Kicking off a federal election year with an overdue accumulation of preselection news, going back to late November:
• Liberal Party conservative Craig Kelly was last month saved from factional moderate Kent Johns’ preselection challenge in his southern Sydney seat of Hughes, which was widely reported as having decisive support in local party branches. This followed the state executive’s acquiescence to Scott Morrison’s demand that it rubber-stamp preselections for all sitting members of the House of Representatives, also confirming the positions of Jason Falinski in Mackellar, John Alexander in Bennelong and Lucy Wicks in Robertson. Kelly had threatened a week earlier to move to the cross bench if dumped, presumably with a view to contesting the seat as an independent. Malcolm Turnbull stirred the pot by calling on the executive to defy Morrison, noting there had been “such a long debate in the New South Wales Liberal Party about the importance of grass roots membership involvement”. This referred to preselection reforms that had given Johns the edge over Kelly, which had been championed by conservatives and resisted by moderates. Turnbull’s critics noted he raised no concerns when the executive of the Victorian branch guaranteed sitting members’ preselections shortly before he was dumped as Prime Minister.
• The intervention that saved Craig Kelly applied only to lower house members, and was thus of no use to another beleaguered conservative, Senator Jim Molan, who had been relegated a week earlier to the unwinnable fourth position on the Coalition’s ticket. Hollie Hughes and Andrew Bragg were chosen for the top two positions, with the third reserved to the Nationals (who have chosen Perin Davey, owner of a communications consultancy, to succeed retiring incumbent John “Wacka” Williams). Despite anger at the outcome from conservatives in the party and the media, Scott Morrison declined to intervene. Morrison told 2GB that conservatives themselves were to blame for Molan’s defeat in the preselection ballot, as there was “a whole bunch of people in the very conservative part of our party who didn’t show up”.
• Labor’s national executive has chosen Diane Beamer, a former state government minister who held the seats of Badgerys Creek and Mulgoa from 1995 to 2011, to replace Emma Husar in Lindsay. The move scotched Husar’s effort to recant her earlier decision to vacate the seat, after she became embroiled in accusations of bullying and sexual harassment in August. Husar is now suing Buzzfeed over its reporting of the allegations, and is reportedly considering running as an independent. The Liberals have preselected Melissa McIntosh, communications manager for the not-for-profit Wentworth Community Housing.
• The misadventures of Nationals MP Andrew Broad have created an opening in his seat of Mallee, which has been in National/Country Party hands since its creation in 1949, although the Liberals have been competitive when past vacancies have given them the opportunity to contest it. The present status on suggestions the seat will be contested for the Liberals by Peta Credlin, who was raised locally in Wycheproof, is that she is “being encouraged”. There appears to be a view in the Nationals that the position should go to a woman, with Rachel Baxendale of The Australian identifying three potential nominees – Anne Mansell, chief executive of Dried Fruits Australia; Caroline Welsh, chair of the Birchip Cropping Group; and Tanya Chapman, former chair of Citrus Australia – in addition to confirmed starter Anne Warner, a social worker.
• Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie yesterday scotched suggestions that she might run in Mallee. The view is that she is positioning herself to succeeding Cathy McGowan in Indi if she decides not to recontest, having recently relocated her electorate office from Bendigo to one of Indi’s main population centres, Wodonga. The Liberals last month preselected Steven Martin, a Wodonga-based engineer.
• Grant Schultz, Milton real estate agent and son of former Hume MP Alby Schultz, has been preselected as Liberal candidate for Gilmore on New South Wales’ south coast, which the party holds on a delicate margin of 0.7%. The seat is to be vacated by Ann Sudmalis, whose preselection Schultz was preparing to challenge when she announced her retirement in September. It was reported in the South Coast Register that Joanna Gash, who held the seat from 1996 to 2013 and is now the mayor of Shoalhaven (UPDATE: Turns out Gash ceased to be so as of the 2016 election, and is now merely a councillor), declared herself “pissed off” at the local party’s endorsement of Schultz, which passed by forty votes to nine.
• Hawkesbury councillor Sarah Richards has been preselected as the Liberal candidate in Macquarie, where Labor’s Susan Templeman unseated Liberal member Louise Markus in 2016.
Late Riser @ #2947 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:07 pm
Probably on hols. He’ll be back to smite some Greens in the near future.
They do? So why are there any restrictions to immigration at all, if that’s the case?
Infrastructure and house prices comes to mind!.
Late Riser:
[‘Me neither. Not since before Christmas, maybe longer.’]
That’s very much out of character for him.
TPOF @ #2916 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 3:23 pm
I’ve been watching this debate all day, and not one person has mentioned that it happens on a regular basis in the Menindee Lakes. Very much swings between boom and bust. Big flooding rains induce a population explosion of the fish. Followed by a drought and the drying up of the Lakes, so they die in large numbers.
Simples. And easily exploited by the usual suspects. The Blue Green algae grow as the oxygenation of the stagnant water in the lakes is reduced. They are anaerobic and the fish can’t breathe in the water and thus die.
I always believe in telling the complete story. Not just the bits that suit my narrative. 🙂
Re Boerwar. I imagine he has just thought coming here to blog just isn’t worth it any more after the way he was abused by clem attlee and others here before Xmas.
Quoll @ #2931 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 3:47 pm
The direct cause of the fish kill is deoxygenation of the water, thus causing the fish to succumb to lack of oxygen, as we would if placed in a nitrogen atmosphere. The deoxygenation is caused by the rotting of algal blooms, both ‘blue green’ and standard green type, which have themselves occurred because of an over concentration of phosphorus and nitrogen in the water. The phosphorus and nitrogen come from run-off, containing fertiliser, from farms. The concentration comes from their being no flow in the watercourses, plus evaporation reducing water volume, and hence increasing concentration of dissolved ions.
The algal blooms die when they have used up the nutrients and come to the end of their life spans, or when there is a particularly hot spell. They then sink to the bottom of the water and rot/decompose, consuming oxygen in the process (which kills fish). The rotting releases the nutrients, and the cycle repeats, unless there is a decent flood. Cubbie and their mates, plus climate change, have stopped these happening.
I know this because one of my children carried out detailed research into the topic as part of a higher degree. I assisted with sample collection, et al.
Pegasus @ #2933 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 12:49 pm
A statement which completely disregards how difficult it is to be preselected for a winnable seat, much less a safe seat, and does not take into account just how hard a politician works.
@yabba:
For all that I agree with you on the substance of your comments re MDB mismanagement (make no mistake, I do), may I point out something?
Touting your MENSA membership in an online forum comes across as just as snobbish as I would were I to reference my holding multiple degrees in my own comments. More, even, since MENSA membership comes as a result of an innate trait (extremely high IQ, as measured by any of several test designs), while my three degrees, one of them a Master’s, came from several years of hard work & study.
poroti @ #2870 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 11:17 am
Probably because their members are tired of receiving hundreds (literally) of unsuitable applications per advertised job.
zoomster,
There aren’t a lot of restrictions…. unless you come by boat….there are new permanent migrants, many thousands of temporary migrants, “temporary” workers and if necessary just get a visa and fly in and over stay…….. simples… ……didn’t you know Australia is the fastest growing developed country in the world?
It’s the only part of the earth where, magically, growth can be unlimited.
C@t
Then there is the actual experts………….
“Professor Kingsford said the Menindee Lakes had been drained more often than in the past – including twice in the past four years – making such diasters more likely: “It’s a classic example of nature biting back.”
Yabba, I find it sad that a person has to depend on the happenstance that they were born with what they consider a high intellect to define themselves. Have you no significant achievements in your life?
Yes, poroti, Nature. She can be a harsh mistress, especially with the wind of Climate Change at her back.
Greensborough Growler @ #2937 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 3:53 pm
I got all of the questions right, except the baseball one; I don’t know whether that qualifies. How about you?
How’s Pell going? Really sad, that. All those lovely golden dresses going to waste, and that spiffing apartment in Rome. How many standard compensation payments did that cost, I wonder? Such a waste!
Is the Royal Commission still a populist witch hunt, or have you changed your mind?
Greensborough Growler @ #2942 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:00 pm
Too easy.
Volume = Pizza
C@tmomma:
[‘Re Boerwar. I imagine he has just thought coming here to blog just isn’t worth it any more after the way he was abused by clem attlee and others here before Xmas.’]
You may be right but I think he’s made out of sterner stuff.
Matt @ #2957 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:19 pm
It’s a bit like how vegans can’t help but tell you their dietary regime within ten seconds of meeting them for the first time.
don @ #2963 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:28 pm
Right answer. But, you miss marks for not showing your workings!
The formula for volume is π·(radius)2·(height). In this case, pi·z·z·a
Peter Stanton @ #2961 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:24 pm
Peter, I find it sad that you find the need to attribute characteristics to a person, that you don’t know, that are simply false. If it makes you feel better, I have no real problem, but it is sad, nonetheless.
I’ve seen it suggested that “Since I became a vegan…’ is a great way to get rid of someone you don’t want to talk to without being rude.
Mavis Smith @ #2965 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:29 pm
It got pretty rabid. Especially impugning his heritage.
Peter Stanton @ #2961 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:24 pm
Yes he has. I’m sure he can detail them for you if you like. 🙂
Greensborough Growler @ #2967 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:31 pm
Not in my classroom. If you get the right answer, full marks. Even if your page looks like chicken scratchings.
Wrong answer, even if I have a fair idea how you got it, zero.
Someone with the same wrong answer, but showing good working out even if the calculations were flawed, part marks.
Take what you want, and pay for it!
Mavis Smith, C@tmomma
I got a weird feeling when what seemed like a crescendo of posts on a range of topics suddenly stopped cold. I suppose we’ll see.
I’m not sure what to make of the Mensa stuff. I know I was clever once. It got me nowhere and brought me nothing but ridicule and despair. Later on I fell ill and lost everything, right down to my literacy, up to and including the power of speech. I lost my mind. Gradually I recovered it, though it is perhaps not the same mind as the one I lost. I cannot be sure. There is no test for the lost.
Today I feel both taller and fuller, as if I could be pregnant. I feel hormonal. I had tea with an old-and-dear. He has a dental phobia and has terrible teeth. Some are missing and others are decayed and some are broken. They remind me of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, headstones standing at odd angles, covered in green or grey stains, under the dappled light. Hundreds and hundreds of broken, flat incisors, pushing from their gums.
C@tmomma/Late Riser:
[‘It got pretty rabid. Especially impugning his heritage.’]
No argument there. For a teacher, clem does get a bit hot under the collar, his invective sometimes over the top. I’m not sure I’d want to be a student-teacher, student of his. It would be six of the best at the drop of a hat. In the Navy we used to call it shit on the liver.
??????
Tell the dinosaurs Earth gets hit by meteors on a regular basis?
We regularly get really hot days in Australia, so dont worry about climate change?
It sickens me that the Department for the Environment immediately took the irrigators side. They are a shadow of what they once were. They have been ripped apart and politicised.
C@tmomma @ #2953 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:14 pm
The “complete story” is one of appalling mismanagement and an ecosystem in terminal decline.
You can spin it any way you want to – like the GBR, the MDB is a 100% man-made ecological disaster.
The Menindee lakes are dry and have been for several years now. They were required for Broken Hill water supply, but BH is getting its water from somewhere else.
The fish kill is due to the blue green algae bloom and subsequent die off.
When the algae die off they use up all the oxygen in the water as part of the decomposition process.
The bloom is due to several reasons.
1. Extra nutrient run off from farming activity
2. Low flow rates means nutrients aren’t flushed
3. Water is warm.
The low flow rates mean the water is not agitated therefore low oxygen transfer from atmosphere to water.
The warm water cannot dissolve as much oxygen as cold water.
Decomposing fish also deplete the oxygen in the water.
yabba @ #2963 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:26 pm
Hey Yabba, for what it’s worth I agree with you about Pell. But tell me, did your ‘robust’ discussions include hounding your late friend about his faith? Some might consider the question a bit controversial, but as you like robust discussion, I’d like to kick off with this question so that we can have a nice philosophical discussion of a person’s right to make their own decisions about their faith or lack thereof. I know that with your superior intelligence you will leave emotions out of this so that we can have a robust discussion…
Shellbell
Thanks for posting this. Listening to ABC 702 when in the car today, and heard about a crowd-funding campaign from Sister’s Inside. They are now close to their target (85 out of 99K): https://www.gofundme.com/bfvnvt-freethepeople?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fb_co_shareflow_w
The Guardian has a good article The Western Australian government has repeatedly promised to repeal the jail-for-fines law following the death in custody of Yamatji woman Ms Dhu, who was jailed for unpaid fines, in 2014.
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A spokeswoman for the state’s attorney general, John Quigley, said he “hopes to be in a position to introduce new laws to reform fines enforcement in the first half of 2019”.
“This will include significantly restricting the circumstances in which a warrant of commitment (WOC) can be issued and requiring that any application for a WOC be made to a magistrate,” Quigley’s office said in a statement. “The attorney general is considering the need to clear outstanding unserved WOCs as part of the reform package.”
Quigley has personally committed to repealing the law, which was a Labor election promise.
His office said the fines enforcement registrar was an independent court officer and still retained legislated powers to issue warrants as a measure of last resort.
Western Australia is the only state that regularly jails people for unpaid court fines, and research conducted by the Labor party before it won government showed the majority of those jailed over unpaid fines were Aboriginal women.
Georgatos said that, although the arrest rate for unpaid fines had fallen, it still stood at about 10 a day.
The chief executive of Sisters Inside, Debbie Kilroy, said she started the fundraiser because she was sick of waiting on the WA government to act.
Aboriginal woman jailed for unpaid fines after call to police
Read more
“The wheels are just turning so slowly,” Kilroy told Guardian Australia. “This is a priority for many Australians across the country, it’s not just a West Australian issue.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/07/wa-urged-to-repeal-jail-for-fines-law-amid-push-to-free-aboriginal-women
Shellbell, do you think the WA government can move more quickly on this issue, or are their legislative holdups?
Wow. I had forgotten that place. Your post brought it back to the front of my memory.
Zoomster, its certainly offensive to vegans
Sometimes the most amazing thing about PB is how often a self-proclaimed expert comments raise points that are actually considered or addressed in articles previously provided. Though the articles or references were obviously never read, or at least not understood.
The specific problem of the algae blooms killing rivers is evidently largely a product of human mis-management of the water resources in the MDB.
Nothing about the current circumstances in the MDB with radically altered tree cover and water flow and holding capacity (in terms of wetlands and soaks), plus climate change and nutrient changes, would have a parallel in any geological timescale or ecological sense.
We are in the anthropocene and this is the kind of results we can continue to expect if things blunder on as usual.
Simon² Katich® says:
Tuesday, January 8, 2019 at 5:00 pm
They remind me of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague
Wow. I had forgotten that place. Your post brought it back to the front of my memory.
It is an extraordinary place. Anyone who can should go there at least once. So many people are interred there and their humanity lives under the trees within the walls. It is a place of immeasurable power.
Player One @ #2978 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 4:50 pm
With Mother Nature in the mix.
And I’m not so bold as to suggest Mother Nature is to blame 100%.
Now, you’re the expert on fossil fuels, so tell me, how did the source of fossil fuels originate in many instances?
C@tmomma @ #2986 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 5:08 pm
???
Tom, appreciate your commentary. But, rule number one is do not argue with dickheads.
Yabba’s alleged superior intelligence is questionable given his arguments are always “Yah, boo, Catholic Church”. Sometimes, there is the variation of yah Boo Growler. It’s his omnibus reply to anything he can’t deal with. I’ve blocked him for years. Occasionally, when he pops up on a copied thread I throw the worm out and he takes the bait every time. He would not have made a very good fish.
He’s clearly a poster of limited intelligence who lives his whole life stuck on the stupid! I pity him more than anything else.
Quoll @ #2984 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 5:04 pm
And it’s not to say that the fertiliser run-off isn’t a big problem for the MDB. However, the Menindee Lakes have a unique ecosystem which needs to also be considered in the mix.
It breaks my heart to see the mass death of bird species’ chicks that have been drawn there to breed in the good times but you must acknowledge the cycle of life there due to the nature of the place is a factor.
@simon katich: I’ll just file that under “Working As Intended”, shall I? If you want to wreck something, preferably beyond repair, give it to the Tories. It continually sickens me that Australians simply refuse to cotton-on to this simple fact.
Player One @ #2987 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 5:11 pm
Mass Extinction events. The like of which we are able to experience in real time these days but which have been happening for millennia. Some of the deposits are made of fish. 🙂
…..their humanity lives….as it does in my old-and-dear. He has care-worn eyes and keeps stories in all his pockets. They bulge with his talks, talks which are as the pages of diaries, diaries opened and read and closed and opened and read and closed and are now creased and torn and as lined as his cheeks and chin, and as patchy as his sun-broken brow.
This fool actually believes the jobs are out there waiting for the unemployed to step up.
Labor Governmnets have done damage to Enviro Departments too. Here in SA it was under the ALP the heads of department decided (and announced to the staff) that National Parks were for recreation – not conservation.
I am putting a lot of faith in the Fed ALP proposed new Environment Act and EPA.
It seems the Potato has surrounded himself with his mental equals.
A Country cannot revoke a citizenship if it would leave that person Stateless.
So absolute proof of alternate citizenship is the only measure that ensures that this requirement is met.
If he had Fijian citizenship then the Fijian Government would be able to clear that up.
If he is entitled to citizenship of Fiji then he is not a citizen, to obtain it he would have to apply and meet other conditions.
So, if he never applies for citizenship he will never become a citizen.
This means the Potato’s actions have left him Stateless which he cannot do.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-08/neil-prakash-definitely-not-fijian-argue-officials/10698462
I might have argued that point, but then I looked up and saw who the quote was actually attributed to.
C@tmomma @ #2991 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 5:15 pm
You mean like all the animals that Noah couldn’t fit on his ark? Mass extinction of unicorns and the like?
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but … 🙁
A diet of fish and greens is good for writing. Whiskey is good for reading and Cointreau is good for sleeping.
Player One @ #2996 Tuesday, January 8th, 2019 – 5:24 pm
Today’s lesson!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4bc9UwZsYs