Greens will ask Senate to reopen Cartier watch inquiry
The Greens will ask for the inquiry into the Cartier watches controversy to reconvene following revelations of Scott Morrison’s secret appointment to the finance portfolio.
Then Australia Post boss Christine Holgate was stood down in October 2020 after she gifted expensive watches – valued at $20,000 – to four executives as a reward for their performance.
Mr Morrison, the prime minister, declared in parliament “she can go” if she didn’t choose to stand aside voluntarily.
In 2021, a Senate inquiry heard evidence from the finance department not knowing Mr Morrison also held that portfolio in secret.
While the research predicts “a potentially bleak future for many marine species,” the authors say it “also measures how much our oceans and the life within them stand to benefit from both climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
Across Australia, Labor and Liberal governments are cracking down on the right to protest. Their motivation is clear: both parties care more about the fossil-fuel industry than the environment.
Republican Congressman wants Science and History out of schools.
From Marx and Engels to the present day, socialists have been deeply engaged with the world of science. With the provision of lifesaving vaccines held hostage by corporate profiteering, the story of this relationship is more important than ever.
Clearer is that the Murdoch’s were always front and center of this globally. They fled to America where the laws and market were much more lax after Rupert’s almost jailing in the UK.
It’s clear the misinformation tactics so readily employed by conservatives for the last decade or so are found to be wanting when held up to scrutiny. Over the years, numerous trends in the USA make their way over to this side of the Pacific relatively quickly – let’s hope holding peddlers of misinformation to account ‘flies across the Pacific’ quickly.
On one side, a small Australian media player. On the other, the world’s most powerful media moguls from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Independent news outlet Crikey has just taken its fight with Lachlan Murdoch public, writes Mark Sawyer.
Will Lachlan Murdoch sue Chris Stirewalt? Of course not! Stirwalt has no problem publicly outlining the intended mis and disinformation broadcast on Fox News and it has nothing to do with Murdoch’s ideology. Their alliance is soley with business and wealthyconservatives whose primary interest was fattening themselves on profiting from others. The Murdoch’s aren’t purveyor’s of news or information but influncers hired guns for sale and nothing offends them more than any drive to reveal or prevent them from that goal. That’s why they have taken to threatening Crikey in Australia and not Stirwalt in the US because the laws say they can and the world gets the message.
Nonetheless, in his memoir, Stirewalt maintains that Fox News’s alliance with Trump and other Republican political candidates has nothing to do with ideology. Instead it has everything to do with delivering ratings and fattening profits, without caring that its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, endorses conspiracy theories that radicalize violent, far-right white supremacists, including ones who staged the deadly January 6 Capitol attack.
As the saying goes, in America everyone is entitled to a second chance — especially con artists. Herewith the 6 rules for getting a second (or third or fourth) chance to sell a giant con:
An estimated 5.2 million Americans couldn’t vote in the last presidential election because of felony “convictions,” including one in every 13 Black adults, according to the Sentencing Project. Last Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted the arrests of 20 people on charges of “voter fraud,” who had voted in 2020 but had been convicted of crimes for which Florida made them ineligible to vote. (Many said they would not have voted had they known they were ineligible.)
Many millions more can’t get jobs because employers don’t want to consider people who have broken the law. (Unlike Marc Andreesen, most employers don’t “love seeing people grow from lessons learned.”) Although some states and localities now prohibit employers and landlords from considering conviction or arrest records in their initial screening of applicants, it’s still the case that one big mistake on the part of someone who’s poor or of color can end their careers and perhaps their freedom.
But if you’re not poor or a person of color, you can get away with the giant cons Adam Neumann and Donald Trump have gotten away with. Just follow the steps enumerated above. Hell, you might even become President.
AUSTRALIA’S OFFICIAL jobless rate is now 3.38%, the lowest in nearly 50 years. But all is not well. More than 1.3 million Australians still can’t get enough work to live on, and 474,000 of these can’t find any jobs at all. Job vacancies in May (latest data) were at an all-time high of 480,100 and real wages are still declining.
But help may be on the way in the form of next month’s Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra.
She openly signed off on $22k of bonus gifts to her exec staff for work and goals achieved well before time. Morrison di the same for his political benefit and dodi it in secret while publicly blaming and shaming Holgate who in the end was found innocent.
Of the manufacturing projects, more than half were in electorates held by the Coalition while just three were in safe Labor seats.
With the ABC neutered these past decade and Murdoch media, Ch9 and other mainstream organizations tied to the Government and it’s donors for financial gain political media in this country holds any oppositions to account rather than the Government. Democracy is no longer being served and an autocracy is encouraged to flourish. Grass roots politics brought an end to the slippery slide and has temporarily allowed the nation to catch its breathe.
Revelations about Scott Morrison’s power-grab of five secret ministries raise serious questions about the health of Australian media and in turn, the media’s commitment to contribute to a strong democracy.
The core function of political media is to hold power to account. The fact that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was able to secretly sign himself in as co-minister in the portfolios of health, finance, resources, treasury and home affairs, in collusion with the Governor-General, speaks volumes of journalists’ unwillingness to scrutinise the powerful.
Politicians would lose the ability to decide who gets billions of dollars in grants every year under a proposal from an independent think tank aimed at ending pork-barrelling in key marginal electorates.The Grattan Institute, in a report released overnight, said the “waste” of pork-barrelling had contributed to a fall in community confidence in Australian politics and increased perceptions that the political system was corrupt.
It showed huge discrepancies in the 19,000 grants allocated during that period, with Coalition seats sharing $1.9 billion compared to Labor seats’ $530 million. Adjacent seats received vastly different allocations with the only difference being the political hue of the electorate.
The Grattan research, which used much of the information uncovered by The Herald and The Age, found marginal seats were funded at almost four times the rate of safe seats in the $1 billion Community Development Grant program.
The Gastapo worked within and outside the laws too
Seven NGOs denounce raids as message of impunity against Palestinians and foreign governments, after army seizes equipment and welds office doors shut.
The Israeli army raided this morning the Ramallah offices of seven prominent Palestinian NGOs that have been designated as “terror organizations” by the Defense Ministry. In a concerted operation, soldiers simultaneously broke into the groups’ headquarters across the occupied West Bank city just before dawn, seized files and equipment from some of them, and welded the doors shut. At the entrance to each office, the army left copies of military orders declaring that the organizations were illegal.
America used to regulate business. Now government subsidises it | Robert Reich | The Guardian
I argued that the government was already engaged in a hidden industrial policy, disguised, for example, as grants to the aerospace and telecom industries by the Department of Defense and to the pharmaceutical industry by the National Institutes of Health. It would be far better to do industrial policy in the open, so that the public could assess what it was paying for and what it was getting in return.
Opponents, which included just about every Republican, were indignant at the very idea that government ought to be “intruding” on their blessed free market.
American Democracy guarantees Trump has inordinate power despite the Majority’s want.
According to the poll, 57 percent of voters said they thought investigations into Trump’s conduct should continue “because he needs to be held accountable,” while 40 percent said they should not continue “because they are politically motivated and divide the nation.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were stark differences along party lines: While 92 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents approved of the investigations, just 21 percent of Republicans thought the same.
All it took was an unprotected email server, some automatically saved credit card information, and a cunning scammer for Victorian businessman Mike Daws to lose over $8000 while on a trip to the United States.
“Towards the end of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, Malcolm Turnbull’s staff began referring to Abbott’s office as the “Führer’s bunker”. There was a general sense he had gone mad. He had fallen out of conversation with the public and was barricading himself in the suite.
At the time, Abbott seemed to be the worst prime minister in Australia’s history. That was because Scott Morrison hadn’t had a go yet. Abbott lied constantly. He was oafish and unimaginative. He used the o… See more
Morrison’s contempt for process is famous. He lives without contrition. He will say whatever he thinks he can get away with saying. It is strange that a man so fundamentally unserious could so seriously rig and bend the political system.
THE REVELATION that Scott Morrison secretly swore himself into five portfolios during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, without telling the ministers of the departments, shows he was completely unfit to be prime minister and has no place in the Australian Parliament.
Bill Shorten, Labor’s version of Angus Taylor, is doing nothing about the estimated $6 Billion being stolen from the NDIS. Why?
Kangaroo Court of Australia
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party need to act
The biggest threat to the Labor Party is themselves and if rusted on Labor Party supporters think turning a blind eye to Bill Shorten will work then they are wrong as those days are long past as the last federal election showed us.
If Labor thinks it’s their turn to govern and act accordingly then they will also lose seats to Community Independents at the next federal election.
As bad as it is, Scott Morrison’s surreptitious circumvention of Australia’s parliamentary and Cabinet processes might have got worse.
Had the former prime minister been re-elected, it is reasonable to assume he would have continued to mislead his Cabinet, the parliament and the public after amassing multiple reserve powers.
Likewise, the Saudi golf tour won’t wash off the regime’s indelible ugliness. But — fore! — it will boomerang on the money-grubbing golfers selling their once-good names to it.
Sacked yet again Morrison is never short on EXCUSES. Who is game enough to employ him now? What shattered legacy is there left to leave? He does of course still have his Qanon BFFs
The excuses, reasons and justifications from Scott Morrison for taking over five portfolios – and the secrecy surrounding them – have dominated the media over the past few days.
Trawling the internet I have compiled a number of these excuses, reasons and justifications (which appear below) and after I will offer a deep, insightful, critical analysis of each (in bold).
Despite Labor having only been in government for less than three months, the Liberal Party have already come up with a new meme titled 5 Labor failures. It’s worth addressing each of their claims individually.
At last somebody noticed. The LNP under Scott Morrison ran as if it were a GOP/ Trump franchise with Scott Trump Morrison it’s leader icon performer and poor mimic. Even Dutton’s first move was to go to America for instructions.
Former PM Scott Morrison’s incompetence mirrored that of his political idol, Donald Trump, writes Paul Begley.
The right to vote is the gift that democracy gives. Suppose a political party is not transparent in supplying all the information necessary to exercise this right. It is destroying the democracy that enables it to exist. ( John Lord )
Except Keith Pitt knew about the arrangement when he was overruled on the PEP-11 gas permit and he told Q&A host Stan Grant that Michael McCormack knew of Morrison’s co-ministering as well. So clearly the Nationals did know and allowed it to happen without comment.
The expectation that Palestinians under thumb for 75 years can plan, present, and articulate as well as the Israelis or are even expected to is a form of Apartheid in itself. Colonisers for hundreds of years have been running arguments like this. Australia for one has been doing it for 200 years
Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t been an effictive leader, and certainly not for a very long time, and his outbursts are just embarrassing. Had he taken the opportunity of the stage in Berlin to bring home to a German audience the magnitude of the human rights crisis faced by Palestinians, he might have done some good. As it is, by trying, pitifully, to appropriate the language of Holocaust for his people’s dilemma, he made himself look small, and a little crazed.
While Israeli politicians may argue about Gantz’s decision to continue meeting with Abbas based upon the recent statements, it is the former army chief of staff who holds enough sway to influence the PA towards Israel’s demands. There is no contradiction between Gantz and Lapid’s intentions. The PA’s existence is subject to international financial donors; if that fact is taken as groundwork by Israel, then the Palestinians are being set up for a much bigger and possibly irreversible loss of land and liberty.
Forced to say “sorry and call it an accident” why? For revealing their truth naturally their Trumpists
A Republican group in Alabama is super sorry they ‘accidentally’ used a picture of the GOP elephant that contained Ku Klux Klan imagery. KKK hoods, to be exact. I’m not sure how this even happens. They did offer a reason why it happened, but it’s still hard to grasp.
Has Dutton said anything substantial since becoming Opposition Leader? “Let’s forget the past and move on” is hardly anything other than projection.
Dutton takes aim at Morrison legal advice – Michael West
Mr Dutton said while what Mr Morrison did was wrong, Australians wanted to put the scandal behind them.
“The issue now waits for the legal advice that comes back from the solicitor-general that the prime minister’s commissioned,” Mr Dutton told Sydney radio station 2GB on Thursday.
“I don’t expect that that provides anything further than probably another opportunity for the prime minister to have a whack, and I think most people, frankly, want to move on and start dealing with issues that are more important.”
Morrison is pleased to present himself as nothing less than a Christ like figure condemned by those he wished to save.
Despite having breached ethics and deceived Australia, former PM Scott Morrison has tried to convince us that his secret power grab was in our best interest, writes Darren Crawford.
The Governor-General’s official program, as well as the Office of the Official Secretary to the Governor-General’s annual reports, are available publicly
The Office of the Official Secretary to the Governor-General is an independent agency
However, there is no reference to Scott Morrison’s appointments to five ministries in the Governor-General’s Program or annual reports
A quick glance through the online
Scott Morrison’s secret appointments nowhere to be found in Governor-General’s reports – ABC News
Scott Morrison’s attempt at securing a legacy has blown up in his face
“What’s astounding is the kind of determination that Scott Morrison was bringing to bear.
‘‘What you had … is a kind of Trump envy.”
‘‘Morrison wanted to imitate that in some way to try and accumulate some of the kinds of expanse of executive power that was not naturally allowed under our parliamentary system.”
Many conventions of Westminster democracy, like public servants providing frank and fearless advice without thinking of politics, have slowly declined without much notice.
But Mr Morrison’s secret portfolio scheme was an unusually direct challenge to pretty core principles of democracy.
Australian democracy has always been a form of ministerial government: one person is vested with the legal authority to administer a portfolio and be held responsible for it.
By repeatedly inserting himself as an alternative decision maker Mr Morrison violated a key principle and one likely to feature in a legal challenge over a project he cancelled while secretly acting as the Resources Minister.
The secrecy that surrounded Mr Morrison’s accumulation of power was also incompatible with transparent government.
But a secrecy fetish alone does not entirely explain behaviour he had only recently disclosed.
Fresh from the mortifying news that he was sharing the second highest post in government with his leader, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg is being spoken of as a Liberal saviour. Apparently Peter Dutton has not inspired the nation in his role as opposition leader.
As outrage swirls around Scott Morrison for running a secret parallel ministry, there is are some wistful musings about the prospect of Josh getting back into parliament, even by replacing ScoMo. The former PM has become an unwelcome presence on his own side, and few would be sorry to see his back. Perhaps only Labor really wants him to hang around.
Australia prides itself on freedom of expression, yet we have the most draconian laws in the Western world. How can we uphold a free press when defamation law is having a chilling effect on our media and threatens to undermine the very foundations of investigative journalism?
A news site with ties to the fossil fuel industry claimed Scotland axed 14 million trees to make way for wind farms. Is that correct? – ABC News
According to the government agency Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), 14 million trees were cut down to make way for wind farms in Scotland, but this had occurred over 20 years.
Meanwhile, over the same period (from 2000), 272 million trees were planted across the country.
That crucial fact is missing from an article published this week by the website Energy News Beat, which appears to have driven the recent surge in social media activity.
Notably, the omission comes despite the article drawing heavily on a two-year-old story published by Scottish news site The Herald, in which an FLS spokesman was quoted as saying: “That figure for felled trees should also be contrasted with that for the number of trees planted in Scotland over the years 2000 – 2019, a total of 272,000,000, and renewable energy developments fit well with this.”
He added: “The amount of woodland removed across Scotland’s national forests and land, managed by FLS, for wind farm development is not even 1 per cent of the total woodland area”, while the 14 million trees were a commercial crop that would ultimately have been felled for timber.
A recent investigation details a campaign by the car industry to have its (low) voluntary standards on fuel efficiency legislated into national standards. This campaign fits into a broader pattern of lobbying by the fossil fuel industry to hinder effective climate action and highlights the importance of democratic integrity in addressing the climate crisis as well as the urgent need for robust regulation of lobbying.
Lachlan Murdoch CEO of his family interests claims the Murdoch’s aren’t running a Trump/GOP/ Extreme Right Agenda In the US. He’s threatening to sue journalists in Australia who claim the Murdoch’s were co-conspirators in the Jan 6th riots, why? Because Australian law says he can. Even though Murdoch media’s Fox News were named apologists and even deniers that a riot had even taken place. The Murdoch’s have always denied any moral responsibility for anything their organisation does and even uses the laws of countries as a smokescreen. In fact his father Rupert Murdoch aided in breaking the laws in the UK and came close to being jailed saved only by the right-wing of the Tory Party.
News Corp’s Sky News Australia were cut off by the NZ government because they were more than eager to keep shooting the Christchurch massacre of Muslims “live”. When asked to stop they didn’t because there organisation doesn’t exist there. The Murdoch’s run their global media organisation not as a News organisation but as thugs, propagandists and influencers for sale to a narrow set of political and financial interests and are currently fighting a profitable but losing political battle. They more than anyone have lowered the bench mark for news and information in a Democracy and raised fake news as the hallmark in it’s place
Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson has long been at the forefront of pushing the deadly “great replacement” conspiracy theory, seeking to bring an idea from the white nationalist fringe into the mainstream of American political discourse. In the latest ominous sign, both Carlson and the network’s supposedly “straight news” programming are pushing his ideas for the Republicans’ midterm platform, a development that should raise alarm bells given the long history of Fox News controlling the Republican agenda.
olddogthoughts 
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