The addition of this week’s Newspoll and Essential Research polls have ended a period of improvement for the Coalition in BludgerTrack, which records a solid shift to Labor this week. Labor’s two-party lead is now 53.8-46.2, out from 53.1-46.9 last week, and they have made two gains on the seat projection, one in New South Wales and one in Queensland. Despite that, the Newspoll leadership numbers have resulted in an improvement in Scott Morrison’s reading on the net approval trend. Full results are available through the link below – if you can’t get the state breakdown tabs to work, try doing a hard refresh.
National polling news:
• A poll result from Roy Morgan circulated earlier this week, although there’s no mention of it on the company’s website. The primary votes are Labor 36%, Coalition 34.5% and Greens 12.5%, which pans out to a Labor lead of 54-46 using past preference flows (thanks Steve777). Morgan continues to conduct weekly face-to-face polling, but the results are only made public when Gary Morgan has a point to make – which on this occasion is that Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party is on all of 1%. One Nation doesn’t do great in the poll either, recording 3%. The poll was conducted over two weekends from a sample of 1673.
• The Australian had supplementary questions from this week’s Newspoll on Tuesday, which had Scott Morrison favoured over Bill Shorten by 48-33 on the question of best leader handle the economy – little different from his 50-32 lead in October, or the size of the lead consistently held by Malcolm Turnbull. It also found 33% saying the government should prioritise funding of services, compared with 27% for cutting personal income tax and 30% for paying down debt.
• The Australian also confused me by publishing, together with the Newspoll voting intention numbers on Monday, results on franking credits and “reducing tax breaks for investors” – derived not from last weekend’s poll, but earlier surveys in December and November (UPDATE: Silly me – the next column along is the total from the latest poll). The former found 48% opposed to Labor’s franking credits policy and 30% in support, compared with 50% and 33% when it was first floated in March (UPDATE: So the latest poll actually has support back up five to 35% and opposition down two to 38%). Respondents were instructed that the policy was “expected to raise $5.5 billion a year from around 900,000 Australians that receive income from investments in shares”, which I tend to think is friendlier to Labor than a question that made no effort to explain the policy would have been. The tax breaks produced a stronger result for Labor, with 47% in favour and 33% opposed, although this was down on 54% and 28% in April (UPDATE: Make that even better results for Labor – support up four to 51%, opposition down one to 32%).
With due recognition of Kevin Bonham’s campaign against sketchy reports of seat polling, let the record note the following:
• Ben Packham of The Australian reports Nationals polling shows them in danger of losing Page to Labor and Cowper to Rob Oakeshott. Part of the problem, it seems, is a minuscule recognition rating for the party’s leader, one Michael McCormack.
• There’s a uComms/ReachTEL poll of Flinders for GetUp! doing the rounds, conducted on Wednesday from a sample of 634, which has Liberal member Greg Hunt on 40.7%, an unspecified Labor candidate on 29.4% and ex-Liberal independent Julia Banks on 16.1%. That would seem to put the result down to the wild card of Banks’ preference flows. There was apparently a respondent-allocated two-party figure with the result, but I haven’t seen it. UPDATE: Turns out it was 54-46 in favour of Greg Hunt, which seems a bit much.
• The West Australian reported last weekend that a uComms/ReachTel poll for GetUp! had Christian Porter leading 52-48 in Pearce, which is above market expectations for him.
• Another week before, The West Australian reported Labor internal polling had it with a 51.5-48.5 lead in Stirling.
Preselection news:
• Following Nigel Scullion’s retirement announcement last month, the Northern Territory News reports a field of eight nominees for his Country Liberal Party Senate seat: Joshua Burgoyne, an Alice Springs electrician, who was earlier preselected for the second position on the ticket behind Scullion; Bess Price, who held the remote seat of Stuart in the territory parliament from 2012 to 2016, and whose high-profile daughter Jacinta Price is the party’s candidate for Lingiari; Tony Schelling, a financial adviser; Tim Cross, former general manager of NT Correctional Industries; Gary Haslett, a Darwin councillor; Kris Civitarese, deputy mayor of Tennant Creek; Linda Fazldeen, from the Northern Territory’s Department of Trade, Business and Innovation; and Bill Yan, general manager at the Alice Springs Correctional Centre.
• Andrew Burrell of The Australian reports Liberal nominees to succeed Michael Keenan in Stirling include Vince Connelly, Woodside Petroleum risk management adviser and former army officer; Joanne Quinn, a lawyer for Edith Cowan University; Michelle Sutherland, a teacher and the wife of Michael Sutherland, former state member for Mount Lawley; Georgina Fraser, a 28-year-old “oil and gas executive”; and Taryn Houghton, “head of community engagement at a mental health service, HelpingMinds”. No further mention of Tom White, general manager of Uber in Japan and a former adviser to state MP and local factional powerbroker Peter Collier, who was spruiked earlier. The paper earlier reported that Karen Caddy, a former Rio Tinto engineer, had her application rejected after state council refused to give her the waiver required for those who were not party members of one year’s standing.
• The Nationals candidate for Indi is Mark Byatt, a Wodonga-based manager for Regional Development Victoria.
So i woke up this morning and opened the back door and whoosh, a foul smell filled the air. I thought it was my dog letting off a ‘Bohdi Bomb’ but alas, it was the waft of Schomo in my home State of Tasmania spruiking promises Abbott made but never kept, or was it Howard ?
Where ? In Bass and Braddon which are hundreds of Kilometres away from me in Hobart yet I could smell him from here. ;Good thing too or I might have been tempted to visit one his pressers and shove a paint chart under his nose and told him to go home, he’s the wrong colour.
Peter Stanton @ #227 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 2:24 pm
Perhaps. However, the Baby Boomers are wealthy not necessarily because of anything they did – they were just fortunate to have grown up during one of the biggest and longest economic booms in history – ironically, caused in large part by the sheer number of Baby Boomers themselves. They benefited first from the post-war boom, and then from the boom generated by their own burgeoning numbers, and then the boom of having politicians (of all sides) falling over themselves to gift them benefits as a means of buying their votes.
But this economic growth was unsustainable, predicated as it was on two erroneous assumptions: “unlimited growth” and “unlimited resources”.
Whether they knew it at the time or not, the Baby Boomers have left ecological catastrophe as their primary legacy for future generations.
Fair or otherwise, this is what they will be remembered for.
oidlord says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 2:32 pm
@Peter Stanton
Stop making excuses，for baby boomers
Don’t blame the current generation because you won’t take any responsibility for the current or future generation.
It’s about time we stop tax dodgers, stop taking tax cuts, stop giving negative gearing.
These changes won’t effect baby boomers in the real world because it’s fear mongering, just like the refugee fear mongering.
———————–
I am not making excuses for anyone. Just pointing out a few of the things that were changed for the better by baby boomers. Yes we do need to stop tax dodgers and accept that taxation is needed if we want government services. I would like to respond to the rest of your comment but cannot work out what you are trying to say.
Rossmcg @ #247 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 2:57 pm
Pension payments are not necessarily backdated to the date of either eligibility or application any longer.
https://retirementessentials.com.au/new-centrelink-rule-could-delay-your-pension-claim/
Note the term “complete claim”. I believe this means that if you make even just one minor omission or mistake then your claim is not yet “complete”. There are plenty of stories of people waiting months before being advised of an error on their claim, or being asked to submit more information.
‘swamprat says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 2:35 pm
Regarding the growing extinction of insects. I noticed there were no Christmas beetles this Christmas time in Northern Rivers. Not one!
I have never seen that before. Was it because of the lack of rain?’
The dearth has been noted in other forums. Others have noticed that the annual Bogong Moth migration was a shadow of its former glories.
Many species of beetles are called ‘Christmas Beetle’.
The larval stage of Christmas Beetles (the big coppery yellow-orange ones) occurs in pastures. The adults then go on to defoliate trees. They are one of the prime contributors to tree death in Australia.
I am not sure what has happened to the climate in the Northern Rivers region. Elsewhere pastures have been smashed by record low rainfall, record high temperatures and graziers keeping stock by hand feeding such that the remaining stock turn whatever pasture is left into bare dirt.
My assumption is that the answer to your question is:
no pasture = no Christmas Beetle larvae = equals no metamorphosis into adult beetles.
However! Other factors that we do not know about may well be in play.
BTW, and IMHO, while the mass decline of most insect species is reasonably well documented in some localities and some regions, it is not at all well-documented on a global scale. There is some heroic extrapolation occurring.
Nor is it all one way. As a straw in the wind, for example, there are billions more bark beetles now than there were twenty years ago. Additionally, there can be little doubt that the hundreds of thousands of new open water temporary ponds and lakes consequent to permafrost melt has generated billions more midges than were around previously.
The moment you whack a bunch of people like ‘baby boomers’ or ‘the Greens’ into a vilified category and point the stick of wrath at them you undermine the validity of anything you have to say thereafter. Do yourself a favour and stop doing it – you never know, a baby boomer like me might pay attention to what you have to say instead of scrolling on.
EB @ #256 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 3:25 pm
Are you a Baby Boomer and a Green?
No wonder you feel vilified! 🙂
GOP Strategist
Rick WilsonVerified account @TheRickWilson
I burn Trumps emergency declaration to the ground, and smite his enablers. Read it here:
Trump’s Immigration ‘Emergency’ Raises a False Flag, and Demeans the Constitution
An extra-constitutional order based on a false crisis is much worse than just a feeble PR play by a frustrated President itching to do something after being slapped by the Speaker.
Donald Trump outdid himself today, and I most certainly don’t mean that as a compliment. His press conference in the wake of signing his executive order for the illusory border wall was part coke ramblings, part tween-girl pity party, and partly the work a man who distrusts his intelligence briefings but believes “news” from fever-swamp bloggers.
It was, as it always is, quite a performance, so long as you don’t confuse the hyperverbal machine-gun show put on by a capering, jiggling Trump with him articulating a reason for his actions. This was a performance for his press hatin’ yokels, a display of Trump’s feral cunning about how easily satisfied the corrupt remnants of the Republican party are by his clownish media tantrums.
The Donald, and his horde, love the conceit of him as a warlord, the tough guy, badass. The Trumpternet is full of romanticized black velvet-quality illustrations of a muscle-bound Trump riding on tanks and smiting the unbelievers. A 300-pound man with ample moobs panting on a golf cart doesn’t have the same **je ne sais dictator. He needs this action to keep the image alive.
It’s funny, until it isn’t.
No tool goes unused in politics. The moment Trump opened this gate was the moment Republicans permanently gave up their ability to call for controls over an executive branch running roughshod over the Constitution.
When a Democratic president takes office in 2021 or 2025 and decides to act, we’ve given them every excuse. After all, they’ve got **so much work to do and they’re just not getting their objectives through a stubborn Congress. It’s an emergency, after all.
Call me old-fashioned, but the conservatism I grew up with wasn’t about pwning the libs, ensuring media tears, and determining the correct ethnic or racial composition of the country according to Ann Coulter’s metrics. It wasn’t about **expanding the power of the state and the executive.
Donald Trump may act the fool and the bully, but his actions are no joke. They open the door for more violations, more depredations that bode nothing but ill for the Republic.
He can and should be held to account, but I can guarantee you one thing: that won’t come from the Republican party.
MUCH MORE : https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-immigration-emergency-raises-a-false-flag-and-demeans-the-constitution?ref=home
I am busting to see Shorten as PM because we will finally have a real politician in the job. I mean that as a compliment. We will someone with a few principles, excellent judgment, the ability to keep his party focused and bring people together to get a result. No challengers in the party will sneak up on him or outsmart him. He’ll see them coming over the horizon.
EB
The Greens Party is accountable for what the Greens Party says and what the Greens Party does and what the Greens Party proposes to do by way of policy settings. ATM these include:
1. Gutting the ADF and turning it into a ‘light mobile force’.
2. Removing ‘all GMOS from the environment’, thereby killing off enough cotton growing to clothe half a billion people.
3. Closing down Olympic Dam Mine (and around 5% of the economy of South Australia) by way of the policy to ‘shut down all uranium mines’.
@ Swamprat
I used to work for a Federal MP – Pension delays like yours are unacceptable. Ring or see your local MP or Labor Senator. In my day DSS would say they can’t divulge private information on a client. Me in my best Electorate Officer voice would answer “that’s ok I will ring the Minister’s office”. Funny how quickly matters git resolved after that.
The US has 32 ‘states of emergency’ currently. One dating back to Jimmy Carter! Looking at the list this one from Obama is truly a roflmao. Big shout out to the Saudis 😉
The rest of them
https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-01-11/us-currently-31-other-national-emergencies-heres-what-means
‘antonbruckner11 says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 3:29 pm
I am busting to see Shorten as PM because we will finally have a real politician in the job. I mean that as a compliment. We will someone with a few principles, excellent judgment, the ability to keep his party focused and bring people together to get a result. No challengers in the party will sneak up on him or outsmart him. He’ll see them coming over the horizon.’
Indeed.
It has been observed, fairly, that there have been major tensions between Shorten and Albanese. To their mutual credit they kept this in check (albeit with one short-lived minor outbreak by Albanese) so that the tensions could not be used by the Greens or the Coalition to damage the workings of the Labor Party.
It has been noteworthy that over the past fortnight Mr Albanese has played a leading part in getting the Medivac Act over the line and also that he has been very active in selling it to the public. IMO, this could only have happened with the active support and concurrence of Mr Shorten and represents a welcome sign that the two have gone some way beyond a tense truce towards developing a productive partnership.
phoenixRed:
David Frum on Real Time said that he expects Trump’s national emergency to blow up in his face as he’s going to be re-allocating defence spending already earmarked for military projects from Republican states which Republican Senators have spent years advocating for. One could potentially be much-needed defence housing upgrades in (I think??) Missouri, potentially alienating many Republican voters.
Meanwhile I’ve only seen the one sitting Republican publicly criticise Trump’s national emergency.
Boerwar @ #255 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 3:24 pm
Hmmm. Now, where have we heard this type of argument before? Oh, I know …
“While climate change is reasonably well documented in some localities and some regions, it is not at all well-documented on a global scale. There is some heroic extrapolation occurring.”
I think I’ll stick to believing the experts.
phoenixRED 6:28 am
phoenixRED 1:41 pm
Interesting that the GOP think that “someone else might do it too” is a problem. It is a problem but it’s not the main problem. The total lack of ethics inherent in the idea that “I’m in charge and I’ll do whatever it takes”, that is the main problem.
Boerwar
With all the gloom over insect numbers how goes your Pine Bark Beetle franchise ?
@ Boerwar
Albo is in London next month and will launch the ALP Abroad campaign. Family and I have signed up again for HTV’s at the Australian Embassy. No Tory HTV’s last time expect the same again. Around 2500 votes here last time including a few dozen for Herbert – I take credit for that win!
Confessions says: Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 3:38 pm
phoenixRed:
********************************************************
THANK YOU for that article Confessions – and it falls into line with what Rick Wilson ( above at 3.28 ) and others are saying – once you set the precedent of using an “national emergency” to get your way it opens the door for others i.e. Democrats to use or abuse it similarly …… and it will come back to bite the Republicans on the ass if the Dems win power in 2020 and more …..
Player One says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 3:04 pm
Peter Stanton @ #227 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 2:24 pm
This list is just what came to mind in a few minutes. There are many other things that were changed for the better by the baby boomer generation.
Perhaps. However, the Baby Boomers are wealthy not necessarily because of anything they did – they were just fortunate to have grown up during one of the biggest and longest economic booms in history – ironically, caused in large part by the sheer number of Baby Boomers themselves. They benefited first from the post-war boom, and then from the boom generated by their own burgeoning numbers, and then the boom of having politicians (of all sides) falling over themselves to gift them benefits as a means of buying their votes.
But this economic growth was unsustainable, predicated as it was on two erroneous assumptions: “unlimited growth” and “unlimited resources”.
Whether they knew it at the time or not, the Baby Boomers have left ecological catastrophe as their primary legacy for future generations.
Fair or otherwise, this is what they will be remembered for.
————————————–
You may be right. The Silent Spring was first published in 1962 and is generally recognised as the book that initiated the environmental movement. Many baby boomers became concerned about the damage being done to the environment and campaigned for change. Maybe they could have done more.
We can always find someone to blame but how does that help in addressing the problem. Problems are solved by action not throwing around blame.
Ale @aliasvaughn
You know it’s bad when…
Fox Admits Trump Is Issuing Emergency Declaration Because He Needs Political Win
Numerous Fox News hosts have openly admitted that President Trump needs the wall if he hopes to win re-election.
From Dan Bongino to Laura Ingraham, Fox News hosts are openly admitting that President Trump needs to fund his wall if he hopes to win re-election.
In essence, the president is exercising national emergency powers in order to score a political win ahead of 2020.
https://mavenroundtable.io/theintellectualist/news/fox-admits-trump-is-issuing-emergency-declaration-because-he-needs-political-win-jn3yIRlVSEWBswdv-JbxVg/?utm_source=Amplify&utm_medium=Intellectualist&utm_campaign=Twitter&utm_term=Alessandra
So the Baby Boomers, of which I am one, did nothing to accumulate wealth
They were just lucky
Are individuals making comments such as that for real?
No wonder they are misfits, jealous of those who have achieved and supporting a ratbag political party which intends to put everyone in the gutter with their supporters
The value of your residential property is of no consequence, because you buy and sell in the same market
And you need somewhere to live, even Greens in their Share residences to be able to afford the rent
Apart from the inconsequential price of your home, wealth has been accrued by hard work that hard work seeing achievement including as an employee in an Organisation
And prudent decisions to protect and add to the wealth you have accumulated across your working life
The Greens contributors making the comment they do have not and will not get to first base because performance leads to success and success leads to wealth
In fact, the Greens juvenile supporters have a better foundation for accruing wealth because they have had the advantage of compulsory superannuation throughout their working life (if they actually are in employment) whereas Baby Boomers did not have such an advantage unless employed in certain industries
What is contributed to superannuation is a percentage of the salary you are on (and you can salary sacrifice on top of that), so if you achieve in the workplace and are remunerated accordingly there is the added benefit
So, again success breeds success
Not sitting on a site such as this insulting a demographic who have achieved success in their life time
Boerwar
I heard on the RN science report at midday. One of the scientists who did the recent insect studies review was interviewed. He admitted limitations in the study but believes the indicators should be taken seriously.
He noted that the review of some 70 studies indicated a severe decline in 40% of insect species and increase in approximately 5% of species that gained from some factor, eg relative immunity to insecticides, adaptation to tree loss, greater tolerance of warming etc.
‘poroti says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 3:41 pm
Boerwar
With all the gloom over insect numbers how goes your Pine Bark Beetle franchise ?’
Depressed. Overreach. Running out of damned trees! There are still some good prospects east of the Rockies, but. And then there is Eurasia!
@WWP
Are you going to Kim Travers 2019 campaign kick off later today?
Peter Stanton @ #270 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 3:49 pm
It’s not primarily about “blame”. It’s that if those who are (at least in significant part) responsible for the problem form a key voting bloc, but they either don’t acknowledge it or don’t understand it (or both), then it becomes politically impossible to implement a sensible solution.
This has been very evident in Australia over the past decade or so.
Observer @ #272 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 4:02 pm
Our definitions of “success” clearly differ. For instance, mine would probably include passing a habitable planet on to my children. 🙁
“The PM today talked about Bill Shorten wanting to win a vote “in the Canberra bubble.” It used to be called the parliament.”
Does that make Morrison Prime Minister of a Bubble?
Sohar says:
As the head of the Coalition it looks like it……
swamprat
One of the difficulties for us ordinary people is that the people who report what scientists say tend to overegg the dramatic and to underegg the qualifiers.
These unqualified horror stories are then disseminated by penguins of limited intellect as a sort of gospel truth. The consequence is that the folk who want to take insect population science seriously are undermined by (a) apocalyptic enthusiasts and (b) science denialists alike.
This has, IMHO, happened with reports of insect populations.
I think your approach is good. The published studies should be taken as an indicator which could usefully be used as the input into a thesis that goes something like this: ‘On a global scale, insect biodiversity and insect biomass are trending such that a critical element of the web of life is being reduced significantly.’ The study could be used as the basis for predicting which extinctions are likely to occur as a consequence.’ The predictions could be based on a number of known factors. The first is that some plants depend almost totally on some insects. The second factor could be a functional breakdown. For example, if flying insects are eliminated then flycatchers will probably go extinct.
In practice I suspect that there will be few extinctions per se.
What is far more likely to happen is a sort of expanded version of Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’.
But that is only a guess.
Boerwar @ #281 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 4:16 pm
Why guess, when the answers are fairly easy to find …
https://www.livescience.com/52752-what-if-all-insects-died.html
EB
“The moment you whack a bunch of people like ‘baby boomers’ or ‘the Greens’ into a vilified category and point the stick of wrath at them you undermine the validity of anything you have to say thereafter. Do yourself a favour and stop doing it – you never know, a baby boomer like me might pay attention to what you have to say instead of scrolling on.”
Well said. The divisive rhetoric has started already, and the election campaign is still two months away.
I just finished reading a Facebook post from an acquaintance titled “I’ll stand with Tony Abbott” and a comment linking lack of aid to farmers to foreign aid, with a photo of Penny Wong. I pointed out that it was divisive and foreign aid was often used to buy farmers’ produce to give as aid, but I was then told that “All greens are communists and all Labor supporters are socialists, and not real Aussies”.
Both other commenters are to my knowledge over 60, ex-servicemen, left school at Grade 10, and one living alone. Neither works full time. I was tempted to draw the link between my taxes and the source of their incomes, but left that for another day. Unsurprisingly, scare campaigns work best on those who are most insecure.
I think the message in all of this Abbott – ScumMo boat people scare campaign is to always point out when they are lying (most of the time) and more importantly to point out that they are divisive and desperate. Also I think Labor must go hard on all the corruption and avoiding implementing the banking RC. In my experience even the most conservative of supporters find it hard to defend those aiding the bankers, because their victims include all the demographics targeted by the divisive tactics.
@beguiledagain, from last thread:
I suspect that Boerwar’s $22trn figure is the U.S. national debt, not his estimate of post-1945 US defense spending. If Boerwar has already explained this, I apologize in advance for wasting your time.
Peter S
‘The Silent Spring was first published in 1962 and is generally recognised as the book that initiated the environmental movement. Many baby boomers became concerned about the damage being done to the environment and campaigned for change. Maybe they could have done more.’
The antecedents and the intellectual underpinnings to ‘Silent Spring’ are well worth some study. Essentially they go back to what von Humboldt ‘did’ to Natural Philosophy. The core bit of new thinking came when he realized that in nature everything was connected.
For a while he considered calling his ‘Cosmos’, created to encompass his new learning, ‘Gaia’. Lovelock was a Johnny Come Lately!
He inspired a global generation and continued to inspire thinkers and poets for much longer. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, Thoreau and Darwin all owed Humboldt a huge debt. Darwin, a notorious piker when it came to acknowledging others, was unstinting in his praise for the way in which von Humboldt inspired him.
More things are named after von Humboldt than any other person. Some 400 plants and animals are named after him.
Concepts that are so basic to our thinking that we totally take them for granted were first thought of by von Humboldt.
Australian scientists, explorers and artists who were heavily influenced by von Humboldt and who made massive contributions to Australia’s cultural and scientific growth include Leichardt, von Mueller, Baur and von Guerard. (I was recently involved in an exercise to find the precise location from which von Guerard sketched the Cathedral in the Acheron Valley, Victoria. So topographically accurate were his sketches that the exact spots were able to be located.)
‘Silent Spring’ as written was intellectually impossible without von Humboldt.
I suspect, without knowing for sure, that the debt we owe von Humboldt and the linear connections to his thinking were, in the anglophone world, collateral damage to the first and second world wars.
Does anyone else think that the focus group really loved the “Canberra Bubble”? Or is a case like the focus group in the “Thick of it” where they basically taking the advice of an actress playing a middle class mother?
Boerwar
I am by nature a pessimist about anything where a naked ape is involved!!
Humans, 7 billions going on to 10+ billions, are still pouring, spraying millions of litres of chemical poisons, assiduously clearing trees everywhere, green house gas production still rising, etc etc
Someone posted before that there are almost no native species left in the Murray River!! I had no idea it was this bad.
You’d think someone in politics would run a scare campaign on it!!
swamprat 247pm
Loved the “We are Scotland” video – also reminded me how I will miss Senator Doug Cameron!
One slightly unfortunate edit in the piece is at 00:47 when the voiceover says “And yeah, there’ll be bumps along the road”, just as it shows a person driving approaching a wee lamb on a country road!
https://youtu.be/TkHEwQUHP0A
swamprat @ #287 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 4:39 pm
If only we had a political party that had environmental issues as its primary focus 🙁
Rocket Rocket
Yes, “We Are Scotland” was a welcoming video to migrants. I suspect the SNP Government was deliberately contrasting itself to the brexit xenophobia of the UK Government.
I remember the wee lamb but not the bump. It was still alive!
Sadly that video on youtube has more negatives than positives.
I agree Dougie will be missed!
‘Matt says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 4:33 pm
@beguiledagain, from last thread:
I suspect that Boerwar’s $22trn figure is the U.S. national debt, not his estimate of post-1945 US defense spending. If Boerwar has already explained this, I apologize in advance for wasting your time.’
IMO, Beguiled was making the point that defence expenditure can be fairly criticized if the priorities do not take into account the concept of assymetrical warfare. His additional point, I suspect, was that I was not an expert because I would not be able to respond to five points.
You are correct about the $22 trillion being the current debt and that I was referring to today’s US military being debt-funded. IMO, this is a serious matter. There can be little doubt that one of the factors driving Hitler to war was that the massive increases in German military expenditure were all on the Never Never. Hitler was facing put up or shut up. He chose war.
Beguiled made a reference to present dollar values. By the end of Eisenhower’s presidency, the US had paid off all its war bonds and the Fed Budget was in surplus. The US military then was paid for in real time.
IMHO, the gold in Beguiled’s comments is implicit: we should be taking asymmetrical warfare far more seriously in our defence planning. I suspect that the reason we don’t do it is because it deliberately reduces expenditure, it deliberately accepts a weaker military position and it deliberately foreshadows enemy successes. Finally, the uniforms don’t like it because asymmetrical warfare works best when it is decentralized. Generals are superfluous.
Probably the most successful recent example of this sort of planning was the Phase B response of the Iraqis to the US led invasion: the real damage happened when the Iraqis went into asymmetrical warfare when the country was already occupied. The Taliban are the gold medal standard when it comes to asymmetry.
We do do some tentative things in the asymmetry line. We are training in situ Indigenous soldiers along the northern coastline. Their prime functions will be coast watching, tracking down downed pilots, and some low level guerilla activities in the event of an invasion.
From my point of view, the reason we would ramp up our investment in asymmetry is that we would be signalling to potential invaders that just getting here and just overwhelming our main force units is only the very start of their troubles. The ROI to underpin this signalling would be relatively cheap.
Boerwar @ #260 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 12:33 pm
Are you still spouting that crap. If all uranium mining is banned, Olympic Dam will remain open because it is PRIMARILY A COPPER MINE. BHP has been running ads recently spruiking copper “like the type that comes from Olympic Dam.”
Uranium is a by product of the mainly copper mining. Oh, and it also produces gold and silver as well. But mainly copper.
This constant crapping on about this issue is just as dumb as your repetitive claims that the Greens were going to nationalise the banks.
That having been said, it’s still nowhere near as dumb as your constant defence of cotton farming in Australia though.
‘swamprat says:
Saturday, February 16, 2019 at 4:39 pm
Boerwar
I am by nature a pessimist about anything where a naked ape is involved!!
Humans, 7 billions going on to 10+ billions, are still pouring, spraying millions of litres of chemical poisons, assiduously clearing trees everywhere, green house gas production still rising, etc etc
Someone posted before that there are almost no native species left in the Murray River!! I had no idea it was this bad.
You’d think someone in politics would run a scare campaign on it!!’
The Dick Smith (name?) Party are onto your general point, I believe.
To the best of my knowledge no species native to the Murray River have become extinct – although I can think of at least one species formerly found in the Murray that is now no longer found in the Murray. A couple of fish species, at least, are in diabolical near-term trouble.
There are long sections of the Murray where part of the native fish fauna is absent to a greater or lesser degree.
A survey was done a couple of years or so ago. It found that the fish biomass of the MDB is over 90% European Carp.
Player One @ #289 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 3:44 pm
I have become convinced that one of the difficulties of politicising any issue, due to our adversarial system, is that it encourages opposition to that issue. Unlike money (Liberals) and workers (Labor), the environment (Greens) doesn’t reflect a group of people. Ironically ‘environment’ is all people. You may have put your finger on the solution for me though, that if the Greens primary focus were the environment then perhaps opposition or indifference from the other parties would reduce.
Dan Gulberry
Not only but also there is a YUGE amount of rare earths if they can figure out how to extract them economically. They would be worth $Trillions.
The SNP had a cheeky Christmas video: “twas the nightmare before brexit”
https://www.snp.org/twas-the-nightmare-before-brexit/
With so many pricks in the Liberal and National Parties, it must be difficult to govern in Scott’s Bubble.
Dan
I note your very abusive tone and therefore decline to respond substantively.
Player One
Fuck off
You know NOTHING
Some Baby Boomers did not make it past 20, killed in Vietnam because their birth date was drawn from a barrel
Late Riser @ #102 Saturday, February 16th, 2019 – 11:30 am
LR: Thank you for pointing to an article that I would otherwise have missed. Apart from Liu Cixin (which was a revelation) I have not read much Chinese SF, despite being an aficionado of the hard genre (and a disgusting intellectual snob about the predominant Fanatsy genre). I must get out more.