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Imagine publically, even gleefully demonstrating that you, the federal police force, is willing to act in a shamelessly partisan fashion, potentially casting doubt over the motivations behind any decision regarding the investigation of politicians over the past decade; over a liberal backbencher that nobody would have heard of or given a poo poo about, and whom the party could have easily distanced themselves from without suffering significant reputational damage, as demonstrated repeatedly by the ALP and the Greens? Just imagine!
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Dec 8, 2022 11:47
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I mean, if I wanted to give somebody sufficient ammunition to tee off a royal commission into whether political bias came into play into several key decisions not to investigate the actions of former Morrison government cabinet ministers, that's certainly a way.
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Dec 8, 2022 11:59
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Tbh most academics care less their University about separating a fool from their money than they do about successive governments gutting funding for research, which is one of the primary means of actually improving the status of a university. That and university management finding new and improved ways to avoid spending on OpEx, aka wages, so they can build more joint venture vanity projects to suck up to billionaire capitalists who then use the tax offsets to fund more donations to the Liberal Party, who gut funding from research
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Dec 9, 2022 13:53
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I am REALLY curious to see what impact the mandatory flexible work arrangements in the new IR legislation has on nursing and hospital residencies. The cynical part of me is assuming that the cabal of ALP premiers currently marching in lockstep and refusing to give nurses a reasonable cost of living payrise will freak the gently caress out on behalf of hospital administrators as soon as the ANWF starts down the path towards enforcement, and try to get an exemption rushed through - but having been in a defacto relationship and having 2 kids with a RN/Midwife, you're basically locked out of hospital nursing if you ever want to see your kids. Mandatory rotations onto 12 hour shifts and weekends; a choice between 7am starts or evening/night shifts, and a total lack of willingness to change or compromise, backed up by nurse-managers who "had to do it for years so you should too." Given the chronic shortage of nurses willing to do ward work when other employers are offering loads more flexibility, it seems like a no-brainer - but I'll bet hospital management teams fight it all the way.
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Dec 12, 2022 17:10
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It strikes me that investing money in mental health care at this stage in human history would be fairly budget-friendly, given that treatable mental health issues tend to keep people either out of employment, or act as barriers to career development and promotion. I personally leant very hard on the Medicare system last year due to some trauma that was severely impacting my ability to function day-to-day, and while time plays a part trauma recovery, the counseling was critical to me getting my life back under control and making genuine and lasting improvements. I'm far better at recognising problematic behaviour in others and avoiding situations that got me there in the first place. Still cost a lot out of pocket and I'm lucky I could afford it, just. Further restricting access to mental health resources is only going to add additional burden on crisis care, volunteer orgs, emergency departments and the NDIS as people who might have been helped the way I was end up unemployed, homeless and circling the drain.
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Dec 14, 2022 13:34
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Cool can't wait for them to abolish the Fair Work Commission
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Dec 16, 2022 17:57
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Bucky Fullminster posted:of course he's not breaking things, cos it has obviously been reported elsewhere, but it is a big and noisy world and perhaps those sources had not made it to the ears of everyone As far as I understand it, the palace letters covering the timeframe were supposed to have been declassified decades ago according to the norms surrounding the public release of palace correspondence in general. A group of people had been trying to get them for a long time, and finally did so a few years ago. An Australian academic (who spoke at an NTEU national council meeting right before Covid) put in the yards going through them and released a book; but between the Liberals being in power and they and the mainstream media having zero interest in promoting the narrative that the Libs were complicit in a straight-up coup OR that the Americans had a major role in it, and the global pandemic hitting not long after it did fall into the memory hole a bit. It's not something most Australians under 60 would be that familiar with. While the dismissal was covered when I was in secondary school, the narrative was more around demonstrating how the Governer General's failsafe works in the event of a hung parliament, and not how extraordinary the whole ordeal was, or the underlying geopolitical context. It's definitely something worth talking about, as people not extremely online and plugged into leftist politics would likely have no clue how vulnerable our parliamentary system is to foreign intervention.
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Jan 7, 2023 12:57
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MikeJF posted:Any chance of recalling the author/book? I wanna say you're looking for The Palace Letters by Jenny Hocking. I got that by googling but the face and name look familiar and she's a historian at Monash so checks out.
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Jan 7, 2023 14:57
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Non-compliance for the sake of non-compliance at extreme personal risk takes an adult level of idiotic overconfidence however.
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Jan 12, 2023 03:07
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Yeah if I can give you any advice at all it's that if you want to pitch something to anyone remotely senior, who spends 8-12 hours a day jumping between meetings, they aren't going to read words on a page. If you're very lucky, they might kick it to a staffer who will glance at it - but as staffers are typically politicians-in-waiting these days, you'll likely hear crickets in response. When I first started working with EY types on projects almost a decade ago, I was really confused as to why everything they produced took the form of a 5-10 slide powerpoint deck, even if it seemed like the wrong medium entirely. The reason was that the stakeholders who need convincing in order to fund or approve things won't read anything on their own time, and the only way to gain a captive audience is to trap them in a room and shove slides in their face. And as slides filled with text are horrible to look at, those slides should have bullet points and graphics that you can then talk around. If you're an expert in something, or even just very interested, it can be really hard to distil pages of what you consider to be crucial information down to a handful of bullet points and a few infographics - but unless you're submitting a research paper to a group of academic peers, you're better off filing that document away as reference info, and shopping around the short and sweet version.
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Jan 18, 2023 07:31
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froglet posted:Jesus, glad to hear you're better! See also: The Black Death, that killed 200m people in like 7 years. Easily defeated by modern antibiotics, which become less modern every year, due to there being basically no public funding (and no profit motive for private funding). But hey, now we've seen how capitalism deals with a global pandemic, I think we can all rest easy!
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Jan 19, 2023 11:33
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Also I think y'all are forgetting that Gillard didn't even contest that election. Rudd knifed her at the last minute and ran a milquetoast third-way campaign that traded on none of the awesome work the Gillard govt/43rd parliament had done over the previous 3 years.
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Jan 21, 2023 02:36
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I feel like Abbott getting turfed out of a formerly safe seat and basically precipitating the Teal Wave may have leant him some clarity. It's also a shocking juxtaposition to the right wing demagogues of today, who absolutely would not have learned a single lesson and are more likely to blame others/ call the validity of the election into question than accept the will of the people. Absolutely agree with the poster above, Scotty makes Abbott look better.
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Jan 21, 2023 03:46
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Yes, that's why they do multiple days work finding you a decent deal at no cost to you.
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Feb 12, 2023 14:40
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I haven't read it myself, but my ex did and ran through some of the suggestions and recommendations around household budgeting (and proceeded to do none of them of course). It seemed like solid advice, and some of it is far enough removed from conventional wisdom that it's clearly not low effort/obvious stuff like paying down high interest credit and loans before trying to save etc. He actually recommends loving off private health insurance, which got my attention, as it seems "controversial" vs the kind of milquetoast advice you nornally see in popular self help literature. If I recall, he goes on to explain that even if you end up paying the Medicare levy surcharge, PHI is a total scam that will never offer a reasonable ROI, and if you're disciplined enough save a few K and then put what you were paying in premium installments on that for like a year or two instead, you're going to be thousands per year better off. TBH gently caress our governments for subsidising PHI instead of funding Medicare and then penalizing people who won't participate in the scam.
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Feb 13, 2023 23:49
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I for one think it would be cool and good to have meaningful legislation to drive down carbon emissions, rather than another totally performative scheme that enables multinationals to keep boiling the planet at no cost due to a bunch of dumb gently caress offsets that don't actually represent a net reduction in emissions but boy, maybe I'm just an idiot lefty communist for thinking so,
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Feb 15, 2023 16:42
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JBP posted:I'm pretty sure Katter just has a desk and a landline telephone in his office. And a staffer with a laptop and a burgeoning case of PTSD.
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Feb 16, 2023 13:04
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I'm in WA and I didn't even know that happened; but at this point it might as well have been 2 blokes at the Kelmscott RSL arguing over the last devilled egg so
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Feb 17, 2023 17:12
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Electric Wrigglies posted:
They might have been high paying once, but our glorious cabal of neoliberal ALP premiers have been persuing public sector wage freezes and doing everything in their goddamn power to avoid giving nurses, cops or teachers more than 2-3% per year in EBA negotiations. Less than half of what they've already lost to inflation. Which is great, because the private sector typically uses public sector wage increases as a pricing signal, to avoid falling behind, or having to try to compete in other areas like job security, paid leave or flexible work. Cops were standing in solidarity and speaking from the podium at the last public sector wages rally I went to. Fairly stark difference to the Barnett years when they were riding protesters down on horseback
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Mar 3, 2023 13:15
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The police unions have the influence, power and density that even the ANF and teacher's unions wouldn't dare to dream about. Even if they were somehow excluded from WorkCover, you goddamn better believe they'd be taken care of via other means... Consider the behaviour of the AFP during the Abbott thru Morrison governments, then imagine if either party actually tried to mess with cop benefits? There'd be bags of MDMA showing up in "surprise raids" of ministers offices before lunch time.
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Mar 4, 2023 13:28
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I feel it's a bit disingenuous to frame the debate as "Yes" and "No" when it's actually "voice", "treaty" and "I'm a racist turd". The primary argument by Indigenous people who are against Voice is less that it's going to make things worse for Indigenous Australians, but more that it won't do anything to make things better. Brass tacks, it's a performative measure intended to avoid the establishment of a treaty between the Commonwealth and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Not delay, but outright avoid. Treaty requires both parties to accept the terms and sign on, which would require genuine concessions and active measures by the government to actually do SOMETHING to improve the lives of first nations people. Neither major party has any plan to do this, and if you look at their actions and policies over the past 50 years, it seems highly likely that both parties would use a Voice to parliament to legitimise their continued agenda of marginalisation - most likely by hand-picking participants who will best support the narrative that works for them. It won't be good. I wouldn't vote no myself because that feeds an even worse narrative, but ideally the referendum should be over Voice or Treaty, not "Voice?" or "Nah, fuckem".
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Mar 7, 2023 18:37
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What does that even MEAN
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Mar 9, 2023 12:07
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ChatGPT is giving academics the serious heebie geebies right now. It's already been demonstrated that it can write an essay on a particular subject matter that won't be picked up via Turnitin and potentially pass muster - but the bigger concern is that University managements will figure out a way to use it to create coursework, as the one thing it can't do is lodge wage theft disputes with Fair Work...
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Mar 10, 2023 15:32
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Tbh if there was a time to pivot away from ANZUS and build stronger relationships with our regional trading partners, it was during the 9 years when the Liberals were expressly not doing that thing. Buying subs is still kinda broke brained, but tbh any military hardware investment we make is tokenistic at best at this point.
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Mar 15, 2023 09:15
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Animal Friend posted:The USA (the destroy ending) or China (the control ending). Australia is sometimes the Assimilate ending, but it really depends on who has the majority in the lower house
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Mar 23, 2023 12:05
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I'm not gonna go all Bucky on you, but there is one dominant reason behind the Liberal Party becoming the Political equivalent of Sideshow Bob in a field full of rakes. This is the result of an organised and very effective campaign by a few pentacostal/evangelical Christian groups to take over the party at the branch level. Most people are barely even aware that political parties have branches, and that the Party Room and the Party are reallll different demographics. Or at least we're until recently. If the classic neolib Ayn Rand's feet sniffing Lib MP is to the right of the average liberal voter, the people running preselections and these days campaigns from the Party are about twice as far to the right of them. So you've had moderates being filtered out by preselection committee's stacked by people who literally think their God wants them to lock up gays and unmarried single mothers. The rest writes itself really.
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Apr 2, 2023 13:20
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They've already tried to suggest we adopt red state style voter ID laws as one of the famous early Morrison-era thought bubbles and it got resoundly trashed by a bunch of Howard-era 'moderates' and centre right talking heads and quietly dropped. So expect to see it resurrected by the Dutton Libs any day now.
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Apr 2, 2023 18:14
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That and a dead hamster would probably have been able to beat the ALP given Murdoch's channeled outrage over the unforgivable crime of replacing his Annointed One with a Woman. Shifting demographics and the fact that even the boomers are all in on streaming services now likely means the right wing media giants will never have that level of influence again. There are still issues/risks associated with monolithic social media corps being totally stacked with Republican party lunatics, but I don't think Facebook for example expected to be outed so hard/fast in the aftermath of 2016. We'll likely see fewer outright attempts to swing elections, and more quiet fiddling of the algorithms to manipulate public opinion on individual issues, and mitigate against Gen Z becoming a socialist bloc etc.
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Apr 25, 2023 01:51
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Hahah, that's amazing. Imagine being smooth-brained enough to believe that having access to 60 day's worth of medication as opposed to 30 is going to increase someone's risk of overdose Alternatively, Imagine being dumb enough to put an argument that thin out there and not expect to lose all professional credibility in the eyes of the non-blue-paint-huffing public?
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Apr 27, 2023 02:13
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Turns out all business ever needed to do was to donate more money than the failing union movement could afford to match. They could have had moderately competent governance AND their interests met all this time!!
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Apr 29, 2023 14:07
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Except they won't, because the entire premise of the Teals/Climate200 was "these Liberals are bad, but Labor want to redistribute the wealth that we've worked so hard to strip-mine back to the working class, and that's just not on and we won't ever vote for them". Except they're going to spend this entire term of government proving otherwise, while offering up the same "action on climate change as long as it doesn't affect my shares" virtue signalling measures the Teals wanted. They may still manage to gently caress it up, and the blue ribbon voters may still refuse to abandon their decades-long campaign against the practically communist Labor party - but even chance that business and big money will back them in, to push the greens/teals out. Also if history counts for anything, the teal movement will collapse now the libs are electorally unviable, and the ALP are clearly not behaving like a radical leftist mob hell bent on taxing the rich to give free solar panels to arts students.
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May 2, 2023 17:00
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Apparently the ALP just announced "the first budget surplus in 15 years", so look forward to the media churning out editorials about how "budget surpluses are bad, actually" (they are, but that's not the point)
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May 4, 2023 08:00
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Should be able to update on Thursday, re: Budget impact on tertiary ed. But the logic that Labor would have a rather huge pool of money to toss around through discontinuation of 9+ years of coalition rorts is relatively sound, when you consider the Morrison era flagrancy alone...
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May 10, 2023 02:33
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I feel like if the thread could pass the hat around and get Bucky a copy of Transport Fever 2 on steam, he'd save about 5000 words/50 PowerPoint slides per week and we'd all be happier for it
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May 11, 2023 01:24
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There are; the problem is they're all in academia, and neoliberal governments view academia the same way corporations viewed their IT departments in the mid 2000s - a cost centre they're constantly trying to offload, until they need something from it and realise it's vastly under funded.
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May 11, 2023 01:38
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Some thoughts and perspective on Voice by Celeste Liddle, an activist/academic/occasional Greens candidate who I have a tonne of respect for. Thought some here may appreciate. https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/voices-beyond-yes-and-no?mibextid=Zxz2cZ
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May 11, 2023 06:58
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Yet if a low-level union office bearer forgets to include something on a register of interests, misses a second signature on an expense form or doesn't re-sit financial governance training after being elected to a different office, the RoC can deregister the entire union. Def got our priorities in order on the governance front folks.
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May 25, 2023 07:34
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There has been an observable drop in social housing in WA. Social housing availability was an issue long before the current general housing availability crisis in WA but the rise in homelessness was basically the signature criticism of his govt for their first 2 years in office. I live in a low SES suburb, and moved in just after McGowan was elected for the first time. Within 6 months, 3 homeswest places within 50m of my place were put on the market and sold to private buyers. Even if that was part of an effort to spread social housing out and away from areas of entrenched intergenerational property, a 4 bedroom house in my suburb costs half what it would cost in a more "gentrified" area, so the economics of it dictate a hit to supply. Of course, now we have a cost of living crisis and a general housing availability crisis on top of that, so you can imagine it's a shitshow.
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May 26, 2023 10:26
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https://theshovel.com.au/2023/05/29/voice-to-parliament-scrapped-hire-pwc-instead/The Shovel posted:Plans for a First Nation’s Voice to Parliament have been abandoned, with Indigenous leaders saying it will be easier to have a say on Government policy via a rolling contract with consulting firm PwC instead.
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May 30, 2023 00:19
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Well there's that, and they actually have a law preventing them from working with foreign militaries who do war crimes* *Where the war crimes are heinous enough that even special forces troops are willing to go on record about it. From what I gather from commentary from GIP and quotes or comments in the media by current and former operators from both countries, this poo poo was beyond the pale even by Navy Seal standards. Y'know, the guys who made a game out of shooting defeated enemy combatants in the head from a certain angle such as to disfigure the corpse, colourfully referred to as "Canoeing". You can figure the rest out yourself. And the same poo poo happened there, btw - other seal teams and individuals from other units blew the whistle real fuckin hard as soon as the first person leaked it, because the difference between a soldier and a mass murdering psychopath is subtle, but distinct. TL;DR next level war crimes make garden variety war criminals uncomfortable.
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Jun 1, 2023 13:11
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