bowmore posted:

The road out of Sydney

AgentF posted:

Yeah a mate said I should go to the Lord Nelson brewery. What else is around the rocks?

JBP posted:

I went to the Dollop on Friday night and left extremely pissed off because they were advertising some stupid website they made where you could go and cry about climate change with other "frightened" people and talk about your kids crying or whatever. It sounded like a pointless and stupid thing, they gave their hope story for crying as the time Kavanaugh got made a supreme court justice (but it was great because a woman harassed someone in a lift!) and it was just loving pathetic. Go online a sook with other people until the world ends. Nice strategy.

e: also the story was extremely boring

JBP posted:

I'm sick of the solutions to things being "make an emotive plea and loving cry about it"

GotLag posted:

His family owned a couple of stores before the war, but he was on the Russian front so it's pretty likely he did his share of warcriming.

GotLag posted:

I'm not the one saying he funded it with Nazi gold, genius

Just that he was probably a war criminal

GotLag posted:

Black armbands are more of an SS thing, the Albrecht brothers were Wehrmacht

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

It was actually Blainey, Howard was just quoting him. And the imputation was that we were too willing to look into our genocidal pasts and had to stop that. So uh, we did.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

They don't. They're imperialist Strasserite countries.

GotLag posted:

It's for classical liberals who would prefer suffering to be neither seen nor heard but other than that aren't really bothered by it.

SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

I get the feeling he'd happily be a goddamned liberal. Shorten counts ipa dickwads amongst his personal friends and advisors

Anidav posted:

To be honest, he basically gets a blank cheque to govern. He can do whatever he likes and that is a good oppurtunity for any Labor Government.

AgentF posted:

This would be best but I've actually warmed to Checks Notes, and might even prefer him to Albo. Call me naive but I think he's playing the game now and will do at least some progressive things while in power. Probably not the next Whitlam but I think he'll be aware of the huge amount of political capital he will have and will act on it.

Don Dongington posted:

But the alternative was to dumb herself down...

Look at the relative popularity of Sanders, who was not afraid to go on the attack, vs Hilary, who famously said "they go low, we go high" and lost an unlosable election ...

Don Dongington posted:

Hilary, who famously said "they go low, we go high"

JBP posted:

This is after a bunch of poo poo about radical greens and the usual junk.

JBP posted:

Greens have good policy, the only thing radical about them is the lack of internal discipline.

Anidav posted:

They don't want to piss off the resources industry.

They edited the NEG to exclude coal but include Gas which means the resources lobby won't run ads about Bill Shorten killing country towns ect.

Then they will introduce a climate change policy on top of the NEG which is rumoured to be a ETS.

Basically it's a Frankenstein stitched together to get a emissions trading scheme on the table without pissing off the Gillard/Rudd slaying war machine.

That's how I understand it.

Don Dongington posted:

Nobody in industry or politics ever gave a gently caress about country towns. It's all smoke and mirrors for maintaining subsidies for mining companies and resisting further regulation etc.

The Adani mine is predicted to create about 1000 jobs. Over the lifetime of the entire mine. It's not statistically significant even on the state level, let alone nationally.

JBP posted:

What in the gently caress...

Headed by Cameron Milner, a former Queensland ALP state secretary, the lobbying firm Next Level had helped Adani get pretty much everything it wanted — through an extraordinarily intense campaign.

Adani began using Next Level to provide lobbying services in Queensland in February 2015.

Alongside Mr Milner, the firm features David Moore, formerly chief of staff to the LNP premier Campbell Newman.

...

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was particularly willing to extend the welcome mat.

The Premier had 10 personal meetings with lobbyists all up. Six of those were with Adani's lobbyists.

The effort was especially intense earlier this year as Adani brokered concessions on mining royalty payments from the State Government.

On five consecutive days at the end of May, as the deal was being hammered out, Adani's lobbyists held meetings with Ms Palaszczuk's chief of staff, David Barbagallo — a notorious ALP hard man.

...

The fruits of the lobbying effort are there for all to see.

A deferment of mining royalties under a secret deal with the Queensland Government — worth big money to Adani — despite Labor's pledge at the 2015 election not to subsidise the Adani mine.

A declaration that the Adani project was "critical infrastructure" — a status never previously granted to a mining project — which exempts it from a raft of planning controls and potential legal objections.

...

Adani also used Next Level to lobby members of Federal Parliament on Adani's behalf, but how much contact Mr Milner and his staff had we do not know. The Commonwealth, unlike Queensland, does not require that lobbying contacts be logged on a register.

What is clear is that Mr Milner is familiar with the revolving door between politics and lobbying.

He spent 18 months as Bill Shorten's chief of staff — helping hone the strategy that nearly carried Labor to victory at the 2016 election — moving directly from his role as Adani's lobbyist to the Opposition Leader's office, then back again.

...

Large sample surveys by reputable pollsters suggest a majority of Australians oppose the project, and a vast majority believe it should not receive government subsidies, such as a proposed $1 billion loan from the Federal Government's Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.

But in a world where big money and influence-peddling hold sway, that may not be enough to stop Adani.

JBP posted:

Chill out. I don't think Adani is good. The "little Aussie battler" line is the funniest part.

quote:

He spent 18 months as Bill Shorten's chief of staff — helping hone the strategy that nearly carried Labor to victory at the 2016 election — moving directly from his role as Adani's lobbyist to the Opposition Leader's office, then back again.

Slugnoid posted:

I don't remember labor ever promising to stop the adani mine. but they did stop the public from paying for the adani mine

quote:

The fruits of the lobbying effort are there for all to see.

A deferment of mining royalties under a secret deal with the Queensland Government — worth big money to Adani — despite Labor's pledge at the 2015 election not to subsidise the Adani mine.

A declaration that the Adani project was "critical infrastructure" — a status never previously granted to a mining project — which exempts it from a raft of planning controls and potential legal objections.

Slugnoid posted:

oof

Moon Atari posted:

...Suddenly the media will remember how to be critical and incredibly trivial details usually relegated to internal committee discussion will become primetime breaking news worthy of constant unflattering discussion. 'Motion of no confidence' is a phrase that will come back in fashion. Labor will manage two terms tops before the LNP are reelected by promising to honour every policy announcement labour has made but cheaper, without cuts and with less dysfunction. They then dump all those commitments before parliament even sits, without even needing to provide a justification and with zero consequence or scrutiny.

Despite having been defeated by this strategy before and having seen what the lnp can get away with labor will still consistently aim to do the decent but self-defeating thing like entering elections having released a comprehensive balanced budget that includes what will be cut rather than staying vague. They will not attempt media regulation for fear of turning the media against them, despite already being under extreme attack at all times anyway. Any meager positive accomplishment will be thanklessly recieved and quickly undone.

JBP posted:

They've only arrested like 200 people in Paris over the fuel riots. Given how fat and lazy Australians are and that we've got no cultural memory of doing anything to oppose the government, I think we should just flat out tax any energy from fossils at double the current price and people will just eat the poo poo sandwich and get used to it while the money builds renewables lightning fast.