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Open Thread – Thurs 7 March 2024
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- The Sweetest Victory
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I’d agree with Roger. What better way to receive public airtime for her ego than expressing trauma after dealing with…
Respect!
40 years at the ALPBC. Talk about Hotel California Ultimo.
Haha. The new lead story at Paywallian.com: China tells other world leaders: be like AlbaneseBeijing has nominated Anthony Albanese as…
Beware the Nature Positive Plan
– Rowan Dean, The Spectator [Part I]
‘Aesop warned the Greeks of the danger in about 520BC; Avianus repeated it for the Romans a century later. William Caxton warned the English in 1484; as did Jean de la Fontaine in seventeenth-century France. It is of course the ever-timely fable about foolish societies deliberately destroying the very things their wealth and prosperity depend upon.
Yet those who, across so many societies and different economic eras, have repeated the precautionary tale of the farmer who kills his gold-laying hen could never have imagined the absolute foolhardiness and recklessness of the Albanese government and its two star environmental ideologues, Tanya Plibersek and Chris Bowen.
Secretly being rushed through the bowels of the Burley Griffin swamp in Canberra is potentially the most dangerous legislation ever to hit Australia – an insidious project looming over every business and consumer called the Nature Positive Plan. It’s goal, in a nutshell, is to replace what are already among the most onerous and investment-destroying environmental laws in the world with even tougher new rules, greater wads of job-destroying green tape and further battalions of meddlesome bureaucrats. The ludicrous leftist premise is that all future development in and on this wide brown land must be ‘nature positive’. This is the same undergraduate mindset that saw the Voice as ‘democracy positive’, views windmills and solar panels littering the landscape as ‘planet positive’ and sees sterilising girls and boys as ‘gender positive’.’
[Part II]
‘The Nature Positive Plan, which Labor plans to legislate this winter, is being sold as a revamp of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) following a recent ‘review’. But it is far worse than just tinkering at the edges. The entire process is shrouded in secrecy, with only a hand-picked group of luvvies and certain representatives from industry bodies allowed to attend the various closed-door sessions that have so far taken place, in which they are permitted to take notes but not to take away anything shown to them in the room. One bureaucrat from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment & Water admitted in Senate Estimates, ‘I can tell you there are a lot of sore arms from people taking notes.’ And what, you may ask, is detailed in these copious notes? Nothing short of the engineered destruction of Australian industry, investment and productivity.
Prime Minister Albanese himself made the decision not to share any of the proposed legislation, guidelines or even an exposure draft. (So much for Albo’s, ‘The Australian people deserve accountability and transparency, not secrecy’.) But what we already do know is enough to send shivers down the spine of every successful company or business in the mining, agriculture, tourism, building or resources sectors. What is inevitable, if the Nature Positive Plan goes ahead, is that billions of tonnes of iron ore and other natural resources deposits will stay in the ground, resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in federal taxes not being raised, and tens of thousands of jobs never being created. Our downward economic spiral will accelerate. According to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in Western Australia alone there are investment projects worth nearly $320 billion awaiting environmental approvals. The Office of the Chief Economist in the Department of Industry, Science and Resources estimates that there are some 289 major resource projects scattered across the nation which have been announced but have yet to receive approval or even to have progressed to feasibility studies. That’s tens of billions of dollars of investment and the creation of thousands of jobs already at risk – multiply that by many more times when the Nature Positive Plan is passed.’
[Part III]
‘Already we learned this week that it was only iron ore and coal that saved the economy from going backwards in the last quarter of last year. Our gold-laying hen.
The Nature Positive Plan will increase the regulatory burden on investments and proposed developments and add huge costs to industry which will flow through to the consumer. There will be mandatory reporting of emissions, of course, and payments if you can’t comply. We are not just talking about large mining projects, but Mum and Dad tourism operations, indigenous entrepreneurs, builders and developers all having their dreams and projects obliterated by Canberra latte-sippers and tree-huggers. Not to mention new hospitals, new hotels, new dams, new roads and new railways. Even the Albanese government admits investment is already much lower than would otherwise be expected given commodity prices and it has been estimated that this missing investment is probably worth around $60 billion per annum. But instead of making life easier for investors and businesses, Tanya Plibersek’s and Chris Bowen’s Nature Positive Plan will make things a thousand times worse.
The original EPBC Act took years to create and ran to thousands of pages. This far more restrictive new set of laws is being rushed through in a matter of months to meet the ideological obsessions and fantasies of Canberra and the Albanese government’s inner-city Green-left supporters. This is not a government acting in the public interest, but one shrouded in deception and secrecy. Nature Positive is Australia Negative. We are taking a butcher’s knife to our golden goose.’
Eyrie
Mar 8, 2024 2:17 PM
More excellent Ann Barnhardt memes:
https://www.barnhardt.biz/
Thank you Eyrie. Many upticks.
Top of the page!
Nope
Passed through Leongatha 3x today and even ate a hot cross bun there, tempting fate or what?
Russell Brand
@rustyrockets
“The CIA had to have INVITED them in”
That was the mistake we made in dealing with Russia. Repeating it, be it with Putin, Xi Jinping or Hamas, would not just be an error. It would be a tragedy.
Henry Ergas
As much as I admire the scholarship of Henry Ergas, and usually concur with most of his work, I think the complexities and anomalies of the Ukrainian situation have not been addressed this time by Ergas. European history has always been a quagmire of competing interests and arguments. It is no different now. As much as it is tempting to argue that the ex KGB operative is just acting true to type, I think this is too simplistic an interpretation of Russian claims and interests – and indeed, of the interests of many Ukrainians in the Russian speaking areas.
Should be fine. I’d skip morning tea with the Baptists though.
Ergas: But all of those capitulations paled compared to the US’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Watching the world’s pre-eminent power scurrying from the scene like a wounded dog, and confident the Europeans were too frightened, and too dependent on Russian gas to react, Putin reiterated what he had said in 2002: that his prime objective was to recreate “Velikaya Rossiya” – the tsarist-era term for “Great Russia”. At that moment, Ukraine’s fate was sealed.
Oh please. The West has been goading and insulting* Russia since 1991. NATO’s advancement eastward has been a constant source of concern and alarm to Russia. They protested time and time again without a single pause by the West.
And by 2014 when the Maidan Revolution (aka Revolution of Dignity) occurred, the path to (potential) conflict was already taking shape. (The US didn’t finally withdraw from Afghanistan until mid 2021.) America’s withdrawal didn’t cement Russia’s action.
In fact, there was still some hope for peace when Putin extended an olive branch in December 2021 when he put forward a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees,” based on non-enlargement of NATO and limitations on the deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles.
In late January 2022, the US formally replied to Russia that the US and NATO will not discuss with Russia issues of NATO enlargement or missile deployment. The door was slammed in Russia’s face. At that point I think we can say Ukraine’s fate was sealed.
Don’t forget the February 12, 2015 signing Minsk II, which was unanimously backed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2202 on February 17, 2015. A while ago, former Chancellor Merkel acknowledged that the Minsk II agreement was designed to give time for Ukraine to strengthen its military. It was not implemented by Ukraine, and Zelenskyy has said they had no intention of doing so.
There is a conga line of other solidly documented historical facts that Henry seems to have overlooked. I’m not saying Russia is blameless – and nor do I have time to write a thorough rebuttal – but Henry’s article is weak and one sided – it may as well have been written by the US State Department and has the same credibility.
* One insult I thought was particularly unbecoming of a supposed Statesman – in March of 2014 Obama referred to Russia as a “regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours — not out of strength but out of weakness.” Referencing Russia as a ‘regional power’ who was ‘weak’ was intended as a deep insult. Mission accomplished.
Trump’s campaign must turn it back on Democrats and start accusing them of insurrection right now and that they will fight it so that it becomes a chant at all his rallies.
This is assuming they know the difference, not backed up by anything I have seen so far from Bowen.
RSL Queensland slammed over new ‘acknowledgment of country’ for Anzac Day ceremonies: ‘Where do these things stop?’
Daily Mail
VicPlod? 5D chess? 😕
OK.
What does “cultural safety” mean?
“Zionists have no right to cultural safety”
What does that mean?
Roger.
Its simple.
Zionisten haben kein Recht auf kulturelle Sicherheit
Jews need not apply.
Not on the protected list. So fair game.
Hilarious!
I chummed the waters for you though.
“Competent magistrate”
Yes, I know.
It’s a rhetorical question.
See Popper’s paradox of tolerance.
Say…what’s the emoji for a rhetorical question?
32D chess. The dildos have to be white and black, in different sizes and shapes. I doubt Vicplod would have any difficulty with that, they’re probably stores items.
Not the Bee.
Austfailure, you are standing in it.
https://twitter.com/mattjcan/status/1766008605705470249
Just when our energy policy can’t get any sillier … our nation’s only nuclear reactor has just blanketed its roof with solar panels!
Mark Twain on Australia.
“Now comes a singular thing, the oddest thing, the strangest thing, the most unaccountable marvel that Australia can show,” he wrote. “At the frontier between NSW and Victoria our multitude of passengers were routed out of their snug beds by lantern light in the morning in the biting cold to change cars. Think of the paralysis of intellect that gave that idea birth, imagine the boulder it emerged from, on some petrified legislator’s shoulders.”
Nature Positive = Pro Poverty. (No breaking that grass-thatched ceiling for you little non-Caucasians!).
I knew this would happen one day. Now it has come to pass.
It’s The Rise of the Paperweights.
Suitnet will hunt us like animals.
That was still the case in the 70s. When or if did they fix it?
Crossie…
2004.
Damn straight.
But he was referring not to garden variety intolerance, which we might otherwise call bigotry, but to an intolerance that would undermine the society itself by attacking its core values.
See the way the UK Hof C Speaker has recently capitulated to threats of violence from Islamists, for example.
Twain has a point, of course, but he’s being more than a little disingenuous.
The US had only adopted a standard gauge some ten years before his tour of Australia,
Aye, that ye did.
By ‘culture’ she means ‘in public.’ That is, no member of this prey group* will be permitted to access the public domain (including digitally) without fearing for their physical, financial, or emotional safety. The intention is to encourage them to self-isolate, so they become invisible outside of their own residential boundary (and again, including online).
* Let’s not pretend there is not a great deal of psychological satisfaction to be gained by perceiving oneself as a ‘hunter’ of other humans.
✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Tolerance, schmolerance. Just no. We will decide what is acceptable and what is not, everything else leads to debasement. I am too old to play the hippie games.
Ta very much.
Standard Gauge from Sydney to Perth went through in 1970.
friday beer music
12 inches of slightly rude disco
Pull up to the bumper, baby
and
Foo Fighters think you should be dancing
That’s still more than a century earlier than Australia. We really are the arse end of the world.
Crossie, quick search 1962.
I remember 3 lines through Seymour up till the recently. The left 2 facing north were for V/line and the single right on was for interstate trains I am led to believe and do remember the freight trains on. Now they only have the 2.
That said. Wasn’t till the 90’s they sealed the last part of the Bruce hwy north of Rocky.
The M7 ring-road around West Sydney has become more crowded since it was opened nearly 20 years ago. We are often held up by such things as concertinas or lawn mowing operations. But now it is to be widened (one day) to three lanes each way – well, most of it. But as a main access to the new airport it will have to be widened to take the increase in traffic.
For the next year or more we will be limited to 80k, down from the normal 100kph. But there will be no reduction in the toll, just as there was no reduction in the toll while the M2 was widened some years ago.
Sorry, but in some things you are. Sometimes i miss living in Australia, Then i walk out the front door, say good morning to my neighbors and realise what i used to think was Gods country is a shithole with nice weather.
Patrick Stephenson
VicPol say it was a deliberate act and that means there is a link between the Samantha Murphy and Stephenson.
I’d be looking at senior school days with relationships that may have turned sour and involved friends of the Murphy family.
That’s my guess as to a motive.
RSL Queensland slammed over new ‘acknowledgment of country’ for Anzac Day ceremonies: ‘Where do these things stop?’
When there is no more Country.
Very depressing read upthread about the intrepid Macquarie University ‘Dr’. This is clear incitement and should be treated as such, deport. Get out and live in Gaza if you feel this way.
The same thing happened with M4, which was F4 when it was built, just two lanes which had to be widened to three lanes to accommodate the population expansion into western Sydney and at great inconvenience to commuters. We have a political and bureaucratic class that are unable to plan for the future.
But only ten years before Twain wrote.
Even England had gauge issues in the early days.
A large part of the problem was the capital cost for states which administered large territories with small populations. Iirc, Queensland, which had opted for a 3’6″ narrow gauge due to the lower cost, only paid off its 19th C. railway debts to British banks around 2000.
Senator Rennick
BOM has manipulated temperature records to show a false increase in temperature
So true:
Chinese Spies | Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain
The same thing happened with M4, which was F4 when it was built, just two lanes which had to be widened to three lanes to accommodate the population expansion into western Sydney and at great inconvenience to commuters. We have a political and bureaucratic class that are unable to plan for the future.
The same thing happened with the Gore Hill Freeway in the early 1990s. Initially two lanes each way which I said at the time would not be enough. We lived in Naremburn at the time (right next door to the Freeway).
Then they did the Lane Cove Tunnel and expanded the Gore Hill Freeway to three lanes each way. Would have been cheaper to have made it three lanes in the first place. Another great example of NSW and the State Planning and Infrastructure Mob.
Long Term Planning – LOL
I can recall reading, but cannot remember where, or confirm, that the M-7 contractors offered to make it three lanes both ways for a relatively small increase in the contract price.
Supposedly, the offer was refused because a politician wanted it opened on a date when he/she/xe would be able to put their name on a plaque.
How China is flooding America with fentanyl on purpose to undermine our society
I’m remembering the uproar when RSLWA banned “Welcome to Country” and the “Aboriginal Flag.”
A white de-centred feminist you say?
All over the place like a mad woman’s breakfast.
Yep, they have. Starting their series in 1910 is a complete tell. Right at the bottom of the 60 year cycle. The Federation Drought and the 1880s were hot, since they occurred at the top of the cycle.
They start their rainfall series in 1900. Weird that.
err, Rog, talk about factlets that one might have not been even remotely interested in until one accidentally had the misfortune to read about them …
So how many Gibbos of the cherry red persuasion had been paid off by their (alleged) owners as of 2000, eh, Squire, I asks ya? 😕
Rail gauge changes at borders can sometimes have benefits. The Mongolians change the boggies on the rail cars at the border with China. Tough and astute buggers, the descendants of Chinggis Khan. Outnumbered 3M to 1.3B, they stick up for themselves.
It’s always about the money which I can understand when it’s a private venture but I cannot understand why governments who approve these projects would go along with it.
The worst project had to have been the M5 between Liverpool and Mascot that was only one lane each way for a while. Who thought that was a good idea? I think that was during the Bob Carr’s admin in NSW which is not surprising since he thought we didn’t need any roads. After all, didn’t everyone just use helicopters like he did?
Old missus lives and works in a town in the Ballarat district. Facebook Agatha Christies she works with and others they are connected to around Ballarat are talking Bikers and debts. There has to be a lot more to this than some young bloke bumping off a woman jogging just for kicks etc.
I can recall reading, but cannot remember where, or confirm, that the M-7 contractors offered to make it three lanes both ways for a relatively small increase in the contract price.
Rinse & repeat Stage 1 & 2 of the Townsville ring road bypass being single lane. The final link was dual lanes.
Apparently on stage 1 & 2 the useless arrogant fool Mike Reynolds kyboshed because the expansions would “create more jobs.” A friend lived next door to an engineer involved in both stages. That said know there was a lot of argy bargy with Beattie playing politics with Howard on funding.
Be interesting to see an in depth analysis on how much these bungles or stubborn decisions cost taxpayers.
Every society before yesterday understood this fact. The implication is that a tolerant, liberal society is impossible because a society cannot be neutral with respect to its ‘core values’. Again, a fact every society until yesterday understood.
Cats, courtesy of Albansleazey and the economic force of indescribable idiocy that is Dim Chambers, we’ve now apparently been gifted with a “per capita recession” whatever the fork that might happen to be.
Methinks they might just be trying to hide the fact that yet again, under their utterly incompetent stewardship, the Ozzie economy is “allegedly, not going forward”.
But it’s all OK, because the least productive jurisdiction in Oz (even more useless than Taxmania and the Nothing Territory) the ACT, has accidentally and unintentionally tapped a boundless new source of revenue – (cue spookee muzak …) the Brutnah Blerb … 😕
Watch horrified as gazillions of taxpayers’ dollars are unrelentingly and interminably mercilessly swallowed up by this evil insatiable creature from a very black swamp …
In the meantime, that big fat orange personage, Fatty Trump, has, courtesy of much illegal help from Vlad the Pute, illegally secured the Republican nomination for the Prezidency election later this year. Upon securing the nomination, Fatty Trump was last seen shaking his house sized backside to this obscure tune … 🙂
Dover, we all understood this until the 60s and I still do not blame the boomers who were misled by their university lecturers who were just your garden variety communists. These “untaught” boomers went on to undermine their civilisations once they infiltrated all our institutions and corporations.
As you can see, it was not all baby boomers, certainly not the hard working ones but the university educated ones who then infected all institutions.
These same universities now are all into DEI and ESG just to finish us off altogether. Do we have time to defeat them? I don’t know.
I recall the M5 and Lane Cove tunnels could have been 3 lanes each way for a very modest amount more. Politicians, oxygen thieves.
Classics.
—-
Superwogs – McDonald’s
McDonald’s
How many Sydney harbour tunnel feasibility studies had been done before it was built. At least three by the same Neutral Bay consulting engineers. Which in effect was the same one dusted off with updated costs.
Politicians (and/or their equally braindead “advisors”), misinterpreting cost benefit analyses. Again.
We came south down the Hume to Western Ring Road the other day, in order to hive off to Geelong. Many, many lanes, all chokka at 3 pm on a Thursday. Bit of a shock for the country yokels. From the ridiculous to the sublime now in north Tassie, those multitudes of elected representatives have supplied excellent roads to the burgeoning population of Devonport and Burnie.
It seems there has been an earthquake in the Blue Mountains. My windows shook but I thought it was a gust of wind.
Gerbil Worming.
Bob Carr sold off the dedicated above ground corridor (since at least the 1940’s) down Queen st through Canada Bay for $70 million odd to help pay for the Olympics and 20 years later we got a tunnel for a lazy billion to make the same trip.
In the best of hands.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is a headline tomorrow.
A block away from my abode in Five Docks … 😕
However, thanks to staggering bureaucratic incompetence and political expediency, it was never an issue.
Until I’d moved outta there! 🙂
A magnifique young womanage, just belting it out, during the height of Bat Flu hysteria.
Never forget, never forgive, Cats.
“I hate rude behavior in a man, I won’t tolerate it.”
This is from Pixy Misa at Ace Of Spades blog, only wish it was much more common.
There most certainly is not enough of it.
collectivism = the lowest common denominator of human stupidity, boundless as the latter now appears to be.
One other thing, Pixy Misa is supposed to be Australian. Does anyone know if that is true?
err, this is the personage in question?
ai .mee .nu
Just my fourth attempt to post the Pixy Misa’s blogue address. 😕
Hint – ignore the spaces, cats.
As the ultra-heated air from global warming rises, it creates a vacuum effect on the air between Earth’s platonic plates, forcing those plates to grind together, and causing more frequent and catastrophic earthquakes.
There. It writes itself really.
Remember to emphasise ‘Ultra-heated air.’
Or maybe Super-Ultra-heated …
Super-Ultra-Mega?
SUMHair.
Noice…
(Trademark pending).
A new fashioned Telecaster …
“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
Bill Shankly.
“Sliante” to you horrible mob. The stock market is at a record high, the investment portfolio is looking VERY healthy, and I don’t reckon that’s too bad for someone raised in a tent on the West Australian sand plain, and who the A.D.F. gave the first new pair of shoes he ever owned…
New OT up.
1 buy from OS … under $1k is effectively GST free
2 gst applies to the customs value … “The customs value is the price the goods are sold for, minus freight and insurance from the place of export”
3 they are probably robbing you … you can bet they won’t be passing that gst to the ATO …because they arent required to do so
4. actually come to think of it , that’s a pretty good rort they have going there