via France’s Hernandez Cleared To Play Next Game Despite Sustaining 11 Separate Concussions – The Shovel
Category: Australia
So the Independant Remuneration Tribunal thinks we have the most valuable PM on the planet. He deserves the sack just for that as does the IRT. Are the 7 million Australian the higest paid workers on the planet? (ODT)?
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is the highest-paid politician in the OECD, new figures show, earning up to 10 times the average wage – the second-highest disparity with the majority of workers in the developed world.
Mr Turnbull’s base pay rose to $527,854 a year after the independent Remuneration Tribunal ordered a 2 per cent pay rise for politicians last year, delivering the prime minister a $10,000 pay jump.
The analysis by market research firm IG puts Mr Turnbull above Swiss President Alain Berset, who will earn $483,000 this year, and US President Donald Trump, who has earned $400,000 in his first year in the White House.
via At $528,000 a year, Turnbull’s pay is highest of any leader in OECD
An Adelaide Jewish leader is calling for stronger hate crime laws, following a wave of pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic posters and stickers appearing around the city, including on university campuses and at a local synagogue.
Has anyone notified George there are 150 Anglican churches up for sale?(ODT)
The sooner we separate religion and state completely, the better. That will entail getting rid of a Coalition who is so far out of touch with mainstream Australian values that they have become an irrelevant anachronism who should have no place in the halls of power.
Between the 4th August this year, the earliest an election can be called and the 19th May next year, the latest, there is a minefield of events that the Coalition will not want to compete with, in its attempts to stay in power.
The most difficult are the Victorian state election in November and the NSW state election in March 2018. Throw in the AFL and NRL football finals in late September/early October, Christmas, School holidays and Easter and it’s obvious.
Politically speaking, this August or early September is the only clear-air time realistically available for the government to try to redeem itself.
via Get ready! An early election is coming – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Our boys were fighting for Empire and a White Australia. They held the prevalent attitude of the day, that the White race is superior to others and the British are the best of the Whites. We don’t have to castigate them for absorbing the attitude of the times, but we should rid ourselves of the illusion they were fighting for the paradise of democracy and freedom (for the wealthy) proclaimed in recent times by John Howard and Rupert Murdoch.
via Howard’s Anzac fictions and the ageing adolescence of Australia
Anzac Day is an opportunity to confront our violent frontier past and its shadow today, writes Dr David Stephens.
YASSMIN ABDEL-MAGIED, a young Somali-Australian Muslim woman, was driven out of Australia last year after she implied that the Anzac sacred cow might be ready to graze new territory.
She wrote:
‘Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine … )’
I thought she was on the right track and I said so, copping some of the bilious and vicious response that she herself received. Yet surely, after a century, we can move beyond dead soldiers and broaden the remembrance focus to other weighty matters, where Australians bear some responsibility and where they should have some interest in making things right.
Such a matter is right in front of us.
One of the most significant findings to emerge from the work of behavioural economists is that human beings would rather go without than be treated unfairly.
This was discovered in a series of experiments involving two people — one of whom had $100 and the other who had nothing.
The most shocking thing about the Banking Royal Commission is how shocked so many profess to be by its findings.
The grandly titled Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry is, daily, hearing more outrageous examples of financial institutions’ shameless fleecing of their clientele.
via EDITORIAL: The ‘shocking’ Royal Commission and the banking mafia
There’s a war being waged in Australia – on our 4.3 million young people. You hear it in the negative and dispiriting language of our national conversation, from being told to just ‘get a good job’ or ‘cut back on the smashed avo’ as the solution to housing affordability, to Prime Minister Turnbull’s assertion his cabinet is ‘young at heart’ when the average age of that cabinet is over 50. Young people and the issues they face are being trivialised.
A public servant turned whistleblower employed by the Australian Taxation Office has this morning had his home raided by officers from the ATO and the Australian Federal Police, after speaking with a major joint Four Corners and Fairfax investigation into alleged abuse of power by the tax office.
via ATO raids tax office whistleblower amid Fairfax-Four Corners investigation
Is there any Australian left who hasn’t complained, or at least rolled their eyes about the state of politics in Canberra? Most of us tend to blame the politicians for all this, but a new analysis of voter data suggests a less comfortable truth. The problem is not just them. It’s also us.
via The fundamental operating model of Australian politics is breaking down
No seriously, why are we still working? Mike Dowson explains in simple terms the great con that keeps you chained to the wheel.
It seems that Mr Joyce has told “The Sydney Morning Herald” that the child’s biological father was “a bit of a grey area”, a revelation which must fill all of us – including Vikki Campion, the child’s mother – with a great sense of relief.
Mr Joyce makes a salient point when he chides “The Daily Telegraph” for assuming that he was, in fact, the father without checking. However, from there I find both my sense of what’s an appropriate comment to make and my knowledge of the facts of life differing from the Honorable Mr Joyce.
via Barnaby Speculates About His Private Life In Public! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Tony Abbott justified a good reason for it
That sinking feeling: trust in politicians lower in Australia than in most other countries
“In confronting these horrible dangers, we know that weakness is the surest path to conflict and unmatched power is the surest means to our true and great defence.”
via Serving two masters? Australia feels heat of Trump’s anti-China push
“Once you start to merge the judicial and the political, you begin to erode the separation of powers. It’s a really regrettable path to go down.”
Peter Dutton says the public should help choose judges and magistrates
Has Fairfax Media been offended or showing position in this nations hierarchy of colour? Reactive Racism, Black Racism is a natural and normal reaction to the celebration of the colonization of Australia and the 200 years of color hierarchy oppression and denial that continues through to today. One wonders why and for whom Fairfax media is reporting this? How very right wing Israeli they sound.
“The hardline Indigenous activist” “The Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance ” “the words “F— Australia”, called for the “decolonisation” of the country.” “Ms Onus-Williams’ comments prompted calls for her to be sacked from the Koorie Youth Council,” “”WAR will not rest until we burn this entire rotten settler colony called Australia, illegally and violently imposed on stolen Aboriginal land at the expense of the blood of countless thousands, to the f—ing ground, until every corrupt and illegal institution of white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist settler colonial power forced upon us is no more,”
‘Abolish Australia’, says Indigenous group behind ‘invasion day’ rally
“Foreign interference laws in national interest: Hastie”
New laws include register of lobbyists, representatives of foreign governments Catholic bishops say bill is so broad everyday churchgoers could be considered foreign agents Liberal MP says legislation is in Australias interest but no further protections are required
The country also dropped from ninth to 14th in its ranking on gender equality.
Australia, meanwhile, ranked 5th in the world for ‘Quality of Life’, which included measures such as “economically stable”, “a good job market”, and well developed public health and education systems. However it did terribly on the “affordable” measure.
Our worst ranking was under ‘Heritage’, where we lost marks for not having “a rich history”.
The survey respondents also gave us a very poor score when asked if Australia “has great food”.
via Australia pips US in global country ranking, thanks to Trump effect
The response from the Australian Immigration Minister was characteristically sinister and appropriate for a former police officer. With barely veiled menace, Peter Dutton suggested that New Zealand “would have to think about their relationship with Australia and what impact it would have”. “They’d have to think that through, and we’d have to think that through.”
Professor Hocking believes the Queen knew what might happen to the government well before it happened – unlike Whitlam, who was caught completely off-guard by the actions of November 11, 1975.
Source: ‘Volcanic’: Evidence of Queen’s involvement in the 1975 dismissal uncovered
A global push to save the world from a nuclear armageddon has the backing of more than 120 nations. Australia isn’t one of them. Rewena Mahesh explains. On July 7, a global treaty was adopted at the UN General Assembly to prohibit nuclear weapons. This treaty now sets precedence for a powerful norm that willMore
There was a time, not so long ago, when Australia’s real power often sat sipping whisky in a couple of big old homesteads in Victoria’s Western District.
Source: Children of Victoria’s Western District squatters revisit their gilded history
The descendants of Australia’s “Afghan” cameleers get together in remote South Australia
Between the 1860s and the 1920s, around 2000 cameleers and 20,000 camels arrived from Afghanistan and British India; if “without trucks Australia stops”, without camels it would’ve stalled. The introduction to the desert of the truck and the train (named after the “Ghans”) – and the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 – sent the majority of cameleers home, but some settled, mostly with Aboriginal women, in remote towns such as Marree.
Source: Hump day | The Monthly
New report reveals systemic destruction of koala habitats in Queensland and says 34 million native animals are lost each year.
Source: The heartbreaking koala extinction crisis and callous government inaction
Why it is almost impossible to dislodge the false assumption a man in an expensive suit is a competent leader.
After a protracted negotiation process, the Federal Government finally strikes a deal to pass a suite of changes to the media industry with the support of Senator Nick Xenophon.
Minister Scullion needs to be held accountable for the gross mismanagement of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy.
Source: Not ‘Closing the Gap’: Nigel Scullion and Indigenous funding failure
The dismissal of the Whitlam government and the Queen’s embargo of her correspondence with the governor general about it remind us of the lingering power of the “colonial relics”. While the palace letters remain closed to us, at the behest of the Queen, we can never know the full story of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.
For instance, when the imperial colonisers decided that the land mass we know of as Australia could be “legally” claimed as “Terra Nullius”, they based their understanding of “unoccupied land” as that which was not farmed or worked in an agricultural way. A false history was deliberately created (they knew it was bullshit) to justify claiming that which was already “owned” by tribal societies who “worked” the land in a nomadic cyclic way in a seasonal cycle of traversing, harvesting, letting fallow and returning at a later season or year to re-harvest. (I have posted on this subject before: An Advanced Society).
Source: What is History? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Australians think doctors, scientists and farmers contribute the most to society and believe almost equally that priests, politicians and journalists are a detriment to our wellbeing.But it’s farmers, factory workers and tradies who do the most for us and get the least recognition for their work.
Source: Under the microscope: The professions Australians most value
For the past few days I have listened to people I admire and people I don’t, talk about the challenge of facing up to our colonial past.
Source: Ben Quilty: it’s time to acknowledge our colonial terrorism
Indigenous people have become a postscript to Australian history thanks to a belief in the superiority of white Christendom, writes Stan Grant.
Australia is the only democracy without a national charter of rights. It is time to reconsider, writes George Williams.
Many more such examples can readily be found, such as the mistreatment of juvenile detainees at the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, the endemic issue of elder abuse across the nation, or the existence of modern slavery in Australia. While each of these issues has prompted federal inquiries, none have been redressed, and there are many more issues that have been tragically neglected, as the death of an asylum seeker on Manus Island this week shows.
Read more: http://www.afr.com/business/legal/time-to-fix-australias-odd-absence-of-rights-protections-20170809-gxt0hh#ixzz4pakPJhto
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Follow us: @FinancialReview on Twitter | financialreview on Facebook
Source: Time to fix Australia’s odd absence of rights protections | afr.com
Skyrocketing Australian gas prices are behind AGL plans to build a $250m LNG import terminal south of Melbourne
Turnbull may finally be realising that energy policy rather than renewables are to blame for soaring power costs but action is required.
Source: Is Turnbull waking up to the political reality of the consumer energy rip-off?
Tim Deane-Freeman thinks enough of his place of birth to call it what it really is. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once wrote that “arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments”. It’s quite true. In my work teaching undergraduate philosophy I am at great pains to impress upon students the basic academicMore
Inequality is growing because there is an uneven distribution of power.
Source: Inequality not just about wealth but also about power
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