QUACKTASTIC posted:

Ora Tzo posted:

Not quite what you wanted, but i suspect it'll suffice.

NATIONALS_ENVIRONMENTAL_POLICY.mp4
https://my.mixtape.moe/cnyprg.mp4

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Is it loving if you wank to your friend's erotic obituary about Bill Leak?

Buzzfeed posted:

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has written to the National Broadband Network (NBN) Committee asking for her chief of staff James Ashby to take her place during hearings and site visits next month, according to a letter leaked to BuzzFeed News.

Hanson claimed she was unable to attend committee hearings and site visits in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania on April 19-21 due to "another parliamentary engagement".

"In view of this I seek the Committee's approval for my Chief of Staff, James Ashby, to attend the site visits associated with the Public Hearings, so that he is able to fully brief me on the NBN-related facilities in those states," she writes.

Hanson wrote that "if the Committee agree" to her request, she would seek to extend it to include "other meetings of the NBN Committee which I am unable to attend".

Her request was rejected by the committee, but has raised concerns among the majority parties about the way One Nation is operating, and the power that Ashby may yield.

"I am not aware of any other situations where staff attend committee hearings in place of their members and senators," a current member of the NBN Committee told BuzzFeed News, on the condition of anonymity.

"In my view it would not be possible for a staff member to participate ‘in the shoes’ of the member or senator at a hearing."

The Coalition government removed one of its own senators, the Nationals' John Williams, from the NBN watchdog committee to make way for Hanson last year after a majority of senators voted against her appointment.

Hanson said in October she would use her role on the committee to represent regional Australia and work to improve the level of its telecommunications and internet services.

Williams told BuzzFeed News he was disappointed Hanson was not turning up to committee hearings after she took his spot on the committee.

"Welcome to the busy world of Senate hearings Pauline," Williams said.

"They are Senate hearings - not Senate staff hearings and inspections... I would be surprised if the committee allowed a staffer to represent their senator," he said.

One Nation doesn't have an official policy on the NBN but Hanson has previously said she wants the rollout revised, and is in favour of a combination of fibre to the node and wireless technology.

Bogan King posted:

AFLW is now being called a grooming tool for lesbians to indoctrinate young girls.

"The ABC posted:

Passengers flying to Australia from three Middle Eastern airports will be subject to additional security checks on the basis of national security advice, the Federal Government has confirmed.

From next week, passengers flying from Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi will undergo random explosive detection tests and targeted screening of electronic devices.

Federal Transport Minister Darren Chester said there was no specific threat to Australia and the extra security was a precautionary measure in line with action taken by the UK and US governments.

These new measures do not include the bans on electronic devices being used in cabins on passenger flights.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Guys I need your help. Ross Cameron was ranting on Alan Jones' Sky News Show and send that if you can find an article in the Sydney Morning Herald [homosexual] or the ABC about the positive benefits of coal to Australia and the world he will take you out for dinner at Beppi's in Sydney.

Please help me.

https://twitter.com/Beppisrest/status/847635435853496320

https://twitter.com/Beppisrest/status/846936794511892485

QUACKTASTIC posted:

Ora Tzo posted:

Not quite what you wanted, but i suspect it'll suffice.

NATIONALS_ENVIRONMENTAL_POLICY.mp4
https://my.mixtape.moe/cnyprg.mp4

Senor Tron posted:

That's just the single bottle price multiplied by 24 isn't it?

starkebn posted:

free market works bitches

Les Affaires posted:

Actually the failure is in a lack of community and/or government structures to ensure it either doesn't happen or that communities at risk are prepared.

Bogan King posted:

https://twitter.com/DaisyCousens/status/848440753256677376

BBJoey posted:

conservatism is dead, though

all the power on the right is concentrated on a spectrum from rabid nationalists to straight up neo-nazis.

free market, social conservatives are being rolled by protectionist, xenophobic nationalists and they have no idea what to do about it.

coincidentally the same thing is happening to the centre-left by socialists and they are possibly even more clueless about how to stop it.

Anidav posted:

Actually conservatism is quite attractive.

'Almost too attractive': artist says former prime minister Tony Abbott has a good face for sculpture

Tony Abbott's face might be one of the most recognisable in Australia, but sculptor Linda Klarfeld found herself caught off guard after sitting with the former prime minister for more than an hour.

Mr Abbott's distinctive ears and Roman nose - prime fodder for the nation's cartoonists and photographers for decades - were almost too attractive to sculpt.

Commissioned by the Victorian goldfields city of Ballarat to create a bronze bust for its Prime Ministers' Avenue, the Czech-born sculptor wanted to avoid a predictable caricature.

"It wasn't an easy one. I personally think he's quite attractive, and I always say attractive people are hard to sculpt because it's hard to make them look real," she said.

"He has a Roman nose, his ears are not big and I don't know why the cartoonists always pull them out the way they do, but for sculpture they're very good.

"All his features are very strong. He has a chiselled face, which is very good for sculpture."

Australia's prime ministers are immortalised in the collection of busts established by Federation politician Richard Armstrong Crouch and, after months of work, Ms Klarfeld will become the first woman to contribute.

Her $25,000 commission has been sent to a Melbourne foundry and is expected to be unveiled in the city's botanic gardens later this year.

The final design is a closely guarded secret.

Ms Klarfeld said the former leader was patient while she made a plasticine maquette model, praising Mr Abbott's appreciation of civic art and a bust of Winston Churchill that looks over his Parliament House office.

"It's almost like a preparatory sketch a painter makes on the spot, but three-dimensional in my case," she said.

"I wanted the bust to be very real. Of course it's realistic, but I've worked hard to capture a sense of him as a human being and not just a prime minister."

Busts of the first six prime ministers were unveiled by Victoria's governor Sir Winston Duggan in 1940, with the Crouch bequest providing funds for their successors.

Ballarat mayor Samantha McIntosh said an unveiling date for Mr Abbott's bust was being negotiated, coming after former Labor leader Julia Gillard took part in a ceremony in 2014.

"It is a significant avenue and one that many people admire and love. There have been large crowds at all the unveilings that I've witnessed and it's undoubtedly a source of local pride that former prime ministers come and visit," she said.

Mr Abbott described working with Ms Klarfeld as "a pleasure".

"I feel thrilled and humbled to be on the avenue of the prime ministers and am looking forward to seeing it in the future," he said.

Anidav posted:

The Greens will only become mainstream once climate change starts flooding Sydney.

Don Dongington posted:

it doesn't mean in a Greens ideal world we stop digging metal out of the ground. I'm positive that it'd still be profitable, even if it was done responsibly and sustainably.

JBP posted:

I'm serious. If you nationalise something like mining with billions if not trillions of dollars in vested interests, how many people will have to die?

gently caress the Domain, don't click this posted:

A controversial Silicon Valley start-up that lets tenants bid against each other for rental properties will launch in Australia this year, amid fears it will jack Aussie rents up higher.

Alex Lubinsky, co-founder of the San Fransisco-based “apartment hunting” app Rentberry, says the platform will bring transparency to the Australian rental market, but tenant advocates say the tool tries to push the market as high as it can go.

The app hosts online auctions for rentals, allowing tenants to submit offers and custom renter profiles to landlords in order to secure a property.

The platform, which has been compared by some as the “eBay of renting”, lets tenants see how much others are bidding and allows landlords to choose the best offer.

But Mr Lubinsky said landlords will not always chose the highest rent, instead using the site’s built-in credit check and referencing system to determine the tenant for them. The idea, he said, is that good renters with excellent credit history will be able to broker a discount with a landlord, based on their strong profile. Mr Lubinsky likened the platform to a car dealership, where those with good credit could get a better deal on a loan.

Rentberry is estimated to go live downunder in the next few months, launching first in Sydney, then Melbourne and the rest of the country.

The Australian launch is part of a global expansion for the start-up, which Mr Lubinsky said had already received $1.57 million (US$1.2 million) of funding, injected from major venture capital investors.

Australia was a target market for the app because there were several investors from Australian shores, who told the company Aussies would “love the concept”.

“They are the ones who said the auctioning and custom-offer submissions essentially are something which Australia needs badly,” he said. “They said it should be very big in Australia, people will love it.”

Rentberry caused a stir when it launched in the US last year, with criticism that the app would drive prices up further, especially in expensive markets such as San Francisco.

“There is always controversy when there is something new – some people act with fear [because] they still have not understood it,” he said. “When Uber came out, people said it was stealing taxi jobs, they don’t have insurance, many things, but we all know now [these] companies bought huge positive change.”

Mr Lubinsky said a market like Sydney – the most expensive place to rent in Australia – needed transparency. “By transparency I’m not necessarily saying higher prices, no absolutely not, what we showed in the US is that we actually save money of about 5.12 per cent for tenants.”

But Tenants Union of NSW senior policy officer Ned Cutcher said rental auctions were an issue because bidding happened behind the scenes. The platform claimed to be an open and transparent process, he said, which was a direct response to that issue.

“From that perspective, people might look at it and say ‘maybe that’s alright’, but I think it still misses the point of what’s dangerous about rent auctions, which is that it has the potential to really push the cost of renting even higher than it already is,” Mr Cutcher said. “Rents are a function of the market and this is a tool that tries to push the market as high as it can go … It’s not actually asking tenants to set the price, it’s asking tenants to bid up the price.

“What it does is that it takes the possibility of one tenant being played off against another tenant in the dark out of the equation,” he said. “They’d be able to see where the highest bid is and they’d actually be able to see that it’s real.”

But Mr Cutcher said the union’s preference would be for rental auctions to be made illegal. “Bidding wars are really only designed for one thing – and that is to push prices up.”

Mr Lubinsky said his lawyers had told him the platform would be legal in Australia, but Mr Cutcher added that though it would be okay for a tenant to make a higher offer, a landlord legally could not ask the tenant to raise their offer. This might fall afoul of the law already, he said, but that was certainly not clear and would needed to be tested in the courts.

Tenants Union of Victoria policy officer Yaelle Caspi agreed rental bidding would further inflate the market in a competitive market.

“With so many tenants desperate for a home, it is likely that tenants will offer more than they can afford in an attempt to get ahead,” Ms Caspi said.

“Rental bidding privileges tenants with more to spend and makes it harder for low-income tenants to compete for properties. This is particularly concerning at the lower end of the market where affordable housing is already so scarce.”

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Rent bidding is illegal in Qld (best state).

G-Spot Run posted:

Go to the media, ideally ACA or similar foot in door "journalism", with their offer

Wheezle posted:

Truly the voice Australia needs.

Anidav posted:

I will hold an election party for the QLD election

The Before Times posted:

this is really cool! and if it can help take some of the guesswork out of depression meds that would be awesome.

Sydney Mining Homosexual posted:

Tony Abbott has criticised the Turnbull government’s deal with the Nick Xenophon Team to pass the first stage of its company tax cuts, voicing his opposition to “horse-trading”.

Abbott also said that, despite the desire to occupy the “sensible centre”, articulated by Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday, the Liberal party needed something to fight for.

Malcolm Turnbull has rejected Abbott’s critique, saying on Tuesday his government stands by its record of negotiating measures through the Senate.

On Friday the government passed company tax cuts for companies earning up to $50m a year with support from One Nation and the Nick Xenophon Team, the latter secured with a deal that included $260m worth of one-off payments for pensioners.

The deal included measures such as fast-tracking a solar thermal plant in South Australia, a study of a gas pipeline connecting the state with the Northern Territory and a new national energy policy.

Abbott said, “You should never agree to do something that is wrong to get something that is right” – although he conceded he hadn’t examined the details of the deal with Xenophon.

The former prime minister said he was “very cautious about horse-trading”.

“In the end you’ve really got to go to the Senate and say support this on its merits and do not ask us to do something which is wrong in order to get something which is right,” he told Sky News on Monday evening.

The deal with Xenophon included providing one-off payments of $75 to single people and $125 to couples receiving the aged pension, disability pension or parenting payment to help pay for rising electricity costs, despite the fact the government plans to cut the recurring clean energy supplement.

“We all want to be in the sensible centre, we all want to be part of club sensible, but you’ve got to have things that you are fighting for,” Abbott said.

Asked about Abbott’s comments at a press conference on Tuesday, Turnbull said the government stood by its record in the Senate and it had been making the “right deals”.

“To secure passage of legislation through the Senate we need the support of the crossbench, if Labor and the Greens oppose it,” he said. “So we’ve been successful in that – we’ve demonstrated we can achieve the passage of our agenda through the Senate.”

Turnbull listed numerous measures “which we had been unable to get through in the previous parliament” that had since passed, including reintroducing the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the registered organisations bill and childcare reforms.

“We’ve now succeeded in securing ... tax cuts for businesses up to turnovers of $50m, employing ... more than half of the Australian workforce,” he said. “We’re delivering, we’re governing, we’re proving that, if you’re prepared to negotiate, you can get things done in the 45th parliament.”

On Friday Abbott hit out at senior members of his own government over the failed China extradition treaty, saying ministers should spend less time trying to trash critics and get on with governing.

Abbott has been increasingly vocal in establishing points of difference between himself and Turnbull.

In February he outlined a sweeping conservative manifesto for the next federal election, declaring the Coalition needs to cut immigration, slash the renewable energy target, abolish the Human Rights Commission and gut the capacity of the Senate to be a roadblock to the government’s agenda.

The intervention was blasted as “self-indulgent” and “destructive” by his former conservative backer Mathias Cormann.

Anidav posted:

Someone is a lying rear end in a top hat

JBP posted:

Complaints box:

Telstra made a mistake by sending me two handsets, received one back and then disconnected my month old service without contacting me. Isn't that unlawful?

The ABC posted:

Childcare centres catering to unvaccinated children will not be allowed to open in NSW under a new bill proposed by Labor, with Opposition health spokesman Walt Secord pointing out that vaccination levels in parts of the state are below those in Africa.

Labor said it planned to amend existing laws to ban people from setting up childcare centres and family day care specifically for children who are not immunised.

Mr Secord said the changes were needed to plug a loophole in current legislation.

rest of article here

JBP posted:

Well look Kerry if people's gayness can mutate over time, and I do say "if", Kerry, then maybe we've been at fault here and need to reconsider whether applying the pub test is still relevant and perhaps move to a more appropriate sniff test.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

https://twitter.com/ccroucher9/status/848737879144538112

https://twitter.com/MarkDiStef/status/848837581877817344

https://twitter.com/MarkDiStef/status/849172034496077824

AgentF posted:

"People are criticising Turnbull for turning down a sausage sizzle? I gotta get myself to a barbeque immediately! They'll see who the real Australian is!"