Anyone know the whereabouts of or heard of a .. “Top Oz politician”” ..?

??Former Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews has warned it’s ‘only a matter of time’ before a top Australian politician is assassinated.

However, a decision was made not to place any personnel on the roof.

Usual waffle – using the passive voice to avoid assigning responsibility. I will assume it was someone she wants to protect who made the decision. But it is not just that there was no one stationed on the roof, but the fact that the guy was seen long before he fired and nobody did anything to stop him until he did.

Even if there is a rule about not firing upon someone before they fire, a sniper firing a bullet into the roof near him would likely have sent him scurrying.

This woman and her minions may want to start updating their resumes.

Douglas Crabbe: Notorious Uluru killer denied parole by Attorney General John Quigley after 40 years in jailDylan CapornThe West Australian
Wed, 17 July 2024 2:00AM

One of Australia’s most notorious mass murderers has been sensationally denied freedom by Attorney-General John Quigley, despite Western Australia’s parole board formally recommending his release.
Douglas Crabbe, who killed five people when he drove his 25-tonne Mack truck into a crowded Uluru pub in 1983, was serving five life sentences at Acacia Prison.
In May, Crabbe, who completed a resocialisation program, was recommended for release by the Prisoners Review Board. Mr Quigley confirmed to The West he had denied the parole application.
But, in a blow to survivors of the fatal truck crash, the board will likely reconsider parole in less than 12 months.
Mr Quigley’s looming retirement from State Parliament means one of the first actions for his successor in the role could be to decide whether to release Crabbe as early as April.
One other option available to the next attorney-general is to classify Crabbe under WA’s tough mass murderer anti-parole provisions, which would delay consideration of release for up to six years.
They are the same rules currently blocking annual parole decisions on serial killers such as Peter John Maloney, Catherine Birnie and William Patrick Mitchell.

Bruce of Newcastle

 July 17, 2024 8:22 am

Good.

Musk Moving SpaceX HQ From California to Texas (16 Jul)

Social media platform X Corp. and rocket company SpaceX will move their headquarters to Texas from California, billionaire Elon Musk, who controls both companies, said Tuesday

This is another indicator how the US is already splitting up into the red and blue countries. Republicans and conservatives are leaving the Democrat hellholes and moving to friendlier states. The only thing holding the separation from completion are the liberals and democrats who are staying in safe blue states and are not moving to California, New York or Illinois, they too consider them too dangerous.

… it took too long to get him in the vehicle and even longer for it to depart.

Agents were darting about, some running in circles, clearly not sure what to do. One, overweight and looking panicked, pointed her gun all over the place. Another had trouble holstering her pistol. 

The only thing missing was the Benny Hill music to accompany these Keystone Kops.

I’m starting to think that even that is a tactic to terrorise and demoralise Trump to the point that he would give up and bow out of the running.

Cost of CFMEU inaction’s an economic wrecking ball
Eric Johnston The Australian 15 July, 2024

There is a terrible inflationary cost to the serious allegations of corruption through construction unions, and it cascades in a poisonous way through the economy. It even gets to the point where some large projects simply won’t go ahead because of the risk of cost blowouts and labour supply. Financial sponsors such as banks won’t go near certain projects because they will be left holding that risk.

There’s also an invisible hit to the economy where more innovative and efficient builders refuse to bid for heavy infrastructure or big-ticket construction jobs. They are too smart to deal with the headaches and likely losses. This means the economy loses.

All this represents untold economic damage, meaning all Australians pay for inflated costs, allegations of corruption and stale work practices.

The new front in the cost blowouts will be across energy, mostly funded by private investors and even some union-aligned superannuation funds, where tens of billions will be spent over the coming decade.

Businesses working in construction and heavy infrastructure are watching how the allegations aired by 60 Minutes against infiltration of the CFMEU by bikies and underworld figures will unfold. Few are surprised by the allegations. Investors will be asking their own questions on building and contractors about the cost of doing business in the coming reporting season.

Many big national building players contacted by The Australian have their own tales of union clashes and strongly doubt much will change.

After all, the behaviour continues even after a royal commission into union corruption, Federal Court actions and even the now-abandoned Australian Building and Construction Commission. In fact, things have just got worse.

On Monday, the powerful CFMEU placed its Victorian branch into administration and promised to clean up and investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

The Albanese government says it is considering deregistering the union’s state construction division. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan, who is footing the bill for road and rail builds, referred allegations of criminal behaviour inside the CFMEU to police and the state anti-corruption commission.

It’s all too little too late – Australia’s economy is rapidly slowing and governments are fast-running out of money to fund their infrastructure dreams.

Soaring costs

Project costs for building construction have jumped 30 per cent since March 2020 when the Covid pandemic brought work to a standstill, according to the ABS’s Producer Price Index figures.

Break it down by state and costs are up 33 per cent across Queensland and 28 per cent in NSW where there are a number of big-ticket infrastructure projects underway.

Victoria, the focus of the allegations where most building activity is underway, has seen costs push up 27 per cent, according to ABS numbers.

It was materials costs initially, but labour supply problems translate to services inflation. This is the inflation that is refusing to go away, and it means we all pay as it adds to interest rate pressure.

Soaring rates mean new apartment construction has stalled, just as more housing is needed.

As the economy slows, the cost of inflated wages and labour mean there is no marginal return for investment. And it’s the subcontractors that feel it the most and they are the ones going broke.

The Reserve Bank’s highly-regarded business liaison program is also warning of stresses. Last month, the RBA noted feedback from business where high-rise residential developments were stalled or not going ahead due to the high costs of construction relative to apartment sale prices and capacity constraints.

“While the pace of construction cost growth is easing as material costs improve and supply chains normalise, the cost and availability of labour remains a challenge,” the central bank said in feedback from the business liaison program.

Tackling unions

Few in the corporate world have been prepared to take on the CFMEU knowing the likely blowback to their own operations.

Governance issues mean many simply won’t deal with the union, and that means not being prepared to bid for jobs, further undermining competition.

Former Boral boss Mike Kane was prepared to speak out, although it came at a cost of more than $30m in lost business to his company.

Kane famously stood up to former CFMEU boss John Setka by refusing to bow to union demands not to supply concrete to Daniel Grollo’s projects.

Setka, the CFMEU Victorian construction division secretary, resigned on Friday.

Boral soon found itself subject to a boycott action across sites in Melbourne, where developers chose other suppliers to keep the peace on building work sites.

Former competition regulator Rod Sims then became one of the few regulators prepared to take up the cause. He spent five years as ACCC boss pursuing the CFMEU through the courts over its actions on Boral. Setka was named as a defendant in the ACCC action.

In 2018, a Federal Court ultimately ordered the CFMEU to pay $1m in penalties for secondary boycotts against Boral in construction sites across Melbourne. This was for the union’s “Ban Against Boral” campaign. At the time, it was the highest penalty awarded for a secondary boycott. But this failed to bring about a change in behaviour.

The court found the union’s behaviour was designed to “cause substantial loss or damage to Boral”.

“The whole purpose of the Ban Against Boral was to cause a substantial loss to Boral, by deterring customers (existing or potential) from using Boral in metropolitan Melbourne,” Justice John Middleton said.

“The real harm to Boral was damage to its reputation by the threat that Boral trucks would be hindered or delayed in the delivery of concrete. This threat was made known to certain customers, some of whom changed their supplier of concrete away from Boral”.

However in 2022, a separate finding involving a boycott acquisition agreement between the CFMEU and Queensland builders Hutchinson was overturned by a Full Court.

Innes Willox, the chief executive of the national employer association Australian Industry Group, urged a restatement of the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

Businesses large and small in the construction sector “have long been forced to work under intimidation and the threat of reprisal if they did not bend to the CFMEU’s will”, Willox says. This means “all Australians are paying more for inflated construction costs”.

Victor Davis Hanson – The Biden Titanic

Biden’s prefaces of “no lie,” “here’s the deal,” “no kidding,” and “no joke” are little more than tics that forewarn us of complete fabrications about to follow

The Biden Tictanic.

Victoria creeps closer to signing Aboriginal treaty less than one year after Voice failure

• Victoria step closer to signing Aboriginal treaty
• First People’s Assembly are ready to negotiate

Daily Mail.

Stand by for a legal dogfight of monumental proportions..

Pierre comes across as a top bloke. The short excerpt of the interview is worth the watch. After that, this channel brings up some GOLD clips from the web.

The Japanese anime on the Trump shooting is a good laugh.

—–

The Pleb Reporter:

Pierre Poilievre REFUSES to apologize for TRUMP comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xrccd0iqp8

Trying to take in that such potential historical weight rested on the slim shoulders of a diversity hire, parachuted into position by an unelected personage and a president under petticoat government, who decided that a sloped roof that presented a perfect position for a sniper was too dangerous to place agents on.

It’s almost akin to Archduke Ferdinand’s driver taking the wrong turn into danger after there’d already been a failed assassination attempt because nobody in the Archduke’s party thought to advise the driver of the altered route.

Empires can fall as a result of such mundane idiocy.

This is not some hopeless DEI chick floundering in the unexpected spotlight. It is the Administrative State in motion, protecting itself in a cloak of plausible deniability.

That’s a very thin cloak of plausibility they’re wrapping themselves in.

Expect this Cheatle woman to be the fall guy, so to speak, for the systemic incompetence that was identified in the upper echelon of the SS as far back as a review by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2015 after a series of SS failures re the WH & POTUS. As a member of that committee angrily said on Monday, they’ve learned nothing since. It even looks like it’s gotten worse.

Rhetoric, meet reality…

‘Difficult summer ahead’ of migrant Channel crossings after record in first half of year, warns Government
It comes after the Prime Minister last week warned the number of crossings “can’t be changed overnight” and acknowledged the situation may get worse before it gets better.
The Standard 17 July 2024

Word is the best Starmer is now willing to do is accept 100 000 asylum seekers a year from the EU in exchange for the EU accepting the return of irregular arrivals on British shores.

Not exactly “smashing the gangs” & hardly the deal of the century for the UK…100 000 a year added to the already unsustainable burden on essential public services.

When I read the “steep roof” line this morning I genuinely expected the link to take me to Babylon Bee.
FMD!
A roof so steep that, when they conducted the high speed remote lobotomy on Crook, he simply lay there. He didn’t roll down the “steep roof” and fall off spaghetti Western style.

The Australian has just indulged in an extravaganza of self congratulation on its 60th anniversary. All well and god but they really need to rein in their moderators who just rejected this response to Paul Kelly’s piece denouncing Trump as – yes – a”threat to democracy”

Yes Trump broke a taboo in questioning the 2020 election result (even though a fair slab of the country including many Democrats shared his scepticism). How many democracy protecting taboos have the Democratic elites broken Paul? How about impeaching a president after he has left office? Weaponising the legal system in the most blatant manner? Cooking up the Russia hoax? Getting the CIA to lie about Hunter’s laptop? Hillary calling Trump an illegitimate President? It’s an Augean stable and Trump’s most onerous labour is to go some way to cleaning it up.