The latest fortnightly Essential Research poll still offers nothing on voting intention, though it’s relative interesting in that it features the pollster’s monthly leadership ratings. Contrary to Newspoll, these record a weakening in Anthony Albanese’s ratings, with approval down three to 37% and disapproval up five to 34%. Scott Morrison also worsens slightly, down two on approval to 45% and up three on disapproval to 41%, and his preferred prime minister read is essentially steady at 44-28 (43-28 last month).
Further questions relate to the right to protest, including the finding that 33% would support laws flagged by Scott Morrison that “could make consumer or environment boycotts illegal”, while 39% were opposed. Fifty-eight per cent agreed the government had “the right to limit citizen protests when it disrupts business”, with 31% for disagree; but that 53% agreed that “protestors should have the right to pressure banks not to invest in companies that are building coal mines”, with 33% disagreeing.
The poll was conducted Thursday to Sunday from a sample of 1075 respondents chosen from an online panel.
So Reba Meagher , Steve Hutchins they would have been from the “political background”? What about Barry French or say Andrew Metcalfe?
Hastie and Paterson are engaging in a two person war of words with China:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-17/andrew-hastie-james-paterson-refuse-to-repent-china-criticism/11712160
DFAT would be none too pleased.
I wonder if Pegasus can enlighten us with news about the wonderful achievements of The Greens’ national conference this weekend?
*radio silence*
🙂
Barrie was actually picked up – out of the gutter – as a broken down drunk who’d been kicked out of his long term gig as the chief advocate for the National Employer’s Federation in the late 1960s. He became a T-totaller (but chain smoker) and made the most of his second chance at the TWU. He taught me Industrial Law at Uni and he was one of the first Commissioners I appeared before at the NSW IRC when I assumed his former position of Chief Legal Officer in 1996.
GG:
[‘…Bogon Poetry which you seemed quite attracted to for some reason.’]
You cite the greatest poet of recent times – ie, T. S. Eliot- a bogan! I take issue thereof, bringing to your attention, for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuTPCG1z42M
– in which he was falsely accused of being anti-Semitic, his letters to Ezra Pound proving same.
I take it that you’re not into poetry. In fact, I don’t think you’re not into anything much other than to sustain your Alpha-male status.
Your very bold to post given what I think your current role is Mr Earlwood.
Bold or stupid. Take your pick, Eddie
Jonathan Pie on week 2 of the UK election. As per usual with his videos, there’s some “strong” language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKKfDqvpHYE
He mentions what 9 years of Tory rule has done to the NHS and has policy suggustions for Labour (which I’m sure our Labor could but won’t consider).
I would say exceedingly bold but bully for you! One should be allowed to preserve one’s anonymity regardless in a forum such as this.
Eddie, if you must play the guessing game as to my real identity, I can confirm that I am not the brother in law of a former Labor senator. So, perhaps I’m not being as bold as you may assume.
——————————-
Fires: Over the past 150 years Australia has had larger areas burned, more infrastructure burned, more people killed and more houses burned.
———————————-
It is only mid Nov. And we have modern fire fighting and preparedness resources and experience than ever before. And it ain’t an el-nino.
Taken in perspective, the NSW/QLD 2019/2020 fire season stats are dire in themselves and a frightening warning.
citizen @ #27253 Sunday, November 17th, 2019 – 7:57 pm
Hastie has been sent out to pick a fight with China in a desperate attempt to distract from ScumMo’s (& Gladys’s) burning questions.
Hastie and Patterson are out of Morrison’s control.
On the one hand we have Morrison desperately trying for patch ups while doing side meetings with Chinese government worthies at regional meetings.
There is a current pattern where China is, with calculation, manipulating Australian exports to China at company, product and commodity levels by way of punishment and reward.
And on the other hand we have the gadfly Hastie sticking it to the Chinese Government.
‘Simon Katich says:
Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 8:22 pm
——————————-
Fires: Over the past 150 years Australia has had larger areas burned, more infrastructure burned, more people killed and more houses burned.
———————————-
It is only mid Nov. And we have modern fire fighting and preparedness resources and experience than ever before. And it ain’t an el-nino.
Taken in perspective, the NSW/QLD 2019/2020 fire season stats are dire in themselves and a frightening warning.’
My point was a tad more nuanced than this. If you listen to the Greens there is no agriculture left in Australia. The drought is the biggest and baddest ever. The Coral Reef is already dead to tourism. The fires are the worst ever.
And it is all the fault of the arsonists in the Liberal and Labor Parties. In other words the facts are being systematically distorted so that they can be used as political clubs. Not subtle!
The CURRENT realities are: the Reef is not dead and Reef tourism is not dead. Agricultural production across Australia for this year is down by around 4%, not the apocalyptic 100% being claimed by some Greens. The fires are not the worst ever. Not by a very long shot. (They have another 4 million hectares to go before they match the worst ever, which happened around a century and a half ago.) The drought is not the biggest and baddest drought we have ever had. It is the worst drought ever in large areas but even so, it is not the worst ever drought over most of Australia.
But wait, there’s more. Taken together the Greens policies as per their policy documents really will smash many regional industries, economies and societies. Di Natale’s promise of ‘millions of jobs’ to replace those destroyed by Greens policies is cynical at best.
The Greens are bullshitting big time.
Pegasus
You must be pleased to have been acknowledged in point 5 of the cartoon.
TS Elliot a bogan?
Cool.
Mavis
Burbank and Gerontion were pretty iffy.
Still, all this digging through artists lives for any imperfections shits me. Caravaggio, David Foster Wallace, TS Eliot seem to cop a lot of inane abuse for three of the greatest artists ever.
Do we ever see culture warriors saying we shouldn’t honour Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Frank Lloyd Wright, Feynman, Martin Luther King, both Kennedy boys etc etc and use their creations?
Boerwar
The Eliot- Bogan connection.
https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/louise-bogan/
p
aha!
BW
I understand. I just don’t want your posts about the Greens to detract from the fact these fires (and other things you mentioned) are dire warnings. We are at 1 degree warming. Locked in for 1.5-2 and without more significant work to reduce GHG emissions…. anything from 2 to completely f’ed.
And we have had a political party running the joint who have known this and but didn’t give a rats because of some really ratty reasons. They are the vermin of our democracy. The dry rot of our institutions. The fart in the elevator to the future. The speck of shit n the porridge of life.
Boerwar says:
Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 8:53 pm
p
aha!
________________________
What’s happened ?? Did Bluey attack you with the suckers?
SK
I think we are roughly on the same page.
About ten years ago I stopped debating the pros and cons of hazard reduction burns with my rural and regional relations, friends, etc, etc, etc.
I told them that as far as I was concerned they could do what they liked when they liked because Global Warming was very rapidly changing all the fire rules.
I told them that they needed to be ready to completely reset all their rules: crop choices, paddock size and shape, insurance, infrastructure protection, house protection, fire preparation, resources, training, fuel loads, and passive defence. I emphasized that they would not be doing this once. They would be doing it again and again as circumstances evolved.
The current bout of politicking is, IMO, sickening.
Henry Lawson penned an anti-coal poem of sorts in 1916
[‘They’re taking it, the shipping push, As all the rest must go –
The only spot of cliff and bush
That harbour people know.
The spirit of the past is dead,
North Sydney has no soul –
The State is cutting down Ball’s Head To make a wharf for coal…
And strings of grimy trucks shall run
In everlasting trains
And on the cliff where wild trees are
Shall stand the soulless cranes
To dump their grimy loads below,
Where the great brown rocks are grand;
And the deep grass and wild flowers grow – and boating couples land.
No more shall poorer families
Give “Grandma” and “Grandad”
A glimpse of nature’s mysteries
To make their old hearts glad.
No more our eyes shall be relieved
In the city’s garish day —
A sordid crime has been achieved! And none has aught to say!]
Steve777 @ #1358 Sunday, November 17th, 2019 – 8:14 pm
UK Labor sounds to be as good at the campaigning caper as Australian Labor. Not very.
Go Mayor Pete!
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/buttigieg-surges-ahead-of-democrat-rivals-in-iowa-poll-20191117-p53bcd.html
We have our first catastrophic fire day for the season predicted for Wednesday. Fireseason Started yesterday. It has been too wet for me to do any burning except last week on one pile I made of some hazard reduction clearing…. and that required a lot of TLC just to keep it going.
Fortunately Issie has cut through the politics and told us it’s not AGW or the lack of back burning; it’s Gods will because of SSM.
Diogenes:
Artists should be assessed contextually. As far as Eliot’s concerned he’s right up there with the best.
As a matter of interest, his estate still has, to the best of my knowledge, the right to “Cats”, saving his former firm, Faber and Faber, from liquidation.
Some Horror stories coming out of the Vic ALP:
Victorian Labor state president Hutch Hussein has called on members to “speak up, stand up and call out inappropriate behaviour” to support women who have launched complaints of bullying and sexual harassment within the party.
Ms Hussein revealed details of women who were bullied within the party, including the case of one man who abused a woman on a campaign bus by “shouting so aggressively that he was spitting on her face”, and a man who constantly lost his temper and verbally abused a woman, leaving her shaking with fear.
“Or the man who continually told another woman, ‘I own you,’ because he had introduced her to ALP, so much so that when she gained an electoral officer role, he insisted that she provide him with her earnings in full,” Ms Hussein said.
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/labor-state-president-urges-members-to-speak-up-about-harassment-20191117-p53bbr.html
This is truly repulsive. He’s a raving religious nucase. This, I hope, will be another nail in his coffin in his upcoming “discrimination” court case.
https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/israel-folau-preaches-bushfires-and-drought-are-gods-punishment-for-samesex-marriage-and-abortion/news-story/1342cc45c7bdd686d99e56e97b608fcf
Re Kronomex @10:42.
Israel Folau and his ilk hold “heathens” and “idolators” in contempt but these guys worship Zeus. He chucks thunderbolts at anyone he doesn’t like and if you pray hard enough he’ll shift the isobars and/or suspend the laws of physics to make it rain.
Diogenes:
I found a list of defunct historical medical terms:
– https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/illnesses-ailments-diseases-history-names/
There are several instances of the definite article:
– the horrors (not clear what it is – maybe sepsis/septic shock? “the horrors” seems to be associated with alcohol abuse…)
– the quinsy (painful abscess in the tissue around a tonsil that accompanies more severe forms of tonsillitis)
– the headache
– the blind staggers (this is selenium toxicity in livestock, and might be something to do with alcoholism in humans)
– the dropsy (ascites?)
– the lockjaw (tetanus, fatal in nine days in the case reported)
One of the indefinite article:
– a consumption (TB)
And several without article:
– grippe (‘flu)
– ague (fever associated with malaria)
– St. Vitus’s dance (chorea)
– apoplexy (stroke)
– croup (“an obstruction caused by swelling of the larynx, trachea, and bronchi that occurs in children as a result of a virus”)
No obvious rhyme or reason to it, but I speculate:
– that historical terms are somewhat more likely to have associated articles than are modern terms (which I suspect are very unlikely to have such articles); and
– that articles are more likely to be associated with things that have been known about for a long time; and finally
– that things that have been known about for a long time are more likely to be serious (which of course is contrary to my original proposition)
Dio
I also notice this. I know more about the foibles of Einstein and Feynman than others you mention. And far more about the foibles of those closer to me scientifically – we plot scientific family trees in Australia, as we are scientists in a small discipline. My “scientific” grandfather was a guy called Bart Bok. Not all of those in my scientific family tree are without sin, but I think to disregard their scientific achievements makes no sense is fucking pointless!!!
Nobody quibbles about teaching Heisenberg’s Uncertainty (HUP), but Heisenberg himself is a controversial physicist – seen as way too close to the Nazis. The play “Copenhagen” is a fantastic dissection of the history between Heisenberg and Bohr, if ever anyone has a chance to see it.
Also, for lovers of T.S. Elliot (and I am one), and satire about academia in general, the David Lodge trilogy, “Trading Places”, “Small World”, and “Nice Work” is brilliant reading. For my money, “Small World” was the best of the three, and if you enjoy T.S. Elliot, you will enjoy this novel
EGT and Dio,
The “dropsy” is an interesting one.
Now that you mention it, Me Mammy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Mammy) had an episode where a young cousin came to stay a Mammy’s place because she had “Dropsy” (i.e. pregnant). I have never thought of it before, but dropsy being equated to ascites makes some sense.
More curious to me is the case of my recently 🙁 deceased and much loved FIL, and what actually happened to his mother. She died at age 27, and around 1930, of “dropsy”. It is on the death certificate. We have all (as well-meaning amateurs) tried to work out what the problem really was. Heart failure is our best guess, with resultant oedema, but I have no idea whether that would cause some sort of swelling of the stomach to resemble ascites?
Are any of the regular crowd here interested in high speed rail?
CC
Yes, me very much. I travel a lot for work, and love going by train, in Europe, Taiwan, China and Korea. I really wonder why we cannot have nice things like this in Australia.
I also love the slower “metro / underground ” trains in so many other places. I have cards in my wallet, such as an Oyster card, for when I am the appropriate country.
I have had my son, and a colleague, both being really excited by the new Sydney Light Rail, Chatswood to Cherrybrook (and as far as Kellyville?) because it reminds them of London light rail. I felt the same way when I took said light rail line. Perhaps we can have nice things in Australia?
Greetings from Adelaide!
D&M
That’s a good question and it requires a very long and complicated answer.
The simple version is Australia just hasn’t had a mature conversation about high speed rail. Instead we’ve gone down the wrong track and become fixated with high speed rail versus aviation. We’ve never really asked the question what is the problem we are trying to solve.
Hi Fess,
Enjoy Adelaide! I will be in Adelaide next week for 2 days – lovely city.
My fave bit of Adelaide – the $6 bus from the airport to downtown.
The parks and churches are pretty good too!
We are starting to get metros in Australia, but the problem is political. We just aren’t willing to fund infrastructure and we have this attitude that good infrastructure has to be parcelled out over decades. Things happen differently overseas.
Its interesting that you hear in the news about the Reserve Bank pleading with the government to fund infrastructure and its falling on deaf ears. Yet the media never investigate which infrastructure projects that could mean.
D&M:
Only here for a couple of days for work, then back home. I haven’t been here in years, so looking forward to catching some of the city. Thank god the truly awful weather happens on the day I leave!
The Chatswood to Cherrybrook and Tallawong line is actually heavy rail. For reasons I don’t understand they had to shut down and modify a section of Sydney’s rail system to convert it to metro standards. It’s what we do here, rip up infrastructure to suit developer spivs.
The metro carriages are single deck with seats along the sides, to cram passangers in, which is what is actually needed, unlike the main Cityrail system with double-deck carriages that seems to have been designed to carry passangers over long distances (which is part of, but not all of its role).
I don’t agree with you on the issue of conversion of the Epping/Chatswood line. That decision made good sense.
CC,
Very good point! High-speed rail in the countries where I have used it is usually for distances of between 200 and 500 km. For distances larger than that in Europe, who travel by plane, and in Japan and Korea, well, you either take a plane or a ship – trains do not do well in water.
So, can we use high-speed rail to connect Sydney to Newcastle and Wollongong? Sydney to Golburn? Sydney to Canberra? Canberra to Albury? Albury to Melbourne?
Each of these routes would be useful for travel, but also for decentralisation. I once lived in Albury, but what drove me back to the city was the isolation.
D&M ..
Decentralisation and housing affordability is a real issue but its become something of a distraction. Worse you’ll find detractors of high speed rail putting forward counter arguments on the assumption that its the only reason for high speed rail. Its not.
Here’s a better argument. HSR competes not with air travel but car travel. In fact if you do it well, you actually take a lot of cars off roads and you can avoid spending billions of dollars on new road pavement.
There are corridors where in the next couple of decades we have a choice between building a new motorway or building HSR. Both cost roughly the same over the same distances. The difference is that HSR moves more people, faster. Its simply better value for money.
That’s the real killer argument for HSR. And those corridors are Newcastle to Wollongong and Brisbane to the Gold Coast (and to a certain extent Melbourne to Geelong).
The other problem I have with the general conversation about HSR is people who connect it with the issue of “what do we do with growth? where do all these new people go?”
Again, its a red herring. The real question you should be asking is, what are the social and economic benefits of HSR for the people who are already here. ?
Steve777
Actually Steve777, I agree with you – a badly designed project which has reduced capacity, to suit developer spivs.
It is sad that, after travelling on it, I am now welcoming the “London” style metro given to us by our new developer-spiv overlords, despite the reduction in capacity. And I am actually very much aware of my mixed feelings on the venture – it could have been done so much better.
Also note, that the residents of the area served by the North-West metro are NOT happy with the service, c.f. blow-in’s like me who use the service twice a year at most.
I realise that in NSW we are now set for one-party Coalition rule, supported by one -part Federal Coalition rule for at least a decade. It has this odd effect, where you basically give up, and start trying to find positives in a system you know you cannot change.
D&M.. what reduction in capacity? Gosh there has been a lot of bullshit said about the metro.
CC
This makes a lot of sense to me, and thanks for helping me to understand where high-speed rail fits into Australia. In Germany, where I have spent a lot of work time, people do not drive from Cologne to Frankfurt, some 150 k (?), or from Cologne to Amsterdam (300 k?). You get the train – it is totally obvious.