Yep, it will be like this for the next 3 years

The death duty thing is off the charts for penetration.

The death duty thing is off the charts for penetration.

Integrity experts say the patently false and “scandalous” claims spread during the election give renewed impetus for truth in political advertising laws, saying reform is now a “no-brainer”.

The election was littered with false and exaggerated claims, many of which were propagated by fringe groups on social media and amplified by major parties.

An invention claiming Labor planned to introduce a death tax, for example, appears to have begun on unsourced Facebook pages, spread to other users via direct messages and paid ads, before finally being amplified by Coalition politicians.

Guardian Australia’s project to monitor hidden campaigning on social media began to pick up claims about a Labor “death tax” in mid-April, when users received direct Facebook messages stating “Labor, the Greens and Unions have signed an agreement to introduce a 40% inheritance tax”.

Other third-party Facebook groups, including an anti-Labor page named Rite-ON!, spread the death tax claim using paid Facebook ads, and it was amplified by Coalition figures, including the Liberal senator Jane Hume and the Queensland LNP MP George Christensen.

Christensen paid for three Facebook ads on Labor’s supposed death tax, one of which said “we know Labor have secret plans to bring in a death tax”.

Social media was also used to spread falsehoods about Labor’s plan to introduce a car tax. The origins of this claim are more obvious. Guardian Australia tracked dozens of paid Liberal party ads spreading the car tax claim into the Facebook newsfeeds of targeted users.

“Bill Shorten and Labor plan to introduce a Car Tax which would increase the cost of nearly all of Australia’s new cars,” one ad, paid for by the Liberal WA branch, said.

Labor – which was itself guilty of spreading the Mediscare falsehood about the Liberals – held no policies to introduce a car or death tax.

Progressive politicians like to assume that, on election day at least, blue-collar workers and urban progressives will bridge their differences, and make common cause to support leftist economic policies. This assumption might once have been warranted. But it certainly isn’t now—in large part because the intellectuals, activists and media pundits who present the most visible face of modern leftism are the same people openly attacking the values and cultural tastes of working and middle-class voters. And thanks to social media (and the caustic news-media culture that social media has encouraged and normalized), these attacks are no longer confined to dinner-party titterings and university lecture halls. Brigid Delaney, a senior writer for Guardian Australia, responded to Saturday’s election result with a column about how Australia has shown itself to be “rotten.” One well-known Australian feminist and op-ed writer, Clementine Ford, has been fond of Tweeting sentiments such as “All men are scum and must die.” Former Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who also has served as a high-profile newspaper columnist, argues that even many mainstream political positions—such as expressing concern about the Chinese government’s rising regional influence—are a smokescreen for racism.

In an interview conducted on Sunday morning, Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek opined that if only her party had more time to explain to the various groups how much they’d all benefit from Labor’s plans, Australians would have realized how fortunate they’d be with a Labor government, and Shorten would’ve become Prime Minister. Such attitudes are patronizing, for they implicitly serve to place blame at the feet of voters, who apparently are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.

What the election actually shows us is that the so-called quiet Australians, whether they are tradies (to use the Australian term) in Penrith, retirees in Bundaberg, or small business owners in Newcastle, are tired of incessant scolding from their purported superiors. Condescension isn’t a good look for a political movement.

Taking stock of real voters’ needs would require elites to exhibit a spirit of empathic understanding—such as by way of acknowledging that blue-collar workers have good reason to vote down parties whose policies would destroy blue-collar jobs; or that legal immigrants might oppose opening up a nation’s border to migrants who arrive illegally. More broadly, the modern progressive left has lost touch with the fact that what ordinary people want from their government is a spirit of respect, dignity and hope for the future. While the fetish for hectoring and moral puritanism has become popular in rarefied corners of arts and academia, it is deeply off-putting to voters whose sense of self extends beyond cultish ideological tribalism.
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err this is the electoral commission not letting parliament sit.
Just settle its going to be a hard 3 years for you.

It will be a hard 3 yrs....not financially, but i couldn't give a shit about tax cuts. But yes other parts and direction of where we are going as a country does concern me.

Electoral commission or not they can get this done if they want, tax office has said they will push it through. But point is they said they'd do it. So it's a broken promise

But they weren't really Fats, the Non-liberal vote was high

And the Greens made gains everywhere.

Isn't it time you sloped off back to G&GR?

But they weren't really Fats, the Non-liberal vote was high

And the Greens made gains everywhere.

Isn't it time you sloped off back to G&GR?

The fear of 'death duty' is quite a uniquely Australian worry. The vast majority of modern democracies have some form of estate tax. It's amusing how much it draws ire here.

Ireland's inheritance tax – or Capital Acquisitions Tax (CAT) – is a hefty 33%. As a child, you are entitled to inherit a certain amount (up to € 310,000 in your lifetime) tax-free; after this point, you are charged 33%.

At that rate the Greens will form government in 2095

Chris Bowen to withdraw from Labor leadership race as Albanese and Chalmers deal firms

By Michael Koziol
May 22, 2019 — 2.49pm

Labor's treasury spokesman Chris Bowen is set to withdraw from the race to lead his party just 28 hours after launching his bid, after a deluge of senior figures threw their support behind Anthony Albanese.

It paved the way for a deal to install Mr Albanese unopposed, with finance spokesman Jim Chalmers as his deputy - though it is understood some in the party are still encouraging Mr Chalmers to run against Mr Albanese for the top job, and he is still considering that option.

Multiple Labor sources said a deal between Mr Albanese and Mr Chalmers was likely but not yet finalised on Wednesday afternoon.

Under that scenario, the ticket would call on Shoppies union figure Don Farrell to vacate the Senate deputy leadership position to allow a female duo of Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally to lead the Labor Party in the upper house

...

This Albanese chap, am I right in reading that he has never held a post-graduation job outside of politics?
Seems he just did the classic route of MP bag carrier, MP. Not sure about Australia but that sort of background is anathema to swathes of the electorate in the UK, commonly referred to as the 'Professional Politician' and has given us such genii as Osborne, Clegg, Cameron, the Milibands etc.

How the global push against Huawei began in a Canberra basement

By Cassell Bryan-Low and Colin Packham
May 22, 2019 — 10.20am

Canberra: In early 2018, in a complex of low-rise buildings in the Australian capital, a team of government hackers was engaging in a destructive digital war game.

The operatives – agents of the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation's top-secret eavesdropping agency – had been given a challenge.

With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next-generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?

What the team found, say current and former government officials, was sobering for Australian security and political leaders: the offensive potential of 5G was so great that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country could be seriously exposed.

The understanding of how 5G could be exploited for spying and to sabotage critical infrastructure changed everything for the Australians, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Mike Burgess, the head of the signals directorate, recently explained why the security of fifth generation, or 5G, technology was so important. It will be integral to the communications at the heart of a country's critical infrastructure - everything from electric power to water supplies to sewage, he said in a March speech at a Sydney research institute.

Washington is widely seen as having taken the initiative in the global campaign against Huawei Technologies, a tech juggernaut that in the three decades since its founding has become a pillar of Beijing's bid to expand its global influence.

Yet interviews with more than two dozen current and former Western officials show it was the Australians who led the way in pressing for action on 5G; that the United States was initially slow to act; and that Britain and other European countries are caught between security concerns and the competitive prices offered by Huawei.

The Australians had long harboured misgivings about Huawei in existing networks, but the 5G war game was a turning point.

About six months after the simulation began, the Australian government effectively banned Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecom networking gear, from any involvement in its 5G plans. An Australian government spokeswoman declined to comment on the war game.

After the Australians shared their findings with US leaders, other countries, including the United States, moved to restrict Huawei.

The anti-Huawei campaign intensified last week, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively banned the use of Huawei equipment in US telecom networks on national security grounds and the Commerce Department put limits on the firm's purchasing of US technology. Google's parent, Alphabet, suspended some of its business with Huawei.

Until the middle of last year, the US government largely "wasn't paying attention," said retired US Marine Corps General James Jones, who served as national security adviser to President Barack Obama. What spurred senior US officials into action? A sudden dawning of what 5G will bring, according to Jones.

"This has been a very, very fast-moving realisation" in terms of understanding the technology, he said. "I think most people were treating it as a kind of evolutionary step as opposed to a revolutionary step. And now that light has come on."

...

Interesting read, that... at first I was impatient, thinking it was more fluff than stuff but perservering and reading the whole thing is well worth the time,

cheers kiap. The first paragraph missing changes the context a little mate...

Albo v ScoMo...

it'll be an o-down.

Admire your optimism, Mat.

Albo v ScoMo...

it'll be an o-down.

“I’m really into Gang of Youths at the moment and I voted for their song ‘Let Me Down Easy’ in the Triple J Hottest 100,” DJ Albo tells InDaily.

“It’s a great track, you know – it starts with the big bass and it kicks off from there.”

...

“I’ll be playing some Gang of Youths, for sure, as well as Vera Blue, Tkay Maidza, Sticky Fingers, The Cure, New Order, Polish Club and [David] Bowie,” he says.

You might pardon the intrusion gents for a quick question.

Is three years not very short for a fixed term parliament?

Thought provoking article

https://quillette.com/2019/05/20/at-aus ... -to-roost/

Senior Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese is set to become the party's next leader, promising to sharpen its economic message and refocus on its traditional blue-collar base, after his only remaining challenger, Jim Chalmers, pulled out of the race.

Dr Chalmers spent Thursday morning calling colleagues to see if he had the numbers to get through a five-week leadership ballot but called Mr Albanese before lunch to offer him his "enthusiastic support".

"There were good reasons to run," he said. "But in the end I couldn’t be assured of winning, and if I did win, the extra responsibilities of leadership would make it much harder to do my bit at home while the youngest of our three little kids is only five months old."

Dr Chalmers, the opposition's Queensland-based finance spokesman, remains the favourite to become deputy leader, with his withdrawal from the contest viewed favourably among colleagues. The Brisbane MP, from the right faction of the party, is likely to be paired with Mr Albanese, as the opposition looks to regain support in northern Australia.

I honestly don't understand why we have had nearly ten years of pretending that the Adani Carmichael mine is viable. Here's some really simple maths explaining why it just doesn't stand up financially:

1. Plan is for a 10m ton per year mine, rising to 20mtpa

2. Galilee coal is ~5,000kcal/kg NAR -- about the same as Indonesian Envirocoal which currently sells for $66/ton before shipping costs (at a time when thermal coal prices are at multiyear highs)

3. So your revenue is ~$660m in the first stage

4. What are the mining costs? Adani doesn't say but BHP's Mt Arthur, a ~20mtpa in the better-located Hunter Valley run by one of the most efficient miners in the world, does $46/ton. So that's ~$460m a year on mining costs, leaving $200m/year left over.

5. But wait! You have to build the mine and a railway first. Again Adani are rubbery on the numbers but the best estimate from the unofficial figures they've put out for the scaled-down project are $1.5bn for the mine and $1.5bn for the railway. So that's $3bn.

6. Adani owns Abbot Point port, which is a project with a guaranteed customer (Glencore). Its bonds on this yield about 7% which is a good proxy for what they'd pay for the Carmichael project. 7% of A$3bn is US$140m of interest each year.

7. So we're down to $60m of profit. But wait! The railway they're building only gets you halfway to the coast. They'd have to pay Aurizon for the remaining distance which ballpark comes to about $6/ton on 10mtpa of product. The project is now not making a cent of profit.

8. BUT WAIT! You also have to amortize the loan principal, and depreciate your A$3bn/US$2bn capital asset. Hard to see how accountants would allow a depreciation schedule longer than 30 years and you'd have to amortize over -- guessing here -- ~10.

9. That puts you an extra ~$260m the hole. Adani is losing $26 on every ton it digs up. More if coal prices fall from their current highs.

10. If the output rises to 20mtpa this maths improves, sorta. You have $400m of gross profit. But then subtract the $140m in interest, $260m in D&A and now $120m to Aurizon and you're still losing $6/ton.

11. And the plan is to self-fund the expansion to 20mtpa, which clearly doesn't work because the 10mtpa mine is already losing money so can't self-fund a chook raffle.

PS an interesting parallel is Glencore's Wandoan mine, a 1.2bn ton 5000/kcal project in the Darling Downs. It's about half the rail distance to port of Carmichael (and remember that rail freight is one of the biggest cost elements for coal) but Glencore mothballed it in 2012ish

Wandoan is basically a more viable version of Carmichael, but Glencore are convinced that developing it would crash that end of the seaborne coal market and have promised to cap their thermal coal output at current levels.

This isn't because they're scared of greenies -- are you fkin kidding me? It's because Glencore are really good at forecasting long-run supply-demand dynamics and they don't see sufficient demand to justify additional supply. People should take that judgement seriously.