"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. No price is too high for the privilege of owning yourself." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Punctuality is the Politeness of Princes ...
Tim Slade* Pioneer. Pic by Ebony Slade of Risdon Brook Dam, source of Hobart's Eastern Shore water ...
08.03.17 4:04 am
… The Premier also promised yesterday, in his State-Of-The-State address to Parliament ( TT here, and here: specific MR ), that his government will legislate for the guaranteed public ownership of TasWater, filtering-out the chance that TasWater will be privatised in the future …
NATION: The loss of all credibility ...
Urban Wronksi (aka David Tyler*) Pic: Flickr, Donkey Hotey
07.03.17 3:59 am
If there were an Olympic event for the side-step, handball or back-flip, the Coalition would win all three at once this past week. Mugged by reality, former small business champions, Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull, duck for cover after the Fair Work Commission’s cuts to Sunday penalty rates for Retail, Pharmacy and Hospitality workers. Once righteous penalty cut crusaders, wild-eyed Coalition MPs now stampede in all directions. The PM wears his best shit-eating grin … Abbott loyalist, Eric Abetz shows why he is the former Minister for Workplace Relations by rushing to the rescue with an absurdly unworkable grandfathering proposal for new workers only to be paid less than they are worth …
…
Just as Labor’s Mediscare campaign disrupted Turnbull’s “powerful and positive campaign” causing the Coalition to be returned with a piddling one seat majority – just as Tony Abbott caused the government’s eighth consecutive dip in Newspoll, the causes of adversity are always someone else’s fault. Come what may, penalty cuts, whatever its latest self-inflicted injury, the Coalition always has Labor or someone else to blame. It’s a strategy that shrieks weak leadership …
• Fairfax: Sunday penalty rates: Women to bear the brunt of cuts, experts say
• Psephologist Poll Bludger: is Pauline Hanson becoming electoral poison?
• Fairfax: Turnbull government quietly planning massive new Department of Homeland Security
• Fairfax: CBA’s decision not to interview customers for insurance report ‘beggars belief’: MP
Right of reply, free speech and editorial discretion ...
John Biggs* Pic: Flickr
06.03.17 4:44 am
Recently I read that the Tasmania’s Chamber of Commerce wants the Prime Minister to re-appoint Liberal powerbroker Eric Abetz to Cabinet, as Tasmania now has no representative in Cabinet and Senator Abetz is “very passionate for our state.” (Mercury, 17 January, 2017. I wondered why they would want that, given some recent misjudgements by Eric, but when this plea was backed up by a Mercury Editorial (18 January) I felt a letter coming on. It was this …
FT’s Blatant Disregard for Nature’s Wonders ...
Ted Mead* Pic*
06.03.17 4:37 am
Forestry Tasmania (FT) has repeatedly claimed it is world-leading expert in native forest management, yet conservationists and any credible scientist knows that nothing is further from the truth. Here is the folly of the modern-day Forester’s thinking …
One for the Men: On Prostitution and Thankfulness
Simone Watson* Pic: of Simone Watson
05.03.17 6:05 am
“Oh you’re different though. You’re not one of those feminists who hate men …”
Download your invitation to the International Women’s Day event today at Parliament House ...
The ingrained assumptions of a political class ...
James Boyce* Pic*
05.03.17 6:02 am
Preface to Losing Streak On almost every index, Tasmania is the most disadvantaged state in Australia. The economist Saul Eslake has recently established that Tasmanians are ‘older, sicker, affected more by disability, less likely to have a job, earning less (if employed) and having less by way of real or financial assets than other Australians’. His Tasmania Report found that the island state has ‘greater concentrations of social and economic disadvantage than any other State or Territory’, with gross household incomes about a third less than the national average …
• Pat Caplice, Rein in the Pokies: Parliamentary Committee told to Rein in The Pokies
• Examiner: Tasmanian gaming inquiry hears of impact of pokies on communities
• Launch of Losing Streak (details below …)
• Amanda Lohrey, The Monthly: Tasmania got gamed James Boyce’s ‘Losing Streak’ investigates how one family came to rule the state’s poker-machine industry
Martyn Goddard* Pic: of Michael Ferguson from his website
05.03.17 6:00 am
Sometimes you wonder why they bother. If anyone still seriously believes the piffle on bed numbers from Health Minister Michael Ferguson will make any noticeable difference to the everlasting turmoil in emergency departments, they will soon be disabused by reality …
Burge v Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Suzi Burge*
05.03.17 5:30 am
A brief overview of life as a victim of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) … (A tech glitch appeared to mean this article was not open for comments. It is.)
• Fairfax: Push for bank staff to act in a ‘fair and ethical’ manner: review
• Tony Rigg in Comments: Dear Editor, my wife and I are victims of the Commonwealth Bank …
• Watch on YouTube: ‘Suzi’s eviction’
• MSN: Westpac is being taken to court accused of approving home loans without proper checks
• Fairfax: ASIC foreshadows action against other banks over lending practices
• Fairfax: Banks may rue not facing a royal commission as they are grilled in Senate inquiries
The Senate Register of Interests, 83 Davey Street, Hobart and Senator Abetz ...
John Hawkins* Chudleigh. Pic: of Senator Eric Abetz from his website
05.03.17 5:15 am
I was not amused when Senator Erich Abetz - then Minister for Forests in the Howard Government - sent two men to my front door to threaten me. My offence? I had written on 21 April 2007 to the Prime Minister and the President of the Senate regarding the gift of $50,000 to the Liberal Party by a Tasmanian woodchip company Gunns Ltd …
• Financial Review: Abetz accused of restacking Fair Work ahead of his Cabinet dumping ...
• Fairfax: Eric Abetz objects to rainbow flag being displayed in government buildings
• Advocates defend rainbow flags after ‘bizarre’ Abetz attack
Vale Max Angus, a total inspiration ...
Peter Whish-Wilson* Pic*
05.03.17 5:07 am
Have you ever had a chance meeting that changed your life? …
The barenaked truth about strategy documents
Bruce Ransley* Diagram*
05.03.17 5:00 am
Here are some ‘objectives’ I randomly plucked out of three current government strategic plans. You know the type of document: the one that sits on the department or organisation’s website to demonstrate that they’re on the ball and forward thinking. It’ll be apparent that it’s a strategy document because it will have the words ‘strategic plan’ in the title …
Kim Peart* of Ross. Pic*
05.03.17 4:29 am
In part one of this story I wondered if the proposed Upper House seat of Prosser, with a boundary drawn north of Campbell Town, will lead to the boundary of the Southern Midlands Council being moved north to match that of Prosser …
Save the Fruit Bats = Save the Planet
Ted Mead*
05.03.17 4:15 am
A couple of weeks ago south-eastern Australia was the hottest place on earth with temperatures nearing 50 degrees centigrade. Every successive year all across our nation high-temperature records are broken, yet back in the halls of parliament it’s business as usual with more coal-mines on the drawing board. So what will it take for the Liberals to wake up? …
Giles Hugo. All pictures are © Giles Hugo
03.03.17 3:15 am
Giles Hugo’s second solo exhibition, ‘Far Away Is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere’ will be launched at the Nolan Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Salamanca, Hobart, at 6pm on Friday the 3rd of March. All are welcome …
NATION: Turnbull embraces Netanyahu; lets everything else go to hell
Urban Wronksi (aka David Tyler*) Pic: Palazzo Chigi, Flickr
03.03.17 3:00 am
Sydney Harbour swells in the morning sun, a wash of blue velvet; a perfect backdrop for the azure ties and matching navy Zegna suits of power-dressers Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu and Malcolm Turnbull who step out together in Admiralty House gardens at Kirribilli; wives Sara and Lucy, their minders, handlers and backers in tow like seconds at a duel. Cameramen scramble backwards up tracks risking injury to keep it all in frame. A riot of photo-opportunities beckons a government of endless self-promotion where image and spin utterly upstage vision; where government can seldom move far away from the politics of the campaign stump. But what is Malcolm Turnbull doing inviting one of the most reviled leaders in the world to Australia for a week? …
• Pollbludger (William Bowe), Crikey: Newspoll: 55-45 to Labor A turn for the worse for the Turnbull government in the first Newspoll result for three weeks …
• Fairfax: Penalty rate cuts to hasten “mass casualisation” of Australian workforce: report
• Fairfax: Cut in penalty rates another win for bizonomics
• RT: Australia joined 2003 Iraq War solely to boost ties with Bush – army think-tank • Also in TT Media here
Who judges the judges? The latest on civil liberties ...
Bill Rowlings, Civil Liberties Australia
03.03.17 2:45 am
Download fascinating articles on civil liberties ...
Bob Lubout* Pic: of John Howard, DFAT Flickr
26.02.17 5:00 am
Australia’s foreign policy and its dependence on America has been in existence since the Second World War and was re-confirmed during the Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt’s Prime Ministership. In 1966 Prime Minister Holt, during a visit to the White House, uttered the slogan “all the way with LBJ” which at that time was aimed at confirming Australia’s commitment to America’s war in Vietnam …
• Fairfax: The Secret Iraq Dossier; Inside Australia’s Flawed War ... • Also, in Media here
It’s not fairer, it’s not faster, it’s not cheaper, it’s not simpler ...
Andrew Ricketts, Convenor, The Environment Association*
25.02.17 4:20 am
… We struggle to see the achievement of the Liberal’s promise of “A fairer, faster, cheaper, simpler planning system”. The Liberal’s mantra also said things like: “Small business and Tasmanian families struggle daily with the red and Green tape involved in development applications. A majority Liberal Government will remove this burden” …
• Sophie Underwood: Planning scheme locks in weakened protections and locks out the public
Kim Peart* of Ross. Pic*
24.02.17 4:10 am
… An historical error may be corrected, if the seat of Prosser is created, and the northern boundary of the Southern Midlands comes to match that of Prosser. Does the central midlands have more in common with the Southern Midlands, than the Northern Midlands and satellite towns of Launceston? …
The Gift That Keeps On Giving ...
Tim Slade* Pioneer. Pic: Tim Slade
24.02.17 3:15 am
If Peter Gutwein’s meeting today with David Downie and the 29 councils goes as it is planned, Tasmanians will need to hold onto their cups through the media storm and hope for the best. With no plans to fund TasWater themselves, Peter Gutwein’s government is imitating a force of nature this week. This may in part be because Mr Gutwein’s Federal counterparts have said no to TasWater’s plea for more funding …
Drinking water is a human right
Richard Griggs* Pic: by Ebony Slade of Risdon Brook Dam, source of Hobart's Eastern Shore drinking water
22.02.17 3:22 am
This coming Friday 24th February, the Treasurer and local councils will sit down to discus drinking water. They should have, at the top of the very top of their agenda, a discussion of the options available to them to quickly cut the number of water alerts in our state. So far, the lead up to the meeting has been more about politics than policy, but there is still time for all participants to focus on the most important issue here. Tasmania desperately needs real outcomes from Friday’s meeting. We need more than the megaphone diplomacy that seems to be leading up to the meeting …
NATION: The loss of all credibility ...
• Labor to tackle our major, long-term water and sewerage challenges
• Labor to make Tasmania a national leader on gender equality
• Liberals Break Right to Information Law
• Minister dodges child protection questions
• King Island’s water project underway ...
• Shameful attack on Key Assets
• It is International Women’s Day today!
• ‘This selectively written piece ...’
• New mental health services for young Tasmanians
• Tasmania needs to join Victoria in Permanently Banning Fracking
• WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged CIA Hacking ...
• First Dog: First Dog on the Moon goes to south-west Tasmania (and totally freaks out)
• Baskerville: New track races to finish line
• Antarctic Exploration with TAG at TMAG ...
• Chloe Shorten to present ALP sisterhood 2017 Young Woman’s Award
• The CSIRO’s ‘miracle diet’ is about a lot more than losing weight
• The Australia Institute sets up shop in Tasmania
• African Food Crisis ...
• Fixing Tasmania’s water and sewerage infrastructure
• Premier’s Address 2017 – Building Tasmania’s Future
• Hodgman’s water and sewerage claims don’t add up
Cascade Female Factory launches design competition for a new History and Interpretation Centre
Tasmanian author shortlisted for the 2017 $50,000 Stella Prize
Hikers’ mate: Three Capes Gear & Gourmet
Hobart Bookshop: Elizabeth Goodsir’s new poetry collection
Tim Thorne at #9 states “Any government which attempted to go against (the interests of global capital) and act in…
