, only the Bengalla and Isaac Plains transactions have reached settlement.

The other five are still subject to conditions and funds being raised, and at least one of them (Exergen's purchase of Wilkie Creek) looks increasingly unlikely to reach settlement.

LibertyCat posted:

Anyone who commits to 4-8 years of study without first independently assessing their prospects is an idiot.

Amoeba102 posted:

Shaun Marsh of politics.

Anidav posted:

A new authoritarianism has descended. There now seems to be a list of official beliefs we are allowed to hold and no others; decided for us by the new establishment that has taken hold in government and the media, especially but not only in Fairfax, the ABC and SBS where there is now a uniformly censorious tone that colours everything. The very idea that you might hold a different opinion from the approved one is, to use the word that is now creeping into our discourse, ‘unacceptable’ and if you dare express it, what you get in reply is not a counter argument but a demand for an apology, the more humiliating and grovelling the better. You will also be forced to resign from whatever post you occupy. And behind the threats and intimidation lurks the spectre of the thought police to enforce the approved view of what is acceptable and what is not. The advocate of unapproved views these days is simply bludgeoned into submission. It is unacceptable that you might have a different opinion from the establishment on climate change, same-sex marriage, adoption by same sex couples, illegal refugees, abortion, the republic, the family, the sexual agenda in schools, foreign aid, religious freedom, government spending, freedom of speech, Israel, Islam and any proposal for changing the constitution.

As views other than the official ones are unacceptable, what is also unacceptable is that you should be allowed to express them. Indeed, you run a terrible risk these days, not that you will have to defend your case on its merits, but that you will be branded as a social leper, shunned, stopped from holding a public meeting or setting foot inside a university, blacklisted, abused and ridiculed simply because you hold a personal view different from the official one that has been sanctified by the new establishment. Were Voltaire alive he would find it easier to say: ‘I disagree with everything you say and will fight to the death to stop you saying it.’ The new authoritarianism has found a very fertile field in the denigration of Tony Abbott which has now reached an hysterical crescendo. He represents a separate strain of opinion from the mush that passes for policy in the Liberal party today and consequently must be stopped and silenced, not by logic, but by ridicule and abuse. He was probably doomed from the start by putting forward the uncomfortable truth in the 2014 budget that the country was living beyond its means and that surgery was needed before we went bankrupt. Given that the new establishment depends on government spending and handouts, it was inevitable that the budget would be unacceptable and Abbott with it. But by that time, it was known Abbott also had a real commitment to socially conservative positions that bind the society together, contributing to its stability. So he was doubly cursed and totally unacceptable. As the Age put it (before the staff went on strike and Fairfax shares went up), Abbott could not be allowed to stay in office and had to be ‘checked’. Eventually this led to his removal, but now, he has to be silenced, his legacy degraded and, if that does not work, forced to leave the parliament altogether. The most egregious example of this practice is the recent attempt by the PM to belittle his predecessor’s achievement in stopping the boats bringing illegal migrants into this country.

Turnbull’s argument is that the boats were stopped, not under Abbott, but Howard. For Turnbull, the crazy excesses of Rudd/Gillard that allowed people smugglers back into business and Tony Abbott’s successful response just did not happen. This is little better than the whiting-out of any inconvenient facts by Turnbull that might diminish his own wondrous lustre. Worse, you would think that Turnbull would have at least an ounce of feeling that here was a policy of which Abbott was justly proud and would allow him this one tick of approval. But no, the zeitgeist is that Abbott and all his works are bad and Turnbull has to deliver the cruellest cut of all. Abbott’s supporters, guilty of the unacceptable sin of loyalty, are now condemned and abused as malcontents, subversives and troglodytes; forget about the arguments, just abuse the advocate. I hope they speak out more, because they contribute to the robust debate of ideas, whether you like their opinions or not. Then we have seen the unedifying spectacle of the Liberal Party itself promoting the line that Abbott should not stand again for election, campaign in the election, speak at conferences or even write articles. You would think that any political party with a former leader who had brought it back from disintegration and got it into government would show gratitude, welcome his experience and invite him to contribute to the debate. Instead, we see a party, now with no sense of tradition or respect, full of midgets who sold their souls for the exalted post of assistant minister or parliamentary secretary, and wailing like a Greek chorus, trying to destroy him. No-one seems prepared to say it, but such an attitude is mean, ungenerous and, above all, foolish, for it cuts the party off from the conservative point of view that Abbott represents and many people want to see promoted. Worse still, it shows how the new authoritarianism is eating away at the free exchange of ideas that used to be one of the Liberal party’s – and the country’s – great strengths.

quote:

Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove has apologised to Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek after being accused of snubbing her in an awkward handshake moment.

Present in the Senate to open the special sitting of Parliament, Sir Peter shook the hands of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, Speaker Tony Smith and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten but denied Mr Joyce's opposition counterpart the opportunity after she extended her hand.

The Queen's representative had just delivered a speech outlining why Parliament had returned, "to give full and timely consideration to two important parcels of legislation", during which Labor MPs had heckled.

Fairfax Media understands the Governor-General has now called Ms Plibersek to apologise, explaining it wasn't intentional and he didn't see her hand.

Following the televised "blanking", Ms Plibersek can be seen amused and shrugging in puzzlement as the opposition benches guffaw.

She has said no apology was necessary and that "the whole thing is a storm in a teacup".

After the incident, one Labor backbencher was heard to heckle sarcastically, "you've been told, Tanya, know your place". Another appears to jeer "that says something".

Protocol - advised by the Senate - dictated the Governor-General greet only the prime minister, the opposition leader and the speaker.

Mr Joyce's handshake was not mandated by these guideliness but Sir Peter noticed his outstretched hand and accepted it.

The special parliamentary session will see the government's hallmark industrial relations legislation either pass or fail, the latter triggering a double dissolution election on July 2.

After the Governor-General's address, Labor frontbencher Stephen Conroy took the unusual step of criticising the person filling the vice-regal position, labelling Sir Peter a "disgrace" for recalling Parliament at the government's request to examine the ABCC. Mr Turnbull has threatened a double dissolution election if the legislation to reintroduce the building industry watchdog is not passed.

"That's what we have seen, a tawdry political stunt and the Governor-General has demeaned his office," he said.

"A strong governor-general would never have agreed to this."

Senator Conroy said the ghost of Sir John Kerr - the governor-general who dismissed the Whitlam government - "reached out from the grave to interfere in a democratically elected Senate decision".

"What we saw is a blight on our democracy today. We've seen a democratically elected Senate decision overturned by the Queen's representative," he said.

Lid posted:

The Turnbull government is preparing to trump Labor in the budget by cracking down harder on high-income superannuation tax concessions to raise four times as much as the opposition's policy.

Labor has promised to cut the income threshold for more heavily taxing contributions from $300,000 to $250,000. The Coalition now plans to cut it to $180,000.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Can an expert on taints confirm if this is true?


https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/31386481/coles-stupid-culpable-leyonhjelm/?cmp=st

open24hours posted:

People should only be able to buy live animals. If you want to eat them you should have to get blood on your hands.

Zenithe posted:

I'm pretty sure making everyone slaughter live cattle in their backyard would lead to some pretty big health/waste issues.

Mr Chips posted:

So they're going to get rid of the private health insurance rebates, and stop cutting funding for primary health care interventions/research?

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Possibly because the US federal reserve told their banks to continue on with lending to each other at a loss as if the crash wasn't happening.

Or maybe there were just fewer bank failures in 87? Not sure.

e:Or the gigantic spike in bank credit to GDP just hid the effects of the crash.

Senor Tron posted:

Nope.

As a South Australian it pains me to say it, but lately Victoria is the one smashing it.

quote:

The closure of Australia's only youth-led sex education service is ideologically driven and will deepen a national crisis in sexual health among young people, experts have claimed.

The Turnbull government will pull all funding from YEAH – a program using youth educators to deliver sex education in schools and universities – after June 30, replacing it with an online resource.

Critics say it makes no sense to shut the $450,000 a year program, which has just four paid staff and provided face-to-face sexual health information to 10,000 young people in 2015, at a time when sexually transmitted infections are rising and condom use is on the decline

trunkh posted:

NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham has posted online a video of himself setting himself the Condamine River on fire.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/04/23/greens-mp-sets-condamine-river-alight-csg-protest

Goffer posted:

[inappropriate joke about busts and cocaine]

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Nam Taf posted:

Lmao this is such a bullshit non-excuse that it's incredible someone thought it'd hold up. The ADF will write a detailed specifications requirement list and that will cover stuff like minimum head clearance, bed lengths, etc. and Japan would happily select their design model and scale by 1.05 to make it work.

Whoever came up with that excuse deserves a payrise for their sheer audacity.

Birdstrike posted:

It's always amusing when the "free market party" demonstrates conclusively that the have no idea about market economics.

Solemn Sloth posted:

Can you imagine how much further the LNP would distort the housing market to try and hold off a bubble bursting on their watch?