By Jo Nova
The problem with aiming to be a less-bad version of Labor is that it’s still bad
The Liberals* dropped the wildly ambitious fantasy of 2030 renewable targets of the Labor Party, but they were still aiming for the slow suicide of Net Zero by 2050. It probably seemed like a sensible compromise, but half crazy is still crazy. We’re still talking about plans for Global Weather Control.
It meant the Liberals have to sell something they don’t believe in, and they can’t mock the stupid core of a Labor policy if it’s their own. So they come across as inauthentic, they don’t have any fun, and have to throw away all their best lines. The Liberals could hardly say Labor’s Net Zero targets were like pagan witchcraft when their own policy was late-pagan-weather-control.
Effectively, both sides of the Uniparty want to turn our electricity network into a global air-conditioner. I wish I could say they were just debating whether solar panels will cool the world better than nuclear plants, but the debate was not that advanced. No one was discussing the degrees-shifted-per-trillion dollars, because all the answers are insane.
So here we are living in the furthest corner of the Earth with the biggest distances and the lowest population density on the planet apart from Antarctica — and at times we’re the world’s largest coal and largest LNG exporter, and we, WE, of all people, want to lead the war on fossil fuels? Do we need more barbed wire in our hair shirt?
Where was the free-market, free-speech small-government party?
Where was the Liberal Party? No one asked if the government should be in charge of the weather? No one questioned whether an unaccountable, unelected global cartel run by President Xi should be in charge of it either. Aren’t we getting a bit ahead of ourselves? Is it the governments fault if the surf’s bad, or the frosts are late?
What if we fix the weather in NSW, but it mucks things up in Queensland? That’s going to need a whole new regulatory agency, a new weather justice assessor and climate courts. This whole escapade is the ultimate Big Government wet dream and the Liberals are just cheering it on.
And where is the Liberal Party when we need a free market in science? Let’s hear from both sides. (Let’s fund both sides too — no picking winners in scientific research). The Left just say “trust us” there’s a consensus and you’re a denier.
They bought the experts, sacked the heretics and hoped we wouldn’t audit them, so we didn’t?
There is no free speech in climate science. Just ask Peter Ridd. The Liberals were in government for all of that time, but they kept funding the universities that silenced whistleblowers. Then they wonder why they get stuck in stupid science traps and embarrassed in election debates. There are no working professors of science in Australia that can speak up to advise or defend them. No one paid to audit the IPCC. No one paid to find out the solar role in our climate.
The Left own The Science TM because the Right gave it away.
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*For foreign readers, Liberals are the Australian major conservative party
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
I wish commentators would desist from using the term ” Corners of the globe “, simply because a globe does not have corners .
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Jo, over the years you have run some good headlines, but this one takes the prize! Right up there with a perfectly good civilisation going to waste
So good that I risk encountering my hardware problem to comment. I don’t know how to fix it, but want to get a new computer anyway which small grandsons are not allowed to use.
About the headline. Should we commission you to write a TV series on the Pauline Hanson saga? I have written to the lady begging her to not die in this job, because Australia needs her to be here in the Post Pauline Period.
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>a globe does not have corners
The shape, “a globe”, has no corners, but this globe we inhabit has countless corners. In fact, just around the corner from me there is a lovely local cafe which is diagonally across the intersection on the apposite corner.
The saying, ‘all corners of the globe’ I understood as humorously referring to the way we represent our globe on a flat 2D map and the way we orient ourselves in reference to the 4 cardinal directions and the irony of representing our virtually spherical world as 2D 4-cornered plane to simplify conceptual difficulties.
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Cities: Four Corners, FL, Four Corners, CA, and Four Corners, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Then there is the Four Corners Region of the U. S. southwest.
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I am very happy with term ‘four corners of the globe’. It is just a manner of speaking that has been used for years. Most people would know what is meant.
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I wish commentators would desist from using the term ” Corners of the globe “, simply because a globe does not have corners .
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It was interesting to note that some large Liberal Party donors, when commenting in The Australian this morning, if they mentioned renewables, they commented that the Liberal Party should have gone harder on their opposition to more renewables. However, from the many comments about the demise of the Liberal Party, it’s also clear that many commentators want more of the “Labor-lite” approach. Not sure where this is all going to end up.
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Well, it certainly won’t end up well.
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The Party will split. Probably the WETS will remain and the DRIES will move elsewhere.
Whether a coherent party can be ready for the next election.
Meanwhile LABOR will be in trouble because “the Money has run out” of The Australian economy. They have spent until the national debt is over one trillion dollars (without counting State debts?) compared with the USA having 33 trillion, but the USA is cutting government expenditure and boosting their economy.
Labor won’t change and will keep spending money, along with doing their best to destroy the local economy by Regulations that will cause many smaller businesses out of business, and larger ones overseas (or sold off).
This may well be the LAST of the Labor Party, certainly unlikely to be reelected for quite some years. Albo will quit before the next election. There will be much infighting (possibly due to an influx of Greenies who want power).
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“Albo will quit before the next election.“. I suspect that you are correct. A firm pattern has established in recent years, where far-left politicians suddenly quit before the sh*t hits the fan, ie, when they can see that the public have woken up to the fact that they have run out of other people’s money. Rats that left the ships that they themselves sank include Justin Trudeau in Canada, Dan Andrews in Victoria, and before them Bob Carr and his team of cronies in NSW, and a few others that I could remember if I tried but I prefer to forget them.
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Don’t forget Ardern across the Tasman.
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Graeme, wanting less consumption of non-renewable fuels in our power grid is reasonable. The unreasonable step is to instigate steps that will have significant cost and lifestyle impacts on the very people that the grid is meant to support. It’s even more unreasonable to be attempting to lead in this endeavour, destroying your manufacturing sector, shipping it to a foreign land and then ignoring all of the emissions of that country yet still using the products they produce.
I see no solution path in any nett zero plan offered to date. I see no solution that provides for manufacturing on home soil. If you can’t do it here under the applied rules, then how can you do it elsewhere and keep a straight face. How can a government insist that we cut ourselves off from industry?
Whichever party commits to a nett zero, if they can’t answer how manufacturing can not only exist but also grow under the rules applied, then the rules are wrong.
Politicians quoting fantasy, fairy dust and unicorn farts should be excluded from the decision tree.
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To kill off net zero just simply cut the subsidies off & the hoax will die a quick natural death when confronted with market driven competition. Also known as the much vaunted “ level playing field “. We all know that market driven solutions will always out perform the drudge of government sluggishness.
Why must consumer pay for the foreign owned companies to be financed as well as pay for overpriced energy which delivers profits taken out of the country.
It’s enough to start questioning the driving force behind it all. Just wondering if Elon Musk would give some advice on researching the financing and naming ALL THE BENIFICIARIES
involved. One things for sure it isn’t the Australian people or the environment!
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The Liberals haven’t believed in that for many decades.
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– not sure that’s true any more Jo. Maybe at a pinch you could call them Slightly Centre Right, but conservative is probably too much. But I do love the re- packaging of the Andrew Bolt question. You know, the one about” how much cooler will the earth be after you’ve spent all that climate change money?” Degrees-shifted-per-trillion dollars is rather good.
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Conservative is a misnomer at several levels!
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I suspect Australia will have to deteriorate a lot more before a very large majority wake up that Australians cannot “control” the earths climate by exporting our energy resources, coal,gas and nuclear; while achieving Net Zero by 2050. Meanwhile the cost of everything in Australia will continue to quickly escalate, in particular energy and food prices along with everything that needs to be transported and manufactured with energy.
I’m looking forward to more energy rebates however funded by the government funded from income provided by our coal, gas and uranium exports. It all makes sense. (Sarc)
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We are or will be bankrupted by Labor spending. Deterioration will be rapid and savage
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Just bought two tubs of butter in Woolies this morning. $9.50 each! I can remember when not so long ago they were just over $4. I’m not blaming the farmers or the processors or Woolies, but the cost of power and labour.
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In retrospect we can see that the election was lost through two significant factors among many others including sabotage and incompetence.
One was the time when Dutton challenged Turnbull and the Turnbull forces swung behind Morrison who took the party to Paris and net zero.
Dutton was denied the time to establish a position on energy that was not hostage to the impossible nightmare of net zero by wind and solar.
Consequently the party was forced into the desperate attempt to use the distant prospect of nuclear power to distract attention from the fact that our energy policy is equally stupid and destructive as the Labor/Green alternative.
Coal can generate cheap and reliable power to deliver real reduction in power prices which could save some sticks of our industrial furniture that is still left after the scandalously undocumented deindustrialisation that has occurred.
A rational energy policy could have been sold to the public over a period of years to capture voters who were open to persuasion.
That brings us to the second point of failure, that was the delusional and suicidal decision to target teal seats instead of going to the outer suburbs to recruit voters in labour seats with thin margins who voted NO to the Racist Voice.
They heard the call of common sense when the coalition turned against the yes vote in one of the pitifully few occasions since Tony Abbott when the party adopted a credible line on a controversial issue. They were low hanging fruit waiting to be harvested by a resolute coalition with spokesmn prepared to stand up and calmly and persistently make the case in the face of hostile interviewers and furious attacks from all the usual suspects.
The only good news out of this debacle is that we can now talk openly about a rational energy project based on coal and getting wind and solar off the grid.
That was forbidden during the election campaign and we had to make fools of ourselves by promoting the same energy policy as Labour and the Greens.
The Energy Realists of Australia could only meet to talk about sensible policies in secret places, only known to trusted people. Now we can be loud and proud once more, defying the coalition apparatchiks who told us to hush our mouths or the election would be lost.
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Doesn’t bother me that the Libs and Nats got their R’sss kicked. They put Pauline Hanson in jail when she was perceived as being a threat. They signed up with the Labor party to implement a bill that kept Clive Palmer in his box. The Nats should have walked away from the coalition 20 years ago. The Libs have become Labor Lite as many have mentioned and the Nats’ only purpose was to shore up the numbers to make a government.
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Dutton’s demise was organised and deliberate! The Turnbullites have succeeded in taking-out the trifecta (Abbott/Morrison and Dutton that effectively “stopped the Boats” with Operation Sovereign Borders but inadvertently allowed Turnbull to take control of The Liberal Party!
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The big question for the fake conservative Liberals is if they are now going to shift even further to the Left or are they going to become conservative?
Frankly, I don’t think they’re fixable.
I think the existing small freedom parties have to unite into a conservative force and make a new genuinely conservative party.
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No new team will be allowed to form, not unless they buy a media franchise first. Anyone who sticks their heads up on the real issues will be slandered, and denigrated until they play the game dictated by the media.
We won’t have a sensible government until someone can tell the media that they aren’t required.
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That’s almost the case now isn’t it with Jo’s site (this one) and free speech on X and even the censored speech on Farcebook and YouTube (which are less censored now after TRUMP threatened Goolag and Farcebook with removal of their Section 230 protections if they didn’t stop censoring conservatives).
To what extent the free flow of information helps Joe and Joanne Sixpack make their decisions, however, I’m not sure.
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This morning the “media” are hard at it, blaming Trump for the LNP poor election results. I first noted it during the election campaign when nearly all Labor talking heads took the opportunity to compare Peter Dutton to Donald Trump. I thought it such a joke, but the media swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then post election day. First I heard Natalie Barr (Ch7 Sunrise host) mention it on Saturday night. Then since, other commentators. Yesterday Andrew Bolt on SKY continued with this BS, accompanied by Greg Sheridan from the Australian. To say that Peter Dutton and LNP were Trumplike during their woeful campaign is an absolute joke. They were nothing like it, and in fact, shied away from any connection. Remember Jacinta Price saying Make Australia Great Again? Peter Dutton couldn’t wait to contradict her. The same thing happened in Canada with the smearing and mythical association of their “conservatives” with Trump. It’s just further proof that less people believe MSM any more.
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So instead of wishing for the fake conservatives to become genuine again(if they ever were) and wanting them to call out the climate alarmist rubbish, why not support the actual conservative parties that do call it out, like One Nation and People First partys ?
Senators Malcolm Roberts (O.N) & Gerard Rennick (P.F) have been throwing the hard questions at bureaucrats and Climate advocates for a long time in Senate Estimates where all we were in replies are um, are and “we’ll take that on notice”. which really translates as- I have no intention of answering the question and this is my out.
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Correction:
For foreign readers – “The Liberals” are anything but a Conservative Party…they’re just another flavour of Woke (but they want you to believe they’re not quite as Woke as the others).
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Labor has successfully completed their long march to the centre.
What now?
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The centre of what? The centre of our institutions maybe. Surely you don’t mean the centre in terms of Left – Right political descriptors.
There are a number of ex Labor people who say the party no longer represents me because it has moved so far left.
If it’s true that the current Labor is now in the centre then our whole political calibration has moved miles left.
If so, the “what now?” is wait for the slow strangulation of society and then the wake-up.
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Yes.
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Ok. But mine hasn’t.
This is the problem with the Libs campaign. They allowed the ALP to define who the Libs were because the Libs hadn’t defined themselves first.
We’ve allowed the media to make “right” be a dirty word and convey the message that the greatest threat to society is right wing activists. This has been done to scare people away from anything considered right … or centre in fact.
Right wing is almost the new “racist” card.
There’s a good chunk of voters looking for a home. That includes many Labor voters who know the party doesn’t represent them anymore and they know where the centre is.
The Libs need to define themselves as the home of sensible policies. A three year campaign. Not a poor 5 week election campaign only. If the media labels them as right they need to come back hard at the media and say, “It’s sensible policy that is in the best interests of this country and this is why …… Are you saying sensible policies are right wing policies? You can’t just dismiss a policy or scare people with a label. It’s a sensible policy”.
They need to be begging radio stations for regular appearance slots. Not to just bag the government. People don’t like the negativity. They need to be messaging about what they’ll do and why.
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Yes they are on the whole, but let’s call them centre-right or right of centre and fiscally responsible. Don’t want to scare the swinging voters.
Conversations like “when Australia reaches net zero, we will have, according to IPCC estimate factors, reduced global temperatures by 0.001 degrees C for a cost of a $trillion or so” might help.
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I’m not sure about that.
I have no idea what the so-called “conservative” Liberal party believe in anymore. I’m pretty sure that they don’t either.
I don’t trust a single word that comes out of their mouths. That applies to all politicians and all parties BTW.
The Liberals proved without doubt that they are Labor-lite.
The Liberals didn’t deserve to win and neither did Albaneasy and Labor.
Poor fella my country.
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Indeed. I was one of the few with a forlorn hope that the election would be a scoreless draw.
Still with primary votes of 34.8% and 32.1% for the major parties perhaps there will come a day when the populace learn that voting only encourages the bastards.
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Not only encourages the bastards, it encourages a Uniparty. Because in a significant number of seats the Liberal preference votes (don’t think the Nationals?) actually helped Labor win seats. So the Libs helped the Labs- do you need more evidence of a Uniparty?
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What you have ‘accidently’ disappearing is men.
Except it’s no accident is it?
We have some left in America.
Particularly one named Trump.
America is big.
It has a huge non urban culture where men still exist.
(Actually the expanse of the country between the coasts.)
Young men are waking up to the assault upon them by liberal urbanized elites.
I think maybe you have a chance to develop more of such in Australia.
The other European descended Commonwealth countries are pretty much emasculated.
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Reminds me to look a little more closely at the MGTOW movement.
Perhaps that is an encouraging development.
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Here’s Bill Nye the Science Guy exemplifying the assault.
The Rubin Report
‘Parents Stop Trusting Bill Nye to Teach Kids After This Clip Goes Viral’
“Science says we’re all on a ‘spectrum’.”
Yeah … ‘Science’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kX9ltiOJ30
The cultural assault on men is an assault on human leadership.
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Well they just bought themselves a couple of years for a total makeover.
If this result doesn’t turn them hard right then I hope they delist themselves.
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Its not looking good.
The punters have Sussan Ley in front as Liberal leader, with Angus Taylor and Dan Tehan following on.
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George Christensen ( ex LNP Qld) has just done a long thread on X. In effect, he claims the whole LNP campaign was sabotaged from within. Wrong polling, donations diverted , incorrect ad buys, policy misdirections. Possibly all manufactured out of LNP head office and Dutton was powerless to re- direct or amend any problems. In other words the idiots didn’t deserve to win anyway.
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Peta Credlin had an interesting commentary on the election last night, apparently there was only about 800,000 votes between the Libs and Labor out of 8 million votes.
Also commented on the fact that Elmerr Fudd won with with 34% the same figure that Shorten lost by. Go figure.
https://youtu.be/QcLX1vQISSg?si=Fa8Vw37hmQyDiVXu
We need her in govt!
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There might only be 800,000 votes between Labor and Liberal. But out of 8,000,000 that’s a big 10%.
This is almost the biggest gap two party preferred in Aus Federal Election history.
Using the word “only” before 800,000 votes is a clutch at positivity.
True. Labor’s primary vote is low at 34% (34.8% at present). The Greens have 11.8%. Libs/Nats 32.1%. One Nation 6.2% (Not all of one nation go to Libs as preferences). There are some other votes out there.
Labor and Greens combined is what we need to look at as a voting sentiment block. Not just the “low” 34% of Labor.
It’s not total doom and gloom for the Libs because a change in leader and a refresh can change sentiment quickly. Particularly if the ALP perform as they have.
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I agree with the last statement however my son thinks she is unelectable because of her defence of Alan Jones.
I worked with a fellow many years ago who was a few years younger than me who went to school in Brisbane where Alan Jones was a teacher. Based on what I was told then, the news of Jones’s misadventures over the years never surprises.
I do not look at enough social media to see what my son sees in that arena but he has a good feel for the present thinking.
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Paul Kelly’s article in The Australian identifies the problem for the Libs.
He said “Albanese secured a higher ALP primary vote running at 34.75 per cent, an increase of 2.17 per cent. It’s still bad, but Labor has mastered the preference system, mobilising the broad pro-left side of politics to shatter the Liberals.”
Unless the Libs can find a strategy to counter this, no matter how good the policies or who is the leader, they are doomed by stay on the Opposition benches.
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What could that strategy be?
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This Labor win also has profound negative implications for the practice of the Scientific Method and science in Australia.
Scientific fact will now be decided by the “consensus” of the most taxpayer-funded “scientists”.
And the more taxes they get, the more consensus will be provided.
There will be no place for unpopular or unorthodox opinions.
For example, ideas of the atom, evolution, an ancient earth and universe, continental drift, the Big Bang, exoplanets, relativity, prions, the Missoula Floods and the germ theory of disease were unpopular and unorthodox opinions all widely rejected at the time.
In today’s Australia, no such alternative ideas could gain currency against the “consensus taxpayer-funded science”.
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We see Ian Plimer visiting Trump in Florida. Where was he during the Australian elections?
The Liberals have been taken for a ride by Turnbull. I agree with Jo that Dutton was in an awkward position – the rock and hard place. He would have needed to come in as leader rejecting NetZero.
When are the LNP going to realise they have been conned by academia?
It takes 10 years to build a coal fired power station in Australia. So the next one is at least fifteen years away. That is 2040. I think I will be past caring but long enough to get value from taking up the Labor gifts of OPM to insulate myself from the rocky road ahead for the NEM.
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I think that’s optimistic.
Last Saturday Australia signed its death warrant.
And even if one could be built in 2040 (and we will need many), with another 15 years of some of the world’s most expensive electricity plus massive new taxes in the near future and over-regulation, what will be left of the economy by that time? We will be a Third World country by then.
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In 10 to 15 years time there will be no money for coal/nuclear energy to be built as all of the current solar and wind infrastructure will need to be replaced
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SLR is still one of the biggest BS scary stories that pollies etc use to scare the usual know nothing voters and layabouts.
Willis Eschenbach has a look at Josh Willis’ latest claims about a jump in SLR in 2024 and again they’re just trying to scare us via their so called satellite data.
It’s BS from start to finish and Willis still finds only 1.8 mm a year at the tide gauges and that’s about 7.2 inches per century.
But isn’t that the same or lower than the entire 20th century? And most of the islands are growing in size, so where’s their so called dangerous SLR or climate change?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/05/05/sea-level-nasa-versus-noaa/
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The demands for taxpayer-funded “free stuff” from low information Labor/Green/Teal voters will be relentless and will soon bankrupt the country.
And they have no clue where all the money comes from.
Everything “free” comes at the expense of someone who works.
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If that is so, then as I suggested before, it is time to re-think our positions and serve the public.
If the public wants free stuff, give it to them, on condition that they have NO say in how the stuff is obtained.
The only thing that matters is the creation of products.
Products create wealth and are limited to things that grow or mine out of the ground or sea and things that we manufacture from them.
Everything else is a service to those products and as a result is a cost.
In Australia now, very few people are involved in either growing, mining or manufacturing. The vast majority of people work at services which are a cost.
So why not take over the growing, mining and manufacturing and provide them for free?
I know that sounds like communism, but fundamentally people don’t want to work and the few that do wish they would be left alone to do it.
I believe we have reached a stage in our civilisation where we could provide goods for free. It just requires the will to do it.
Who then would work? Well, the people who love farming, or fishing or mining or making things would. If their wants are fulfilled, these people would do it as a hobby. The rest should just live and mind their own business.
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It’s not clear that Australia has a viable exit strategy out of its current mess.
Australia will just continue to deteriorate until things get extremely bad and only then -possibly- might conditions ferment to produce a real leader that will restore Australia.
However, that’s likely to be decades away, if ever. By then someone else might decide they can do something useful with the country and take over.
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Another thing that now has no chance of being reined in is massive rorting of NDIS.
That alone has the potential to bankrupt the country apart from all the other scams.
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“When you stand for nothing , you fall for everything” – Tony Abbott stood up and won . When it’s hard to see daylight between the parties the electorate will stay with the status quo .
The other issue is the number of “conservative parties” on the ticket all chasing the same voters . You know what’s going to happen now , they have told you – plan accordingly .
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Looks like TEAL, Zoe Daniel, has gone with the wind.
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Much can be said but in this case I would just like to make one small point. Each “Western Liberal Democracy” is effectively controlled by a Uniparty – an unelected elite establishment who control an arrangement of two supposedly rival gangs of politicians but which in reality is just a shared power arrangement. We dont have a democracy any more than East Germany or North Korea had democracies. We just get to vote for whoever the globalists install in each half of the uni-parties. Howard, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, Dutton were/are all simply puppets of a globalist internationalist establishment (check up their WEF credentials) – most obvious in the way the unquestioning support of the globalist agendas of Net Zero, vaccine lockdown, high levels of immigration … policies that suddenly appear out of no-where and cannot be disputed by anyone, certainly not by popular vote.
In America one can see that for the last 50 70 years the Democrats and Republicans have been both involved in this power-sharing arrangement as part of the establishment “Swamp” (research the Trilateral Commission if you are interested) If one looks closely one will see that the Trump phenomenon is really about a series of disaffected Democrats abandoning the Democrat Party, abandoning the globalist agenda, and infiltrating the Republican Party and effectively taking over the Republican Party in a “palace coup”. This is an important distinction because it provides one successful model on how to combat the establishment “Swamp” elsewhere. The Trump guys have ousted the Old Guard Republicans and effectively defeated one half of the Uniparty and are now locked in a fight-to-the-death with the other half – the globalist Democrats. In other Western Liberal Democracies there have been attempts to form separate Parties which compete with the so-called conservatives, splitting the vote in the first-past-the-post electoral systems and handing power to the most left-wing extreme halves of the Uniparties. In Australia, with proportional representation, the vote always goes back to the Uniparty. There is no way I can see for a third party to make progress, except by capture as in the Trump model. The Liberal Party is an empty carcass screaming out for infiltration and re-vivification … but I fear the big money of the elite establishment will keep the shell going simply as an alternative front to the Labor Party to keep the illusion of a working democracy alive.
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Interesting statistics – Peta Credlin analysis with historical comparisons including fact that in 2022 the voter turn out was 89.82% whereas in 2025 only 77% of enrolled voters cast their vote.
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