Bundambarama

A second by-election now looms in Queensland, in which One Nation may cause trouble in a traditionally Labor-voting working class seat. Elsewhere, Josh Frydenberg faces a contentious Section 44 challenge, and a Victorian Liberal aspirant regrets not paying his train fare.

At the top of the sidebar are links to guides I have up for three by-election campaigns currently in progress, including yesterday’s new addition:

• Queensland’s festival of democracy on March 28 looks set to receive a new attraction after Jo-Ann Miller’s announcement to parliament yesterday that she is resigning as member of the eastern Ipswich seat of Bundamba, effective immediately. After two decades as Labor member, Miller has grown increasingly estranged from her party over time, a particularly interesting manifestation of which was an appearance alongside Pauline Hanson on the campaign trail two days before the December 2017 state election. One Nation did not field a candidate against Miller in 2017, but has been quick to announce it has a candidate ready to go for the by-election, who will be announced on the weekend. Since Ipswich was the birthplace of the Hanson phenomenon, this could yet make the by-election more interesting than the 21.6% two-party margin suggests. Tony Moore of the Brisbane Times reports Steve Axe, Miller’s electorate officer, will contest the preselection, but Sarah Elks of The Australian reports the front runners are two candidates of the Left: Nick Thompson and Lance McCallum, who are respectively aligned with the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union and the Electrical Trades Union. I have a provisional by-election guide up and running which takes it for granted it will be held on March 28, though this is yet to be officially confirmed. Also on that day will be the Currumbin by-election and council elections, including for the big prizes of the Brisbane city council and lord mayoralty.

• Further on the by-election front, I had a paywalled piece in Crikey yesterday on the Greens preferences imbroglio in Johnston.

Legal matters:

• The Federal Court is hearing a Section 44 challenge against Josh Frydenberg relating to his Hungarian-born mother, which complainant Michael Staindl argues makes him a dual citizen. Frydenberg’s mother and her family fled the country in 1949 as its post-war communist regime tightened its grip on power, describing themselves as stateless on arrival in Australia. Staindl maintains that the whole family’s Hungarian citizenship rights were restored with the collapse of communism in 1949. Staindl is also pursuing defamation action against Scott Morrison over the latter’s claim that his action was motivated by anti-Semitism. The Australian ($) reports a decision is expected “within weeks”.

• In further legal obscurantism news, Emanuele Cicchiello has withdrawn from the race to fill Mary Wooldridge’s vacancy in the Victorian Legislative Council on the grounds that he once pleaded guilty to an offence carrying a prison term of more than five years – for improperly claiming a concessional train fare when he was 19. The Australian ($) reports that those remaining in the field are Asher Judah, former Property Council deputy director and Master Builders policy manager, and Matthew Bach, deputy director of Ivanhoe Girls Grammar.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,417 comments on “Bundambarama”

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  2. there’s an article at the age about bob brown & the convoy that i can’t read as i don’t have a subscription. could someone read it, come back & excoriate him (shouldn’t be hard) so i can find out what its about ? -a.v.

  3. Re: Taylormade’s complaint.

    BK uses SMH so naturally the articles tend to refer more to NSW. When I try to fill in for him I use The Age, which I am normally more interested in because it’s Victoria. It’s nothing to do with voting preferences, showing how assumptions of bias are so easily made, and so often wrong..

  5. Zoom

    I’m waiting for Peg to post Adam Bandt’s comment on Albo committing to zero net emissions by 2050.

    Does Bandt:

    A) Welcome ALP position?
    B) Say it doesn’t go far enough?
    C) Say ALP is joining the Coalition same/same?

  6. PeeBee @ #46 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 6:16 am

    Soc, what surprised me was the small number of passengers (153 I believe). Could something like this accident be the catalyst for stopping passenger trains running at all?

    The most surprising thing for me is that, according to sprocket, the investigation into the accident is apparently complete and the cause is now known.

  7. Ian Dunlop, formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chair of the Australian Coal Association and CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is co-author of “What Lies Beneath: the understatement of existential climate risk”, and of the Club of Rome’s “Climate Emergency Plan”. He was a co-convenor of the first Australian National Climate Emergency Summit recently held in Melbourne.

    Emergency action on climate change is imperative

    https://johnmenadue.com/ian-dunlop-emergency-action-on-climate-change-is-imperative/

    The first Australian National Climate Emergency Summit was in Melbourne Town Hall, 14-15 February 2020 – there will be many more.
    :::
    Meanwhile business is seizing the initiative: “Something must be done to retain our social licence”. So all those lowest common-denominator organisations who have spent three decades preventing the development of any serious climate change policy, such as the BCA, MCA, APPEA, AIG and many others, have leaped aboard the net zero emissions by 2050 bus.

    Which demonstrates yet again the massive failure of leadership and imagination which has characterised the climate change debate since John Howard institutionalised climate denial in 1997.
    :::
    In the current climate context, the 2050 net-zero emission target is totally unrealistic, and a recipe for disaster. Just kicking the can down the road not quite as hard as before.

    Net zero emissions has to happen within the next 10 years, for whilst: “Men Argue, Nature Acts”, as Voltaire put it.

    A massive task, but we have no choice. Do we have leaders capable of doing this? Certainly not within the current incumbents, but others are emerging.
    :::
    There will be many more emergency Summits. The voices will get louder and louder until the incumbents either join with us, or get out of the way.

  8. Bob Brown is uncharacteristically scathing in his description of the crowd that greeted his Stop Adani convoy to north Queensland last year.

    “Cranky, nasty, inhospitable,” he calls them in the documentary Convoy, which screens at the Transitions Film Festival on Friday. The peaceful convoy was, he adds, “faced with this unruly mob fuelled up by extreme-right activist politicians and publicans letting the grog flow”.
    …
    The time for “playing nice with planet killers” is over, he says. “I’m not one for trying to find placatory words for people who are robbing our children of their right to a secure future on a sustainable planet, and that’s what our political leaders are doing.”

    Convoy is an unashamedly slanted account of the road trip in April and May last year, from Tasmania to Clermont in Queensland and then back to Canberra, in a bid to draw attention to Adani’s controversial and economically questionable proposed mine in the Galilee Basin.

    Though it ended with a rally of 5000 people outside Parliament House in Canberra, with Paul Kelly performing and Richard Flanagan reading – “the biggest public rally during the 2019 election campaign”, Brown claims – there was limited media coverage.

    There are, though, plenty of commentators who have subsequently ascribed huge impact to the convoy, with some going so far as to sheet blame for Labor’s failure to win government to the campaign against the Queensland coal mine.

    But Brown won’t have a bar of it.

    https://www.theage.com.au/culture/movies/bob-brown-takes-the-gloves-off-to-give-unruly-mob-a-lashing-20200220-p542oz.html

  10. Barney

    Victoria’s rail union says V/Line drivers had refused to traverse the section of track where a Sydney to Melbourne XPT train derailed in Wallan on Thursday night, killing two rail workers.

    As investigators comb through the twisted wreckage of the derailed train that was carrying 153 passengers, the Rail, Tram and Bus Union claims the accident occurred on a section of track that was awaiting maintenance, prompting V/Line drivers to avoid it over the past week.

    “The RTBU is deeply saddened by the tragic accident that has taken the life of two rail workers and unnecessarily injured many more,” the union said.

    The train driver, a 54-year-old man from ACT, and co-driver (or ‘pilot’), a 49-year-old woman from Castlemaine, both died in the crash.

    ***
    The train driver, a 54-year-old man from ACT, and co-driver, a 49-year-old woman from Castlemaine, are dead
    The Rail, Tram and Bus Union says V/Line drivers had recently refused to traverse the section of track where the accident occured
    The accident followed a fire that destroyed signalling equipment at Wallan and caused delays on the line
    Investigators are at the site with state and federal ministers promising a full and thorough review of the incident
    Services on the line have been suspended
    ***

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/v-line-drivers-avoided-track-section-where-deadly-wallan-train-derailment-occurred-20200221-p542xw.html

  11. a.v.

    It’s an article about a new doco titled “Convoy”.

    https://www.theage.com.au/culture/movies/bob-brown-takes-the-gloves-off-to-give-unruly-mob-a-lashing-20200220-p542oz.html

    “We are not going to save the planet by being perennially well-mannered,” says Brown, the founder and former leader of the Greens, whose environmental activism is these days funnelled via the foundation that bears his name.

    “I used to be too shy,” he adds. “I’m over it. I’m much more direct now, since leaving Parliament.”

    The time for “playing nice with planet killers” is over, he says. “I’m not one for trying to find placatory words for people who are robbing our children of their right to a secure future on a sustainable planet, and that’s what our political leaders are doing.”

    Convoy is an unashamedly slanted account of the road trip in April and May last year, from Tasmania to Clermont in Queensland and then back to Canberra, in a bid to draw attention to Adani’s controversial and economically questionable proposed mine in the Galilee Basin.

    The trailer is on youtube…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmA-UTQruhU

  12. zoomster @ #50 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 9:20 am

    Alas, I haven’t noticed much excitement here, from those who were demanding Labor put up a policy in this area…

    All I have seen so far are news article saying he will re-commit to the Paris Agreement. Not much to comment on there. I guess the details of all the new commitments will come out in a document that will be released to the press after he makes his speech?

    But if you have an advance link, by all means post it. I am sure I am not the only one who would be interested.

  13. One in eight people in Australia living in poverty, report finds

    More than 700,000 children among those below the poverty line, with low rate of Newstart, lack of jobs and rising housing costs the main drivers

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/21/one-in-eight-people-in-australia-living-in-poverty-report-finds

    “Not only has poverty remained consistently high in our wealthy country, the depth of poverty is getting worse, with households in poverty on average living 42% below the poverty line, up from 35% in 2007,” she said.
    :::
    Child poverty trends were impacted by the Howard and Gillard governments decisions to move single parents with children aged eight and older on to Newstart and another Labor government move in 2009 to index family tax benefits to inflation, rather than the faster-growing wages index.

    Noting separate but similar data collated by the OECD, the report said Australia’s poverty rate was above average among OECD nations.
    :::
    The government and departmental bureaucrats have faced criticism in parliament from the Greens senator Rachel Siewert over its failure to adopt an official measure and definition of poverty.

  14. Does Bandt:

    A) Welcome ALP position?
    B) Say it doesn’t go far enough?
    C) Say ALP is joining the Coalition same/same?

    D) Say nothing because….cognitive dissonance
    E) Deflection, LOOK OVER THERE!!! or find some other perceived shortcoming to whine about

  15. Interesting dummy spit from Bob Brown.

    He is all for “ freedom of expression “ when the extinction rebellion and other climate protesters hit the road but has the shits when locals in their home communities in Central Queensland express their opinions about the Adani convoy.

    A bit two faced is the ol Bob Brown with the ol freedom of speech is ok as long as you agree with me.

  17. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-20/indigenous-all-stars-reach-out-to-bullied-boy-quaden-bayles/11985364

    The relentless bullying of a nine-year-old Indigenous boy has prompted some of the NRL’s biggest stars to show their support, as well as a global fundraising effort.

    Key points:
    •Yarraka Bayles posted a video of her son, Quaden, distraught after a day of bullying at school
    •The video has been viewed more than 4 million times, prompting support from around the world
    •The NRL’s Indigenous All Stars want Quaden to lead them onto the field this weekend, and a GoFundMe has been started to send him to Disneyland

    Quaden Bayles’s mother, Yarraka, posted a video on social media of her son crying in the car after school, after he had been bullied, something which she said happens “every single freakin’ day”.

    In the video, Quaden says he wants to take his own life, and Yarraka, speaking to NITV, said he has made previous attempts.

    Bastardry starts young and often is a lifelong pursuit.

    The article has a photo of the young boy – what possessed whoever picked the photo is beyond me. Brickbats you fuckwit. I can only hope that the exposure help make Quaden’s life easier.

  18. Fess

    On the zero/2050 target, Morrison is doing his usual weaselling.

    Saying that Coalition accepts the target, he then assures us that he will be reaching it with a technological solution that is cheaper. Brings back memories of Turnbull and fraudband.

  19. Bandt was on the radio this morning bagging the Labor zero/2050 target.
    Funny how the greens only a few days previous were bagging Labor for not jumping on Zali Staggall’s zero/2050 target.
    Bandt was also upset that Labor won’t give him a 2030 target to get upset over

  20. Adam Bandt

    ‘Genuinely free public education’: Greens leader Adam Bandt wants fees scrapped in public schools

    https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/02/20/greens-adam-bandt-school-fees/

    In a speech to be delivered on Friday, Mr Bandt will call for a debate about ‘genuinely free’ education.

    “We all accept that public education is in the broad sense free, but over the decades there has been a creeping cost shift from the states, pushing it back onto parents,’’ the Member for Melbourne said.

    “Sure, buying a book pack at the beginning of the school year might not seem like much to many, but for a single parent who was pushed from the pension rate onto Newstart, a book pack is a big whack to your weekly budget.
    :::
    Mr Bandt said he saw no reason why all these costs should not be covered by the federal government, given that it spends $12.6 billion on private schools and just $8.3 billion on public schools that teach two out of every three students.
    :::
    “It is a broken system where private schools have guaranteed funding, while public schools are left to the whims and financial pressures of state governments,” he said.

    “There is no reason it should be like this, except for the political ideology that has contempt for public services.”

  21. ‘Set up for failure’: Almost 18 per cent of Australian children in poverty

    https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/set-up-for-failure-almost-18-per-cent-of-australian-children-in-poverty-20200220-p542vp.html

    More than 13 per cent of Australia’s overall population – or about 3.24 million people – live below the poverty line, according to an Australian Council of Social Service and University of New South Wales report released on Friday. About 774,000 children under 15, or 17.7 per cent of Australian children are in poverty.
    :::
    Dr Goldie said Australians living in poverty include young people trying to start their working lives, single parents and older people who came up against age discrimination.
    :::
    The report also said that the “freezing” of the dole, which has not seen a rise in real terms since 1994, together with the transfer of some single parents from the Parenting Payment to the lower Newstart Allowance, “increased poverty and the depth of poverty”.

  22. lizzie @ #58 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 6:32 am

    Barney

    Victoria’s rail union says V/Line drivers had refused to traverse the section of track where a Sydney to Melbourne XPT train derailed in Wallan on Thursday night, killing two rail workers.

    As investigators comb through the twisted wreckage of the derailed train that was carrying 153 passengers, the Rail, Tram and Bus Union claims the accident occurred on a section of track that was awaiting maintenance, prompting V/Line drivers to avoid it over the past week.

    “The RTBU is deeply saddened by the tragic accident that has taken the life of two rail workers and unnecessarily injured many more,” the union said.

    The train driver, a 54-year-old man from ACT, and co-driver (or ‘pilot’), a 49-year-old woman from Castlemaine, both died in the crash.

    ***
    The train driver, a 54-year-old man from ACT, and co-driver, a 49-year-old woman from Castlemaine, are dead
    The Rail, Tram and Bus Union says V/Line drivers had recently refused to traverse the section of track where the accident occured
    The accident followed a fire that destroyed signalling equipment at Wallan and caused delays on the line
    Investigators are at the site with state and federal ministers promising a full and thorough review of the incident
    Services on the line have been suspended
    ***

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/v-line-drivers-avoided-track-section-where-deadly-wallan-train-derailment-occurred-20200221-p542xw.html

    Thanks lizzie, but that doesn’t make it the cause.

    Also the reference to fire damage does not seem to imply poor maintenance as Socrates implied.

    —-
    Apologies to sprocket who I mistaken named in my previous post, it should have been Socrates.

  24. Is Brown turning into a cantankerous, deluded, embittered, old, white, Boomer male?

    Or is he phishing for some more Inner Urbs Greens votes?

    Bob Brown here shows the usual Greens total contempt and hatred for rural and regional deplorables and is then genuinely surprised and hurt when the courtesy is returned in spades.

    Well, Mr Brown. The Bush gets it. The aim of your Party is to introduce a comprehensive regime of policies that will, combined, smash many a rural and regional economy.

    Much of the smashing will be for the amenity of the Inner Urbs elites – a high proportion of whom are Greens.

    The electoral problem for Labor is that the Coalition succeeded in tagging Labor with the Greens. The direct consequence is that the Coalition now holds 30 of 34 regional seats in the large states. Morrison is, as a consequence, wrecking the joint. Naturally, Mr Brown repeats the Greens mantra that Labor should just copy Greens regional policies and Labor will romp home.

    Apart from destroying the coal and the uranium industries on day one*, did the Adani Convoy promise to:

    1. take GMO Cotton away from farmers?
    2. take 605 Gigs of irrigation licences away from farmers?
    3. add a mountain of regulations prescribing an undefined mass of ecosystem services on farmers?
    4. gut defence spending?

    Because all of these are, literally, massive economic smashers in some parts of rural and regional Australian.

    Which reminds me. How is the Bush Bandit connecting with these traditional hate and policy and program targets of Inner Urbs Greens ecosystem services amenity policies?

    *mining and export of uranium will be banned
    *coal has no future

  25. ‘Vogon Poet says:
    Friday, February 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

    Bandt was on the radio this morning bagging the Labor zero/2050 target.
    Funny how the greens only a few days previous were bagging Labor for not jumping on Zali Staggall’s zero/2050 target.
    Bandt was also upset that Labor won’t give him a 2030 target to get upset over’

    Labor is playing the Greens nicely on this.

    They spent six months after 2019 Fed election bagging Labor’s policies.
    Then they realized that Labor had dropped the policies, the Greens spent months bagging Labor for not having policies.
    Labor gets some policies and the Greens (a) bag Labor for not going far enough and (b) simultaneously bragging that Labor has copied the Greens.

    Soooooooooo predictable. So vicious. So deceitful. So destructive of the alternative government. And sooooooooo useful for the Greens’ particular political beneficiaries: Morrison, Dutton, Canavan and Abetz.

  27. Today’s episode of ‘This Day is Another Day to Prove The Greens Delusional & Incapable of Political Nous or Nuance’:

    Bob Brown is uncharacteristically scathing in his description of the crowd that greeted his Stop Adani convoy to north Queensland last year.

    “Cranky, nasty, inhospitable,” he calls them in the documentary Convoy, which screens at the Transitions Film Festival on Friday. The peaceful convoy was, he adds, “faced with this unruly mob fuelled up by extreme-right activist politicians and publicans letting the grog flow”.

    …“I used to be too shy,” he adds. “I’m over it. I’m much more direct now, since leaving Parliament.”

    ‘Convoy’ is an unashamedly slanted account of the road trip in April and May last year, from Tasmania to Clermont in Queensland and then back to Canberra, in a bid to draw attention to Adani’s controversial and economically questionable proposed mine in the Galilee Basin.

    …There are, though, plenty of commentators who have subsequently ascribed huge impact to the convoy, with some going so far as to sheet blame for Labor’s failure to win government to the campaign against the Queensland coal mine.

    But Brown won’t have a bar of it.

    “If only we could determine who is in government,” he says. “Bill Shorten sitting on the fence, backed by his ministers, lost the election. If Shorten had said, ‘I will stop the Adani mine’, he’d have lost the same number of seats in Queensland but would have won a whole stack more seats for his leadership in the rest of metropolitan Australia, and he’d be prime minister now.”

    Nor was the return of a Coalition government a worse outcome as far as the Stop Adani movement is concerned.

    “Labor would have put a stamp of approval on this mine, and that would have been harder to fight,” he says. “The failure of vision and social justice and environmental wellbeing on this issue under Labor is monumental, and it’s continuing. While Albo’s (Anthony Albanese) own electorate was shrouded in bushfire smoke so you couldn’t see one corner from the next, he was in Queensland talking up coal. Appalling.”

    https://www.smh.com.au/culture/movies/bob-brown-takes-the-gloves-off-to-give-unruly-mob-a-lashing-20200220-p542oz.html

    So, Bob ‘I Don’t Like Wind Farms I Can See’ Brown, acknowledges that Labor would have lost seats in Queensland if it had supported The Greens’ Convoy but believes that Labor would have somehow magically won more seats in metropolitan areas if it had supported the Convoy??? Well, I have seen the numbers and Labor’s vote maxed out in the metropolitan seats due to its superior Climate Change offering compared with the Coalition but suffered from two realities. Firstly, that vote came to it in safe Coalition seats, and secondly, ‘Tax You to Death’ played a big factor in overwhelming other concerns for voters in metropolitan seats. People aren’t single issue voters like Bob Brown is simplistically posturing and positing.

    Also, it’s nice to have had Bob Brown bell the cat and straight out say that The Greens are happy the Coalition won the federal election. They now get to ‘teach Labor a lesson’, just like in the NT, and carp at them for 3 more years. While the Coalition goes about its business of clearing the land and digging it up for fun and profit. The fun aspect comes as they laugh at The Greens for being such fools and willing tools for their continued re-election.

  28. Boerwar @ #73 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 6:54 am

    ‘Vogon Poet says:
    Friday, February 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

    Bandt was on the radio this morning bagging the Labor zero/2050 target.
    Funny how the greens only a few days previous were bagging Labor for not jumping on Zali Staggall’s zero/2050 target.
    Bandt was also upset that Labor won’t give him a 2030 target to get upset over’

    Labor is playing the Greens nicely on this.

    They spent six months after 2019 Fed election bagging Labor’s policies.
    Then they realized that Labor had dropped the policies, the Greens spent months bagging Labor for not having policies.
    Labor gets some policies and the Greens (a) bag Labor for not going far enough and (b) simultaneously bragging that Labor has copied the Greens.

    Soooooooooo predictable. So vicious. So deceitful. So destructive of the alternative government. And sooooooooo useful for the Greens’ particular political beneficiaries: Morrison, Dutton, Canavan and Abetz.

    Also, currently the Greens don’t have a policy as they’re developing their Green New Deal.

  30. Also, currently the Greens don’t have a policy as they’re developing their Green New Deal.

    I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, you’re right.

    The irony!!

  31. Someone has summarised some of the reasons why Morrison is being hypocritical when he comments on the “tragedy” in Brisbane.

    2. Jill Meagher died as the Vic. govt. didn’t fund bail services properly;

    3. Tony Abbott de-funded HALF A BILLION DOLLARS from family terrorism services while Minister for Women;

    4. Family courts & police DV services are grossly under-funded thus disorganised & strained;

    5. Research into this field, training for police/other services & other services to manage perp restraint or rehab is grossly under-funded; and

    6. Govt. spends BILLIONS on far less-dangerous issues like religious terrorism.

    NONE OF IT IS AN ACCIDENT. IT’S A WAR ON WOMEN.

  32. ‘Mr Bandt said he saw no reason why all these costs should not be covered by the federal government, given that it spends $12.6 billion on private schools and just $8.3 billion on public schools that teach two out of every three students.’

    Mr Bandt needs to familiarise himself with a little document called ‘The Australian Constitution.”

  33. zoomster @ #80 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 7:03 am

    ‘Mr Bandt said he saw no reason why all these costs should not be covered by the federal government, given that it spends $12.6 billion on private schools and just $8.3 billion on public schools that teach two out of every three students.’

    Mr Bandt needs to familiarise himself with a little document called ‘The Australian Constitution.”

    I’m glad they finally got a lawyer to lead the Party! 😆

  34. Barney
    It’s still being investigated.

    After the accident Leon, who has experience in rail transport, said he walked back to where he thought the train had derailed.

    He said the tracks, which police said were badly damaged following the crash, were set to divert the train onto an adjacent parallel side track. Leon said signals should have alerted the driver to slow down to be able to move into the side track, but he did not notice the train slowing prior to the derailment.

    “If the driver knew that, and the signalling told him that, there’s no way he would have been travelling at the speed he was travelling at,” Leon said.

    “You have to slow down at that point … And this train didn’t.”
    …
    A freight train also came off the tracks in Wallan in 2017 and last month a passenger and freight train crashed at Barnawatha near Albury, but no one was hurt.

    In December, Infrastructure Australia knocked back a proposal to have an upgrade of the line from Melbourne to Albury placed on the nation’s priority infrastructure list.

    It found the Australian Rail Track Corporation’s business case for the $198 million project “materially overestimated” the community benefits from the works.

    The business case noted that Victoria’s regional trains had a self-imposed speed limit of 15km/h on the entire line from Melbourne to Seymour, which includes Wallan, due to “poor track quality” such as mud holes and tight rail alignments.

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/v-line-drivers-avoided-track-section-where-deadly-wallan-train-derailment-occurred-20200221-p542xw.html

  36. Sanders is increasing consumption pressure on fossil fuels by having three houses. He should be ashamed of himself.

    Surely he knows that more consumption = more demand = more methane?

    This reminds me of the story about the Little Greens boy who was walking along a dyke one day way back in bakunin’s 1990. The little Greens boy noticed that there was a small hole in the dyke. He knew that big leaks develop from little leaks. He knew what the consequences were if the dyke broke: flooding, drownings, the world under water, refugees, biodiversity smash up… the whole damn lot.

    So, the boy left the leak exactly where it was, went home and formed a political party called the Stop-the-Dyke-Leak-Greens Party. The Party cobbled together a leak plugging program and many other righteous programs as well. The Party then spent the next thirty years ensuring that anyone with any sort of impetus at all to fix the leak was kept out of government. This was because the Stop-the-Dyke-Leak-Greens Party intended all along to fix the leak when they formed government themselves or when they could manage a BOP.

    In the interim, the Stop-the-Dyke-Leak-Greens Party members steadfastly refused to do anything about the leak because it was not their personal problem. In fact, they added to the pressure on the leak by pumping in more and more water through their consumption patterns which were, per capita, the second highest in the world for all those 30 years. Fortunately, when the dyke finally burst, there was just enough space left on the remaining dykes for Stop-the-Dyke-Leak-Greens Party members to huddle together and to tell each other how they were right all along.

    Here are the actual results:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=images+of+dyke+bursts+flooding&tbm=isch&source=univ&client=firefox-b-d&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiYzq7_neHnAhUgwzgGHeZdDJ8Q7Al6BAgGEBk&biw=1120&bih=534

  37. ‘“If only we could determine who is in government,” he says. “Bill Shorten sitting on the fence, backed by his ministers, lost the election. If Shorten had said, ‘I will stop the Adani mine’, he’d have lost the same number of seats in Queensland but would have won a whole stack more seats for his leadership in the rest of metropolitan Australia, and he’d be prime minister now.”

    Nor was the return of a Coalition government a worse outcome as far as the Stop Adani movement is concerned.

    “Labor would have put a stamp of approval on this mine, and that would have been harder to fight,” he says. “The failure of vision and social justice and environmental wellbeing on this issue under Labor is monumental, and it’s continuing. While Albo’s (Anthony Albanese) own electorate was shrouded in bushfire smoke so you couldn’t see one corner from the next, he was in Queensland talking up coal. Appalling.”’

    Wow. Talk about all over the place. Shorten should be PM, it’s not Brown’s fault he’s not, but it’s better that Morrison is PM….

  38. the guardian report on albanese is about a speech to be delivered somewhere today. given alp policy is decided not by the leader but at the conference, is albanese in this speech declaring his position outside conference setting & thereby drawing a line in the sand vis a vis fitzgibbon & his ilk on a policy position that will be thrashed out at the conference & only then become policy if albanese prevails ? -a.v.

  39. ‘Barney in Tanjung Bunga says:
    Friday, February 21, 2020 at 9:58 am

    Boerwar @ #73 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 6:54 am

    ‘Vogon Poet says:
    Friday, February 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

    Bandt was on the radio this morning bagging the Labor zero/2050 target.
    Funny how the greens only a few days previous were bagging Labor for not jumping on Zali Staggall’s zero/2050 target.
    Bandt was also upset that Labor won’t give him a 2030 target to get upset over’

    Labor is playing the Greens nicely on this.

    They spent six months after 2019 Fed election bagging Labor’s policies.
    Then they realized that Labor had dropped the policies, the Greens spent months bagging Labor for not having policies.
    Labor gets some policies and the Greens (a) bag Labor for not going far enough and (b) simultaneously bragging that Labor has copied the Greens.

    Soooooooooo predictable. So vicious. So deceitful. So destructive of the alternative government. And sooooooooo useful for the Greens’ particular political beneficiaries: Morrison, Dutton, Canavan and Abetz.

    Also, currently the Greens don’t have a policy as they’re developing their Green New Deal.’

    All the policies that they took to the 2019 Federal Election stand. They are all still in the Australian Greens policy site. They have not changed. One of the implications, to date, is the so-called Greens New Deal is the Greens Old Deal, tarted up.

  40. a.v

    No, if you read my earlier post, you would see he is re committing to a policy already approved by National Conference in 2015.

    This is not uncommon. Beazley, for example, would commit to reviewing all policies except the sale of Telstra, because it was a no brainer that this would have party support.

    As I also said earlier, recommitting to a policy position that I doubt any Labor Conference would argue against still leaves open the possibility of tightening the policy further as the election approaches and the situation facing us is clearer.

    My only carp would be that he should have followed Beazley’s lead and made this commitment immediately after the election.

  41. [2. Jill Meagher died as the Vic. govt. didn’t fund bail services properly;]

    Wasn’t it erroneous decision making by the Parole Board?

  42. ‘zoomster says:
    Friday, February 21, 2020 at 10:03 am

    ‘Mr Bandt said he saw no reason why all these costs should not be covered by the federal government, given that it spends $12.6 billion on private schools and just $8.3 billion on public schools that teach two out of every three students.’’

    Bandt shaking the Magic Money Tree again. How easy is populism when you will never, ever have to deliver!

  43. Barney in Tanjung Bunga @ #78 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 9:58 am

    Boerwar @ #73 Friday, February 21st, 2020 – 6:54 am

    ‘Vogon Poet says:
    Friday, February 21, 2020 at 9:41 am

    Bandt was on the radio this morning bagging the Labor zero/2050 target.
    Funny how the greens only a few days previous were bagging Labor for not jumping on Zali Staggall’s zero/2050 target.
    Bandt was also upset that Labor won’t give him a 2030 target to get upset over’

    Labor is playing the Greens nicely on this.

    They spent six months after 2019 Fed election bagging Labor’s policies.
    Then they realized that Labor had dropped the policies, the Greens spent months bagging Labor for not having policies.
    Labor gets some policies and the Greens (a) bag Labor for not going far enough and (b) simultaneously bragging that Labor has copied the Greens.

    Soooooooooo predictable. So vicious. So deceitful. So destructive of the alternative government. And sooooooooo useful for the Greens’ particular political beneficiaries: Morrison, Dutton, Canavan and Abetz.

    Also, currently the Greens don’t have a policy as they’re developing their Green New Deal.

    Self-Serving Hypocrisy, Thy Name is The Greens.

  44. a.v.

    I think you are under a misapprehension about how policy is “thrashed out” on the floor of the ALP conference. What happens there is just for media consumption. All theatre. The policies to be adopted have already been stitched up behind closed doors. To think otherwise is naive, dare I say.

  45. Bill Shorten’s friend Kimberley Kitching who he wrenched into Parliament at the displeasure of pretty much everyone is repaying her master:

    WHEN Labor’s Joel “Fitzy” Fitzgibbon organised a group of colleagues to talk about how to find a workable solution on coal, some viewed it through the prism of leadership.
    Undoubtedly some of the “Otis” members probably were, because whenever Victorian Senator Kimberley Kitching is present, many believe she is practising the political dark arts for Bill Shorten.

  46. zoomster : thanks for the correction, i missed your earlier post. i was under the impression all policy positions were void after an election loss pending the conference. does this mean fitzgibbon has no choice but to acquiesce ? is this expected to be a shoe in at the conference ? -regards, a.v.

  47. Unlike the ex-politicians from both major parties securing cosy sinecures with powerful vested lobby groups via the revolving door, Bob Brown established a foundation.

    https://www.bobbrown.org.au/

    The Bob Brown Foundation is all about action with a vision to protect Australia’s wild and scenic natural places of ecological and global significance.

    The first place on our radar is the stunning Tarkine in a remote part of North West Tasmania. The Tarkine is a vast wilderness area supporting Australia’s largest tract of cool temperate rainforest, spanning wild windswept beaches, extensive buttongrass plains and pristine wild rivers. It is of great significance to Tasmania’s Aboriginal people and a relict of the ancient continent of Gondwana and related to temperate forests in Patagonia and the South Island of New Zealand.

    Our campaign for The Tarkine is calling for its recognition as a National Park and World Heritage Area and is taking strategic and considered action step by step to reach this goal by 2020. We need your help to do this.

    ————–
    Bob Brown protesters banned from Tasmanian forests due to ‘safety concerns’ over actions at Tarkine

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-21/bob-brown-protesters-banned-from-tasmanian-forests/11986996

    Earlier this month, protesters rallied to a site in the state’s north west after the Tasmanian Government-owned Sustainable Timber Tasmania company said it was “conducting selective harvesting for special species timber in the Boco forest south of Waratah on Permanent Timber Production Zone land”, with 100 trees to be taken.
    :::
    Bob Brown said it was the result of “right-wing extremists dictating to Government and getting Government to take action” against protesters.

    “We are in an end game, with forests around the world and wildlife extinctions at record levels, it is expected that those who want to further exploit it and destroy what is left of the natural world will take extraordinary and unprecedented action,” Dr Brown told ABC Radio Hobart today.

    He accused WorkSafe Tasmania of “doing the Government’s political bidding” — but said protesters would not yield.

    “I am not going to be coerced by a bureaucratic division which is a political fix by Premier [Peter] Gutwein and his government, which is totally against the spirit of Australia’s democratic freedom.”

    “We know that this is coming but we are going to stand up to it because that is the right thing to do. We’ll be seeking legal advice and we’ll be continuing our protest.”

    Dr Brown said the Government’s action was a “move that would do President [Vladimir] Putin’s Moscow proud” and was a “snub” to the High Court finding over the Tasmanian Government’s attempt to introduce anti-protest laws, which were found in 2017 to be unconstitutional because they breached the right to freedom of political communication.

    He said the WorkSafe notice would extend to all protest actions across the state, not just those within forests.

    “This is an outrageous intrusion into the rights of every Tasmanian … and it goes beyond the Tarkine, [this affects] all environmental protests,” he said.
    :::
    “Failure to comply with this notice may incur maximum penalties ranging from $100,000 to $500,000,” the regulator warned.
    :::
    A moratorium on logging in specified areas expires in April this year, with some saying they are fearful of a revival of the so-called “forest wars” of Tasmania’s 1970s and 1980s.

  49. Trump Outraged After Intel Officials Warn That Russia Is Trying To Get Him Reelected

    Intel officials sent Trump into a rage after they warned that Russia is trying to interfere in the 2020 election to get Trump reelected.

    The New York Times reported:

    Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump reelected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.

    The briefing is speculated to be the reason why Trump replaced the DNI with a loyalist who as no intelligence community experience.

    Trump’s presidency has been a dream come true for Putin. Trump abandoned Syria, weakened Europe, attacked Ukraine and has diminished the global power of the United States.

    https://www.politicususa.com/2020/02/20/trump-outraged-after-intel-officials-warn-that-russia-is-trying-to-get-him-reelected.html

  50. a.v.

    I figured you did know. I threw in the “naive” bit as a mirror to the usual suspect, or three who bang on about how naive non-Laborites are and that they don’t do “nuanced”.

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