Talking to myself on the old fred …

Why aren’t the Feds raiding the ABC and seizing tapes and documents?
There is credible evidence that ABC staff fabricated evidence which could have resulted in a murder conviction.

1st they sent the pagers but I didn’t have one
Then they sent the walkie-talkies but I didn’t have one
Next came the solar panels and I had none
But when they sent the toasters ……. duuuuuuuuuh!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13864883/Lebanon-explosions-Hezbollah-communications-devices-detonate-country-pager-bomb.html

calli
 September 19, 2024 7:52 am

I wonder what Iran and Syria will do?

Definitely not check their pagers.

Reports this morning that the central market in Tehran has sold out of three metre cane poles.
Or “log-on sticks” as they are now known in that part of the world.

Imo, Coory is far too kind in his assessment of Howard:

The final nail in the Liberal broad church?

Damian Coory, The Spectator (Aust ed.) 18 September, 2024

Weakness on the misinformation and disinformation bill could prove fatal ‘The father of the nation…’ That’s how former Deputy Prime Minster John Anderson described his former boss, John Howard, during a podcast interview last year. Mr Howard these days certainly carries the presence of the elder statesman. The stability of his time as Prime Minister reminds us of a different – and better – Australia. The days before Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and Tony Abbott-Turnbull-Scott Morrison made the nation’s top job a precarious short-term reign.

But Howard himself coined a term that could be the ultimate demise of the Liberal Party: ‘a broad church’.

‘We should never, as members of the Liberal Party of Australia, lose sight of the fact that we are the trustees of two great political traditions. We are, of course, the custodian of the classical liberal tradition within our society, Australian Liberals should revere the contribution of John Stuart Mill to political thought,’ Howard opined, during a 2005 speech.

‘We are also the custodians of the conservative tradition in our community. And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions.’

I wonder if John Howard envisaged at the time how his broad church would look two decades later?

In marketing, there’s a different philosophical approach: if you try to be all things to all people, you’ll soon be nothing to nobody. The double negative being grammatically and logically incorrect, but (as marketers prefer) the alliteration is nice and you get the point.

Another core tenet of marketing is differentiation. People don’t make purchase decisions based on a rational analysis of all the pros and cons of a certain product versus a competitor. They make decisions on a few memorable points that instil a positive emotional response. They then post-rationalise their purchase later.

Most importantly, faced with a new product option, consumers tend not to change unless there is a compelling ‘reason’ to do so. The risk of change is usually seen as not worth taking unless there’s a potential for significant reward.

All of this, I believe, explains the failure of the Liberal-National coalition to win any of the last federal or mainland state elections it’s faced. And it points to the Queensland LNP facing a more difficult path to victory next month than should be necessary (and probable minority government) given the contempt in which a majority of Queenslanders hold the incumbent Labor crew.

Howard was a stable and solid Prime Minister worthy of fond reflection, but he betrayed the core values of the party at least twice. The introduction of one of the greatest administrative burdens ever to be placed upon small business in this land – the curse of GST and BAS – was a bureaucratic manoeuvre worthy of Mao. And the failure to introduce a pro-family policy of permitting a household to split its combined income for tax calculation purposes – something he himself had championed for many years – was a capitulation to the left’s long march to destroy the nuclear family as the basic unit of our community.

Is John Howard’s broad church sustainable? I don’t think so.

The Australia of 2024 is different. There is a sharper divide in political ideology and a geographic shift has occurred too.

This could work in the Coalition’s favour, but it will require burning down the broad church and a decisive move from a market-responding stance to a market-shifting approach.

Geography now maps political ideology fairly nicely. Forget the inner-city mentality. It’s a lost cause and worthy of ignoring. Focus 100 per cent on rural, regional, and suburban Australia. Grow the pie from the outside-in and you’ll not only win votes, but the culture too.

The rapid rise and fall of Scott Morrison should have been a clear lesson. The fearful trepidation surrounding every policy position as strategists nervously consulted the ‘market research’ at every turn, is a path to destruction.

At some point you have to lead. You have to sell an idea to the market.

To quote someone who had a tiny bit of success in his lifetime selling products nobody realised they needed, Apple founder Steve Jobs: ‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’

Every so often an opportunity comes along to really lead. To seize a modestly popular position and expand upon it.

Such an opportunity landed in the laps of the federal Coalition this past week and was met with the lacklustre response of a church that may indeed be too broad.

The Other Side (my weekly online video show alternative to the ABC’s left wing cultural bias) has a modest 27,000 followers on X. It is unusual for any of our tweets to receive more than a few dozen likes or re-tweets.

But every now and again something hits a public nerve and generates a huge unexpected response. And this one shocked me. A post on Friday about the government’s hideous Frankenstein reincarnation of the dud Misinformation Bill garnered 77,000 views, 1,300 retweets, and 4,100 likes in a matter of hours.

Even among a right-wing-leaning sample on an atypically politically engaged platform like X, that’s a response that should alert any politician to a golden opportunity.

What was even more telling was the nature of the response. I had rhetorically posed the question, ‘So… Where is Peter Dutton and [the Liberal Party] on all this?’ I never anticipated the veracity of the response. A significant proportion of the comments were more critical of the Opposition for not doing the job of opposing, than of the government.

‘The lack of a true opposition party in this country is completely astounding. The Australian people must reject this bill at all costs,’ wrote one.

‘This bill is now so toxic it will destroy every politician that doesn’t come out and totally condemn it… That any politician thinks it’s okay to gag the majority of the population is utterly contemptuous,’ one particularly articulate commenter noted. ‘That they also think it’s okay to exempt themselves and their mates is utterly despicable. The outrage at this is palpable. Any party which makes this a fundamental part of its platform will win the election.’

‘There are many of us who have addressed [Dutton] directly asking for a clear statement in response to this bill. It’s reminiscent of the eSafety Commissioner saga. He waits and then delivers a response. It’ll be interesting, given his support of Covid vaccines, Digital ID, eSafety Commissioner, and his 16-year-old threshold for SM accounts,’ laments another.

This is a skewed sample as the market research boffins would say. True. But the quantity and quality of this reaction to a tweet from a modest independent news commentary channel, is a red flag. It’s also a flashing green light of opportunity.

The ‘moderate’ Liberal Shadow Minster for Communication, David Coleman, is astoundingly – but sadly not surprisingly – busily looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Elon Musk accused the Australian government of being ‘fascists’ with these new laws that threaten to fine global companies 5 per cent of their global revenue for breaches of what ACMA deems to be a failure to properly police ‘misinformation’.

Coleman, with all the leadership and force of a wet blanket wrapped in a lettuce leaf, told Sky News Australia he would not use the same words Musk did.

Why not?

He said merely that ‘there are a lot of problems with this bill’ and that the government was being ‘contemptuous of free speech’. Shadow Cabinet needed to carefully review the details before commenting further, his advisor told me, as he turned down an interview spot on my show (the audience isn’t small).

How about a blanket in-principle condemnation of this ghastly piece of legislation that is not worthy of any kind of consideration, but only immediate relegation to the garbage bin of bad left-wing authoritarian ideas?

The conclusions more right-leaning classical liberal and libertarian Australians can draw from all of this are stark: either this opposition is full of politically strategic fools or they actually like and want this bill to proceed. Either is a troubling concern.

‘It’s possible to imagine the ex-copper Dutton is in furious agreement with the moderates on this one,’ a former senior party figure told me this week.

Oh dear. We may now have the worst ‘broad church’ of all in play. The authoritarian bureaucratic Liberal Party left locked in a joyous embrace with the party’s conservative authoritarians.

If someone doesn’t burst this bubble of groupthink soon, the quiet Australians who see these draconian laws for what they truly are – an abomination in a modern liberal democracy – will remain tragically unrepresented by an Opposition incapable of opposing even the most obviously bad laws.

And for the Coalition many more years of opposition or, at best, minority government, awaits.

Martin McKenzie-Murray writes about teaching.
He nails it.

There are more than 300,000 full-time school teachers in Australia, although that’s far from enough. It’s a sufficiently large number, however, that reporting on their grievances and satisfactions can invite generalisation – that is, the promotion of an individual frustration to something dubiously representative. Naturally, there is great variability between schools. They occupy multiple socioeconomic pockets, enjoy different budgets, possess their own cultures, philosophies and challenges.

Last year, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released its report on the “disciplinary climate” of classrooms across the developed world. Australia was among the most unfavourable, ranking 33rd among the 37 countries surveyed.
The report informed a Senate inquiry into classroom behaviour, which reported late last year. PISA’s unflattering findings have been complemented by other reports and surveys, including Monash University’s frequent survey of Australian teachers. In its 2022 survey of 5000 teachers, it found the volume of teachers who felt unsafe at work had increased from 19 per cent in 2019 to almost 25 per cent in just three years. Last week, the New South Wales Department of Education released data on school suspensions within the public system. It reported that last year almost 34,000 students were suspended – that’s 800 a week, and almost one in 12 high-school students.

“We’ve got a number of data points coming together, all showing a similar picture,” says Dr Greg Ashman, deputy principal of Ballarat Clarendon College in Victoria and a frequent commentator on education. “So to ignore that, I think, would be complacent. But I think the politicians, to be fair to them, they understand that there’s an issue, because they were talking about managing behaviour, and they’ve asked AERO (Australian Education Research Organisation) to develop these behaviour resources. It’s more the department bureaucracies and the academics and the people that train teachers who just don’t want to go near the issue.”

A primary school teacher from Brisbane I spoke to this week, who has been practising for 40 years, tells me she had to drive a teacher aide home recently after the aide was attacked by a young student. “She was injured, and she’d been injured many times before, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the teacher says. “In the last few years, going to the staffroom and seeing someone in tears – that’s much more common now. Fear is definitely something that I’ve noticed more in the last few years.”

Contained within the reports and statistics about student behaviour and teacher satisfaction are philosophical debates and cultural changes that are reported on much less than the numbers. It’s not just media indifference here: the use and appropriateness of suspensions or expulsions is a significant debate within the profession, but it’s inhibited by several things.
One is the effective gagging of public-school teachers by their state’s typically risk-averse education departments; another is the delicacy that’s introduced by the fact Indigenous and disabled students are disproportionately reflected in suspension numbers. To argue for a school to reserve the right to suspend or expel students can invite accusations of discrimination.

A major part of this has been the trend of closing down specialist-needs schools, which some have argued is discriminatory and ghettoising. It’s a contested idea, but generally speaking the argument for equity has triumphed over tailored, specialist education. Last year, in its final report, the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability recommended that segregated schooling be phased out by 2051. Notably, however, the six commissioners were themselves split on this: half of them wanted no deadline imposed on the transition.

For Greg Ashman, there’s friction between ideology and practicality. He believes more disabled students can be included in mainstream education, but the subsequent challenges and demands placed on teachers must be commensurately acknowledged and resourced. “I wonder whether we’ve kind of crossed the Rubicon a little bit, particularly the inclusion agenda,” he says. “I think we could include more kids in mainstream education, rather than specialist schools, and I think the way you would do that is by having lots of structure and lots of routines and lots of support in place to do that. But I still think there’s a role for specialist schools. But what we’re having at the moment is activists saying we need to close all the specialist schools down and that we need to get every kid into mainstream education – we just need to support them, and we just need more resources. But more resources aren’t coming, and that is also affecting people’s morale and their perceptions of the feasibility of actually doing the job.”

Here’s the rub, as described almost uniformly by teachers I’ve spoken to: the burden of the job has increased, without commensurate support. The administrative load, as a function of increased accountability, has often become overwhelming. Adding to this has been a shift in parental attitudes: parents are much more anxiously inquiring about their children’s education these days, and there’s a related sense of entitlement to a teacher’s time. Equally, parental trust in schools has decreased. I’ve lost count of the number of teachers who in my conversations have nominated parent–teacher nights as exhaustingly combative. “I spoke to a teacher last week who said she felt suicidal after parent–teacher interviews and that she needs to see her GP,” one teacher told me, “and she said, ‘I just can’t do this any longer.’?”

“Anecdotally, I think morale is not great,” Greg Ashman says. “Certainly, we have a teacher shortage at the moment, and that gives you some indication of what might be going on. And I don’t think that, although all teachers would agree that they need to be paid more, I don’t think that’s the core issue. I think making the job more manageable is the core issue.”
It can be spurious to offer one individual’s quote as being representative of 300,000 people, but this one, I think, probably is: “Ultimately, it does feel like both the best job in the world and one of the hardest.”

@GuntherEagleman

Walz is just as bad as Harris.

Zero brain activity

He was just asked: “What do you tell people who wake up each morning wondering ‘How am I going to get by financially?”

Walz: “Kamala and I are middle class folks.”

Keep these people in front of a camera unscripted!

Election Interference? Fed Slashes Interest Rates By Biggest Amount In 16 YEARS (50bps) Two Months Prior To Presidential Election 

Calls for age restrictions on free syringes as Kimberley kids as young as eight request needle packsBethany HiattThe West Australian
Thu, 19 September 2024 2:00AM

Kids as young as eight are being handed packs of free needles provided for intravenous drug users in the Kimberley, prompting calls for age restrictions to the scheme.
Hospitals and health services across WA provide “fit packs” containing five sterile needles and syringes to drug users to help prevent transmission of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis and HIV.
Questions asked in Parliament by Broome-based MLC Neil Thomson have revealed Kimberley health providers’ concerns that children as young as eight are being provided fit packs through the Health Department’s free needle program.
Mr Thomson said health professionals feared the children were using those needles for drug use for themselves or other children or adults.
In response, Labor MP Pierre Yang said “clinical judgment” was used when distributing fit packs, “as well as providing information and referrals to drug services where appropriate”.
It comes after The West last week revealed an eight-year-old girl was pricked by a needle found in the playground of a Broome primary school, amid residents’ complaints of an alarming increase in the number of needles being discarded across the tourist town.
Mr Thomson said it was shocking there was no limitation on children accessing needles.

Meme