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So are they happy yet?
Take someone without hope of employment in an area of dying employment, indeed without hope. They are already suicidal. Without mental health services provided to them that could guide them through.
Tell them the gov doesn't give a fuck about them and is going to take away their only means of survival for the next 6 months. Take any hope they have and crush it.
For some just the intention of what the gov was planning to do was enough to drive them over the edge. Their capacity overwhelmed.
This gov has blood on it's hands.
Proposed federal welfare changes had prompted a spike in suicides in Tasmania, according the state's Mental Health Council, while fears existed that homelessness would also rise.
The proposed changes would force jobseekers to apply for 40 jobs a month and would prevent unemployed people aged under 30 from accessing benefits for six months.
Tasmania already had the highest suicide rate in Australia after the Northern Territory.
The council's Darren Carr said welfare changes, along with declines in the mining and forestry industries, was behind the rise in the number of suicides.
"We also know that threatened loss of income does lead to suicide and we understand there has been a spike in suicides following announcements of welfare cutbacks in the federal budget," he said. more
WTF? - $470fortnight ($235week)? Rolling in it? *sheesh*
So Abbott's discovered that a war footing is good for his abysmal polling, so it seems he's going about declaring war on all and sundry. Only problem with that is that he hasn't got a fuckin brain in his body. He's a bureaucrat, a career politician. He doesn't know the first thing about diplomacy or negotiation. He's liable to put his foot in it again, this time involving Australian lives being sent into war zones.
This from a James Brown, who unlike Abbott has actually served in the military and knows what he's fuckin talking about. He raises serious concerns over Abbott's current war footing and seeming reckless abandon in promising military support.
I think we're running that risk and I hope that it's been well thought through by the Prime Minister and his national security team.
This is a country, Ukraine, that is on or some would say is actually at war with Russia already.
Sending military forces to a country that is at war means you are becoming a party to that conflict whether you're fighting or not, I think, in the eyes of Russia.
We're also sending military advisors to a country that we didn't have an embassy in a month ago, so it was unimportant to Australia's national interest that we didn't even have diplomatic representation there.
It's unclear what our national interest is now. Fundamentally we want to make sure that it's in our interests and in NATO's interest.
We need to be sure that if we're contributing military advisors to a NATO-led conflict that they would be willing to do the same here in our region, and it's not clear yet that we would see a significant NATO commitment in our part of the world if Australia got into a conflict. more
Well at least we have a study now that proves what everyone has been saying; that in particular the US is ruled by the elite and not the majority of it's own citizens.
We see the same thing happening here in Australia, increasingly with corporate interests being put ahead of the wishes of the population (fracking anyone?). We also have the NSW ICAC that so far is now at 11 ministers who've bitten the dust over the corruption inquiry into property investments and funds being funneled from elsewhere into party coffers. We see vulnerable Housing tenants at Millers Point in Sydney being booted out, the first property selling recently for $2.5 million. We see the Abbott gov attacking Medicare and welfare which the poor and vulnerable rely on for survival, whilst Gina and Palmer get rid of the mining tax. On and on, corporate interests are taking the front seat. That can only be bad for our democracy.
After sifting through nearly 1,800 US policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile) and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the United States is dominated by its economic elite.
The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special interests and lobbying organisations: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it." more
And this from the report itself:
Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of
majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually
have little influence over the
policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features
central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association,
and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated
by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s
claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened. PDF
Do it here. Tell Australia's "Four Pillars" banks not to fund the Adani company, which wants to dredge the reef and build the biggest coal port in the southern hemisphere, right smack bang through the Great Barrier Reef. The destruction, to an already stressed ecosystem due to global warming, will be huge.
Sign this petition to show your bank you won't stand for your money being used to damage the Reef
ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and NAB: The expansion of the Abbot Point coal port and the associated mines pose an unacceptable threat to the Great Barrier Reef. Rule out financing or arranging finance for these destructive projects. Sign here
That whole affair had something very rotten about it. This Sunday 60 Minutes is showing a report on Peter Slipper with some tell all interview from James Ashby. Expectations are this will rock the Abbott gov. We shall see.....
OK, this is more than just some nut behind a screen. This is surely a serious matter, whether Abbott meets the criteria for even being in parliament let alone PM. The story is starting to sound like something out of James Bond:
The blogger at the centre of the controversy is a Tony Magrathea. Who innocently simply asked about the PM's citizenship and the situation has escalated to this:
Magrathea posted a note to his Federal MP Mal Brough’s Facebook page, pointing out that any doubt over the Prime Minister’s legal right to hold office should be settled before the upcoming G20 Summit.
Brough blocked him.
He posted the same thing to the Attorney-General Senator George Brandis. Nothing.
He posted to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. No reply.
He wrote to the Federal Police regarding a possible crime against the Commonwealth. Nil.
He wrote to Governor General Peter Cosgrove. Nada.
On 1 August, Magrathea’s email account was hacked and all his emails were deleted. What started as an innocent enquiry has begun to morph into something quite serious — and perhaps sinister. Certainly suspicious.
Abbott can clear the whole thing up in the blink of an eye, of course — just show us the RN and it will all be over.
But he and his camp followers don’t seem to want to do that — or allow others to release this information. We can only wonder why.
If the British Home Office come back to Magrathea and say they are unable to find the RN, things may move up a notch. more
Political commentator Michelle Grattan gives her critique of the Abbott gov's first year. Well what other way could it be described other than a catastrophe?
The article they're referring to in the video is here.
Thanks to the mobilisation of the Australian unions, the senate cross benchers have been inundated with 17,000 emails against the proposed industrial relations legislation put up by the Abbott gov. There were so many emails in fact, that the whole thing's been put off for two weeks. This will of course give much more time for the unions to raise an almighty ruckus about this latest attack on workers.
This from a mass email of Ged Kearney and Dave Oliver:
Since last Friday 17,000 of you emailed cross bench senators asking them to vote NO to the government’s Fair Work amendments. That is an amazing effort. Thanks so much.
We are definitely being heard.
The good news is that while Tony Abbott’s new work laws were on the agenda for the Senate this week because of your efforts they did not end up being debated. But we know that Abbott will push them onto the senate in the next sitting of parliament. This means that we have another two weeks to raise the volume about how these changes are bad for ordinary working Australians.
The not so good news is that the Liberals and big business are starting to ramp the pressure up. Just this afternoon Liberal backbencher Alex Hawke called for weekend rates to be scrapped. Shortly afterwards the Business Council of Australia and Australian Industry Group, representing Australia's biggest corporations, called for Abbott’s changes to be passed.
Over the next two weeks we are going to have one hell of a fight on our hands, but we are certainly going to give it our all.
We’ll be in touch very soon with the next steps so keep checking your inbox and following Australian Unions on Twitter and Facebook.
In the mean time we just wanted to say thanks. Our movement is powerful because we are fuelled by the passion of people like you.
That’s a power that Tony Abbott will never have.
In union --
Ged Kearney, Dave Oliver and the Australian Unions team
(BTW, look over there, a civil war on the other side of the world).
It's clear. Australians don't want this gov's agenda. From fucking over the poor to fucking over the workers, Australians once again find themselves on the defensive against a Lieberal gov that wants to radically change the sort of country Australia is; one that cares about and wants to help the unfortunate, and one where you can get a fair wage that you can live off. Once again, a Lieberal gov is attacking those things that ordinary Australians hold dear. I'd have to say though that this latest Abbott attack is fuckin out there man. Really wacked out. Indefensibly ignorant.
I understand completely this article from a Shaun Crow of the ANU, who brings up these issues. Naming Hewson, Howard, and Hockey now all in the same boat. Hewson lost the un-losable election against Keating, Howard lost his gov and his seat, over trying to change Australia's economic system to favour the rich. Australians have been rejecting bullshit like the Abbott gov's present attacks on our being egalitarian for decades now.
These nitwits just seem to keep trying and trying even when we say no at the polls over and over. We don't want that, they don't get that. We've never wanted that, they don't get that. The Lieberals are no longer "conservatives", they're radical ideologues who will clobber the poor and workers with said ideology. Apparently this ideology agrees that catholic christians should punish the poor and reward the rich. Like I said, fuckin out there man......
The political left is waking up to the fact that it might be now on the side of tradition. You can hear it in the language of its leaders.
Ged Kearney, head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, described the budget as:
"… nothing short of a savage assault on the Australian way of life and famous egalitarianism."
Opposition leader Bill Shorten has variously accused the budget of being “unfair” and “radical”.
It’s hard to reconcile the term “conservative” with these attempts to overturn and remodel traditional institutions. But when it comes to economic policy, preservation has never really been the goal.
As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it back in 1981:
"Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul." more
This has got to be up there with SSJoe's "poor people don't own cars" comment. Personally I think it's worse as he's obviously thought it out into a speech. And thus he describes the oldest surviving race on earth after a minimum of 30,000 years in Australia, as apparently not defining enough to get a mention in "the defining moment of this continent".
Here's some more about the white settlement of Australia. I'd hardly say it was a defining moment of our history, unless "defining" meant convicts being brutalised by the British. I've been to that Hyde Park Barracks too in the middle of Sydney, an historic building where convicts were held and sent out to work.
The First Fleet arrived with bags of seeds for sowing and growing vegetables, flowers, farm implements, sheep, cattle, horses, pigs for breeding and slaughter to feed the few, and many other goodies that befit a form of nobility, to begin with, and included dogs, cats and plenty of rats. Plus a whole lot of people who were rejects by the British establishment of the time, because they’d run out of room in their own jails.
Convicts were no longer accepted by the United States. Among the convicts who were in fact mainly British, there were people of other nationalities – including African, American and French on board. These nationalities were sent here, most likely because of pre-history with the British, and were no doubt eagerly chucked aboard the ships for deportment to the Antipodes. African? Perhaps because they were black. American? Because they had routed the British in the War of Independence proclaiming their independence in July 1776. French? Probably because of all the previous wars in history . . . the English didn’t like ‘em much.
It was tough getting started. The farm implements were not up to scratch – too lightweight for the heavy heat hardened soil of Australia.
But what a bonus it all was. o be able to send men, women and children convicts to the furthest and remotest place on earth (at the time) to slave – yes, slave – on farms in order to earn a pardon of one degree or another. There were 3 tiers to pardons, and each had to be worked through diligently and with exemplary behaviour. The convicts used on farms and (later) buildings of a grander scale – rather similar to the US South, were ‘fed and watered’ by their colonial masters. They worked from morning to night, without pay. They were in fact used as slaves. Finally, if good enough, they were granted free pardon to make of their lives what they could. Many succeeded, many failed and fell back into lives of crime, partly to survive, and partly to rail against their oppressors. more
How humiliating. All that bluster, all that insistence that it had to be done, only to have the whole thing cark it in the senate.
The bill has been defeated and the gov hasn't even said if it's going to reintroduce it sometime in the future.
A controversial Bill that would have left the poorest unemployed Australians without welfare for eight weeks has been voted down by the Senate, throwing its future into doubt.
In a victory for welfare advocates, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Stronger Penalties for Serious Failures) Bill 2014 today failed to pass the Parliament’s upper house, defeated by 35 votes to 29.
The legislation, championed by the Coalition, would have punished job seekers who refused “suitable” work or missed three participation requirements over a six-month period.
While sanctions for welfare recipients who refuse work already exist, the new laws would have removed ‘waivers’ introduced by Labor in 2009, which allow people to have payments reinstated if they take steps to rectify their errors, for example by attending counselling and job placement meetings they had previously missed.
The legislation also sight to destroy a ‘financial hardship’ waiver, meaning those with less than $2,500 of liquid assets would also have welfare payments suspended for the eight-week period. more
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