Election news:
• The Palaszczuk government faces what it may now think a fortuitously timed by-election tomorrow in the southern Brisbane seat of Stretton. The seat was vacated by the late Duncan Pegg, who retained it for Labor by a margin of 14.8% at the state election last October. The intimidating margin has not stopped Liberal National Party taking the field, together with the Greens, Animal Justice and the Informed Medical Options Party. My guide to the by-election can be found here; tune in tomorrow for live results, my page for which awaits the numbers here.
• Jack Morphet of the Sunday Mail reports Nick Xenophon is “seriously considering another tilt at federal politics”, ostensibly because the federal government has failed to protect the rights of Australian producers to market sheepskin boots as ugg boots, the name of which is trademarked by an American company.
• The Herald Sun reports Labor’s Victorian preselection process, which has been commandeered by the party’s national executive after a branch-stacking scandal, has confirmed candidates in four marginal Liberal seats. Gladys Liu will defend her negligible margin in Chisholm against Carina Garland, former assistant secretary at Victorian Trades Hall Council, who was chosen ahead of Monash mayor Rebecca Paterson. In Higgins, the once safe Liberal seat that is developing into a three-cornered contest between Liberal, Labor and the Greens, Katie Allen will face Michelle Ananda-Rajah, consultant physician in general medicine and infectious diseases at Alfred Health. In Casey, where the Liberals will defend a 4.6% margin in the absence of retiring incumbent Tony Smith, Labor has again chosen its candidate from 2019, engineer and small business owner Bill Brindle. In Deakin, which Michael Sukkar holds for the Liberals by 4.7%, the Labor candidate is Matthew Gregg, a teacher.
From the world of academia (Queensland chapter):
• In the Australian Journal of Politics and History, Paul Williams of Griffith University offers Queensland’s role in the 2019 Australian federal election: a case study of regional difference (paywalled, naturally). Williams argues the Coalition’s strong federal performance in Queensland can be understood in terms of its six diverse regions and five elements of its political culture. The former reflect the state’s decentralisation and reliance on primary industries, which show up demographically in low educational attainment, high religious observance and a paucity of migrants. The political culture elements are “a predilection for strong, masculine political leadership; a zealotry for state development; a disproportionate focus on regional and rural districts in budgetary allocations; a pragmatically flexible approach to policy-making” (the Humphrey Appleby-esque note struck by the latter would seem to be deliberate) and “a parochial chauvinism celebrating a Queensland difference, and drawing a moral superiority from it”.
• In the Australian Journal of Political Science, Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland and Tracey Arklay of Griffith University are rethinking voter identification: its rationale and impact. This includes an analysis of Queensland’s one-off experiment with a soft voter identification regime in 2015, which reaches the unsurprising conclusion that migrant and especially indigenous areas had the greatest number of voters needing to lodge provisional votes for want of acceptable identification on the day. For this reason, and despite the measure’s clearly modest impact on the voting returns, the paper concludes “there is no real case for voter ID in Australia”, which it deems “a solution in search of a problem”.
Psephological arcana:
• In keeping with its code of conduct obligations as a member of the recently launched Australian Polling Council, YouGov has published methodology statements for the last four Newspoll surveys. Among other things, these fully detail the questionnaires that were presented to the respondents.
• David Barry has developed a tool for exploring Senate preference flows at the 2019 election using the ballot paper data files, which is immensely nifty if you can work out how to use it.
• A Tasmanian Electoral Commission report into the recent state election, which unusually coupled a statewide lower house election with one of the state’s periodic upper house elections for two of the chamber’s 15 seats, finds over 6% of those who ought to have lodged an upper house vote did not do so because they attended a booth in the wrong part of the electorate, and a further 1% were not issued with a ballot due to staff error. It argues against the contention that this should invalidate the election, since the errors in the former case were committed by the voters rather than the commission, and the latter were too few in number to affect the results.
a r @ #NaN Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:17 am
Exactly as The Monthly pointed out:
mundo @ #NaN Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:22 am
Isn’t Tasmania?
Victoria
I do so want VicGov to succeed in driving the infections down, just to prove to Gladys that she’s not the Best.
I posted a comment yesterday after seeing a ‘news flash’ on Ch10 news. It named the departing and arriving military persons but it was so quick I didn’t catch the name of the new person.
(I’m terrible with remembering names.)
lizzie @ #72 Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:04 am
Labor needs to get a Waste and Corruption bus on the road asap.
Complaining is ok, but a stunt ensures the punters get to know about it.
guytaursays:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 9:18 am
It gave the coal industry $10B in subsidies last year.
__________________
I assume most of this is the petrol and diesel fuel rebates?
May I use “off-piste”, or is that classist? 😉
Lizzie
NSW need to succeed too. Cos just like Victoria had leakage from NSW this time. It will happen again.
Freight needs to move around the states etc.
Hence why I want to understand what the strategy for NSW is going forward.
It matters to all of us
Lizzie
These arguments have been used about language for ages. They are part of our cultural inheritance that lets racism happen thanks to the British Empire.
Just look at the cheese brand that changed it’s name due to the known association in the US.
It’s good to recognise that in the country we imported the original phrase from deems it racist. It saves our citizens from unintentionally being seen as racists when travelling. Especially those that plan on holidaying in the US.
So there is a net benefit to everyone by adopting the change.
Plus as the cheese example shows. It may be slow but it’s inevitable as people naturally don’t want to cause offence.
So it’s not nitpicking. It’s not being a sheep. It’s just being aware change is happening.
Isn’t Tasmania?
Yes.
Also the ACT, less than three hours down the road from the outskirts of plague-infested Greater Sydney. However, because the ACT has an ALP-Green Government it can’t qualify for the award of “Gold” status (from whoever decides – Murdoch?)
guytaur
I didn’t use nitpicking. You’re addressing the wrong person.
citizen @ #104 Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:25 am
I am a retired Librarian and had a quick look this morning. Not finding anything (as yet)
@Paul_Karp tweets
#breaking James Ashby’s bid to get the Commonwealth to waive his debt for costs in his case against Peter Slipper has been REJECTED by the federal court.
#auspol #auslaw
Ashby had argued that the refusal to waive his debt for his (discontinued) 2012 case against Slipper constituted “adverse action”, a breach of the Fair Work Act.
Justice Bromwich has summarily dismissed the claim.
#auspol #auslaw
Just look at all the money wasted on giving companies that dont need it, jobkeeper.
How many quarantine facilities and vaccines could have been procured
Morrison and co are the frickin worst.
Victoria
There’s no doubt that if Gladys doesn’t stem the flow of infections, it will spread again. I wish NSW all the luck in the world (and more effective government).
I would avoid the use of the term “reservation” in the context used a page or so back. It has racial overtones and there are lots of alternative figures of speech to make the same point.
Lizzie
Sorry. I should have said using words such as nitpicking to be clear I was not saying the word was being used by you.
They rejected his application to join?
Lizzie
NSW is nowhere near under control at this point in time. Far from it.
citizen @ #NaN Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:36 am
He’s a Cross Dressing Lesbian!?! 😯
Q :David Speers is still supporting “sorry” on ABC this morning.
There’s always one…..
Honestly, all Conservatives have these days are Culture War and Talking Points.
Stalin’s gulag, Hitler’s concentration camps, and now Xi’s detention centres.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-23/chinas-largest-detention-centre-for-uyghurs/100316712
Something’s gone badly wrong when coercive powers of the state are used to determine who can be admitted to a lesbian dating club.
Have to say that would be well-down on my list of things to worry about.
”
boerwarsays:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 9:13 am
Ven says:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 8:52 am
…
Also, I have Mandarin tree in my house and about 50 mandarins came to fruition this season. But one day about 6 weeks ago when I looked at the tree, about 30 of them were bitten off from tree and bitten into pieces. The neighbour has dogs and they did not bark. So I was not sure whether it was Possum or Cockatoos that did that destruction.’
_____________________________
That sounds like Tree Wombat behaviour to me: climbs trees, eats, roots, and leaves your precious mandarins on the ground.
Tree Wombats are a subspecies of your more common Common Wombat. Scientific monicker:
Vombatis ursinus arboris
”
Thanks BW.
Cat
Yes. The real moral outrage of corruption and attacking the trust the community has in experts is to wage a culture war to distract.
The US gives us a perfect example of it with the Republicans attacking Trans people and Black Lives Matter and Socialists as bogeymen while passing voter suppression laws and spreading antivaxxer messages.
To be fair to Steelydan, the phrase “going off the reservation” is pretty commonly and uncontroversially used by a lot of people who (I’d assume) have no idea of the context, especially outside of the US. I have to confess I only made the connection recently myself.
This is a guy who unwittingly named himself after a giant dildo, after all. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Itsa from previous thread.
Thanks for that but when I had my 1st AZ there wasn’t any attempt to aspairate. Just stick it in and press the plunger. Maybe I was just lucky.
AL
I thought the way Ven raised it was ok.
The point was about the phrase not the person.
The Woke have zero sense of irony. So now we have a proscribed list of phrases. Really? How Orwellian. Let me just say, this has nothing to do with being of the left, nothing at all. There are so many constructive things people could be doing to further progressive causes, yet some choose to scour other people’s language. Frankly, they have far too much time on their hands.
”
C@tmommasays:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 9:24 am
mundo @ #NaN Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:22 am
Steve777 @ #96 Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:18 am
Fourteen new local cases in Victoria today – a move in the right direction.
Is Victoria the new gold standard yet?
Isn’t Tasmania?
”
Yes. 🙂
C@
I hope Ergas was equally outraged by the Melbourne Club’s exclusion of women.
C@tmomma says:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 9:23 am
a r @ #NaN Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:17 am
Steelydan @ #29 Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 8:17 am
Why isn’t the government getting more Pfizer ASAP, and why aren’t you criticizing them for it?
This from BK explains the logical approach…. one that utilises AZ ..
https://johnmenadue.com/graeme-stewart-we-can-help-to-restore-confidence-in-the-az-vaccine/
…. The second goal is to increase confidence in the AZ vaccine by better management of the fear of TTS, the cause of AZ resistance.
Could public discussion of minimising risk from TTS enhance anxiety over this rare side effect and further increase AZ vaccine resistance? For some, that is possible.
But for others, it could be a dealmaker. Carrying a blood test form, with control over when to use it, improves autonomy; confidence in an accelerated pathway through the complex medical system, if the tests are abnormal, compounds the feeling of control. Further, not informing people of the option to co-manage their risk with their GP is difficult to justify at several levels.
As pointed out yesterday by Hazard.. “don’t blame ARAGI… adjust the brief “..ie adjust the risk profile .. say by following the excellent proposal offers by
Graeme Stewart is a Clinical Immunologist at the Westmead Institute for Medical Research and a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney.
Loathe as I am to agree with Steelydan, “going off the reservation” is not racist. There has to be a point where references to indigenous cultures become an acceptable part of the language. That said, we don’t hear the term “going walkabout” much these days and that’s a good thing. That’s because the first refers to someone people behaving differently from the norm. The second implies a loss of concentration and focus due to a tribal history. That expression is 99% aimed at Aboriginals.
Clem attlee
Remember Charlottesville in the US. That happened because the “woke” wanted to remove a statue.
President Biden won the election on this.
I side with the woke people because I find the alternative very scary.
Edit: When you import the US term woke in a derogatory way be aware of who is using it.
A better expression to use is “off with the pixies”.
I’ve not heard any pixies protest it’s use.
Australian icon John Cornell the man behind comedian Paul Hogan’s success and Kerry Packer’s confidante during World Series Cricket — has died at the age of 80 following a 20-year battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He was surrounded by his family, including his wife and television personality Delvene Delany and children, at his home at Byron Bay.
”
Victoriasays:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 9:33 am
Just look at all the money wasted on giving companies that dont need it, jobkeeper.
How many quarantine facilities and vaccines could have been procured
Morrison and co are the frickin worst.
”
And according to 7:30 report ( or was it some other news agency?, Harvey Norman is reportedly refusing to pay although he had profits during that period.
I had the same doctor for both A-Z injections, but her technique varied.
The first time she aimed and fired quickly. No blood, no pain afterwards.
Second time she pinched my arm quite painfully and when I removed the band-aid later it showed blood leakage.
I admit I was a little worried.
I’ve used “going off the reservation” a lot in the past. I simply absorbed it from US media with no understanding of the context and considered it a rather neat turn of phrase. I imagine the same applies to the majority of people who use it.
It’s important to remember that most people arn’t experts in etymology, nor in the history of other nations’ relationships with their indigenous people.
(Likewise, I daresay many who talk about “cabals” are unaware of the antisemitic connotations behind that word)
Oh, hello. Movement at the station.
GT:
Um…
I seem to remember the question of progress on the Melbourne Quarantine facility was raised. From the Age blog;
Federal Finance Minister Simon Birmingham has announced Multiplex has won the contract to build a 1000-bed quarantine centre at Mickleham, on Melbourne’s northern outskirts.
The federal government will pay to build the “centre for national resilience” but the Victorian government will operate it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Building is expected to being in August with the first 500 quarantine spots available by the end of the year.
BW
“Tree Wombats are a subspecies of your more common Common Wombat. Scientific monicker:
Vombatis ursinus arboris”
The tree wombat should not be confused with the closely related dropbear (Thylarctos plummetus). Both these arboreal marsupials have similar provenances and abundances.
AL
It was central to Biden’s campaign. Fighting for the soul of America was a campaign catchphrase Edit: Overlaid with images of Charlottesville
”
guytaursays:
Friday, July 23, 2021 at 9:52 am
AL
I thought the way Ven raised it was ok.
The point was about the phrase not the person.
”
Thanks guytaur. That is exactly what I posted. I did not say Steelydan is racist I said that sentence was racist.
guytaur @ #NaN Friday, July 23rd, 2021 – 9:45 am
And a Republican was asked to define ‘Socialism’ the other day and he basically said it was everything to the Left of the Republican Party. Ie, an artifice to beat the Democrats over the head with.
Guytaur:
It may have been part of his campaign, but I seriously doubt it’s what won him the election.
Oh great. I log in and I see the “woke” debate is brewing up again by the same whiny curmudgeons. Our standards shift – get over it.
Y’all didn’t give a shit when we were censoring anything that got the Christians’ knickers in a twist or anything that got some conservative busybody group upset, not too long ago. Shoe’s on the other foot and suddenly it’s a crisis.
Stop whining about trivial shit. We are in a pandemic, economic inequality is through the roof and I am almost out of wine. Let’s prioritise here.