Good political fun with out-of-touch ministers. Traditional, except for one thing: the hopeless targets of this stuff are usually relics of a bygone age. Joe Hockey is 49, Christopher Pyne 47. They were toddlers in 1969 – the year of Woodstock and equal pay for women. They are products of a post-’60s Western world, bound within it, but their mindset comes from somewhere else. It’s as if they’ve had a Philip K. Dick-style mind implant from an earlier era.
Perhaps the whole frontbench got a bulk deal on such, for what can explain this government’s unique inability to understand the real-life impacts of many of the measures it is proposing? The Howard government had the basic nous to refrain from antagonising low-income people who voted for them on culture-war grounds. There seems to be none of that on display in the Abbott government. Indeed it is worse. They seem to have no conception of the life-world of those on low incomes, the everyday structure and texture of existence for those in precarious or poor situations.
What else can explain Joe Hockey’s remark that the $7 Medicare co-payment is no more than a “couple of beers”? Quite aside from the inherent anachronism – it’s barely one beer in a pub – it suggests Hockey is unaware that many people on benefits have to budget with the expectation that they will spend the last two to three days of a fortnight with no ready cash at hand. How else to explain the six-months-on/six-months-off dole scheme for the under-25s, which would make it impossible for a dole recipient to, among other things, rent a flat with a standard 12-month lease. How are they then supposed to move to areas of lower unemployment to seek work, as they have been urged to do? The scheme is meticulously designed to punish initiative and reward stasis. It is anti-brilliant. You don’t have to come from a low-income background to understand these demands. You only need to buy a pie and a Coke at a convenience store – close to $10 – to realise that it constitutes about 10 per cent of a week’s discretionary income on benefits, or the part-time wage of a worker who needs a full-time job.
New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world panty-waist’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his seventy dollar TV.Is it such a stretch for Steyn to imagine that police in a place where (as he thinks is fantastic) nearly every household has a gun (or on the street, anyone might be carrying a concealed gun) might be more inclined to shoot first in many situations?
and this:What Telcos/ISPs are doing?
There has been a proliferation of ISPs in Australia in recent years – there are now more than 200.
There are variations between each company on what data they store and for how long. Industry retention patterns vary from "months" to "years".
There has been a trend towards telcos/ISPs holding metadata for shorter periods of time.
Some telcos already hold data for seven to nine years, government officials say. Those companies would not be affected if the Government proposes a mandatory two-year retention of metadata.
So, privacy freaks, is this another case of you blithely living with something that hasn't had an effect on your life for like, 10 years or so, but now that the government wants to regulate it a tiny bit more it's full blown panic mode?What would be different for telcos/ISP with mandatory retention of metadata?
Nothing, if they are already holding it for more than two years.
Some telcos/ISPs who hold for shorter periods would be affected if the Government seeks to "standardise" a two-year retention period.
In old age, Bacall raged against what she saw as the mediocrity of contemporary Hollywood, as represented by everything from the career of Tom Cruise to the Twilight movies that her granddaughter dragged her to see. “She said it was the greatest vampire film ever made,” Bacall recalled. “After the film was over, I wanted to smack her across the head with my shoe.”The Good: The Brisbane Exhibition visit this year calls for my (almost annual) duck in a cage photo:
Increasingly worried about the spread of Islamist militant extremism reaching its own doorstep, Saudi Arabia donated $100 million to a fledgling United Nations counterterrorism agency on Wednesday and expressed hope that such an infusion — 10 times what the Saudis gave to help create the agency three years ago — would strengthen its abilities and set an example for other donor countries.
The money was the second big contribution by Saudi Arabia to the United Nations in the past few months, largely in response to crises caused by the ascent of radical Sunni Islamist militancy in the Middle East. On July 1, Saudi Arabia provided $500 million to United Nations humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of people have been uprooted by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a marauding force that many counterterrorism experts now regard as a leading threat.
With its vast trove of petroleum wealth, Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy has also provided grants and loans worth more than $1 billion to help strengthen Lebanon’s armed forces, which have recently battled ISIS fighters on the Syria-Lebanon border. The Saudis are also huge financial underwriters of Egypt’s new anti-Islamist government and have been somewhat silent about Israel’s war against Islamist militants in Gaza.
I don’t really want to add any detail about what has happened down here (it’s nowt exciting honest!) but would just like to reiterate that we are all healthy, in good spirits and are busy setting about getting, and keeping the station in as good an order as possible. No-one here on station is responsible for the technical issues we are having and we are all working extremely hard.He has good photos at his blog too:
Tea making facilities are still going strong.
On a happier note, despite the difficulties I really am still loving the place. Having made mention of how Antarctica can take things to another level just when you think you have seen something truly beautiful, well, I’ll have to say it once again. To prove that every cloud has a silver lining Halley, during the time without any power, was the clearest I have ever seen. This, coinciding with the loss of the small amount of light pollution we have, made the night-sky of the power-down the most beautiful I have ever seen – or probably ever will. the whole galaxy in its majesty, brighter than ever – going outside was almost a religious experience!
In an advertisement in today’s The Australian Financial Review, the Department of Health calls for companies to express interest inproviding claims and payment services for the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), the second-biggestresponsibility of the Department of Human Services after welfare payments.
It follows the allocation of $500,000 in this year’s budget, largely unnoticed, for market testing.
“We’re determined to put into place a 21st-century payment system that will be more efficient for patients and doctors,” Health Minister Peter Dutton said. “It will reduce red tape for doctors and streamline their administrative processes and, we believe, deliver a saving to the
taxpayer.”
The contract is likely to be highly complicated. The new providerwould have to be capable of processing a collective $29 billion of claims from 600 million transactions a year conducted for the Department of Health, and nearly $2.5 billion in claims from 33 million transactions for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.The suggestion seems to be that the Post Office might take it over (!). So all of those franchised post offices will need to find new, larger premises and scores of extra staff, taught about health and veteran's benefits processing?
The size of the job and requirement for a physical shopfront presence means few existing Australian companies would be capable of carrying out the task. But it could provide an extremely lucrative and stable revenue stream for successful candidates.
In its recommendation, the audit commission run by businessman Tony Shepherd warned that outsourcing national payments would be a “substantial and potentially high-risk undertaking” requiring careful consideration.I imagine this will be a rather unpopular move, if it proceeds.
Bolt himself seemed to grasp at least in part that to have him at the centre of a battle for “freedom” was always fatal.
“To associate it with me meant so many people of the left thought that any law that could be used against me must be pretty good, and I think that’s poisoned the debate,” he told radio station 2GB.
Yes Andrew, it did poison the debate. But the “left” didn’t make it all about you. You did, and so did the government.
But study co-author Carl Lamborg, a marine geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, says that the deep water's ability to sequester mercury may soon be exhausted. Humans are on track to emit as much mercury in the next 50 years as they did in the last 150 years, he notes.
“You're starting to overwhelm the ability of deep water formation to hide some of that mercury from us, with the net result that more and more of our emissions will be found in progressively shallower water,” Lamborg adds. That increases the odds that mercury levels in key food species will rise, increasing humans' exposure.
I guess I expected a smoother, icier looking surface for a comet, but it looks very cool nonetheless.
ICAC hears that Liberal party boss Brian Loughnane knew of developer donations going through federal channels
"what constitutes a “fair” distribution of national income ultimately comesThe essay is in effect a really valuable look at the poisonous "lifters and leaners/moochers and looters" philosophy that the Coalition - including Hockey - has been infected with from too much contact with the American small government/libertarian wing of the Republicans (and their Australian counterparts in the IPA.)
down to social value judgements."
