Jerry_Atrick

You're clutching at straws, Spacey: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-elite-money-behind-the-no-campaign-20230913-p5e4eh.html

The real losers will the the ATSIs (not that a Voice guarantees them a "win". Sadly, all the verifiable BS from the No campaign is divisive as they are lying it up just to stop it from happening.. because they don't want to. So yes, I will call them divisive whichever way the vote goes. I wouldn't call them divisise if they were honest with their opposition and put forward honest arguments - that is totally different. But they're not and they even admit it. Dutton then goes and says if he gets into government he will allow a referendum - on exactly the same thing! Not divisive, eh? OK, then call it weaponising. That does not excuse the poor approach that Albanese took knowing (or ought to have known) what he was up against, which if I were an ATSI would hold him at fault for. This may give further explanation of the divisive no , and why the Yes need to up their game: https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/why-the-no-side-is-winning-and-how-yes-could-respond-20230913-p5e4hb.html

Huh? Referendum has chanbged before and it can change again. And even if it didn't, the constitutional amendment allows the Voice to be rendered useless.. so it doesn't matter if it the constuttion can't be changed. What has Charlie got to do with anything? And he is the King ofd the United (becoming less so) Kingdom.. not England. (oh, and he is the King of Australia, too - and Canada, I think, and possibly New Zealand)..

Here's one for the mods to ban me for... You can have a creamy canal... That would not be good.

Most rural areas and fewer but stiull many urban areas don't use street numbers, but house names. If yoiu use iether and a postcode, the letter will get to you. Often postcodes cover one or a small handful of houses, too.. and they aren't mansions. Not one place in our village has a street number. My house name is The Old Rectory; the two br barn converion on our title is The Old Meeting House. My inlaw's house name is.. drum roll please..... Waterly Bottom (ther is a waterly creek at the bottom of their back yard).

The barter system doesn't get taxed. If I swap you a bunch of my juciest, reddest tomatoes for an hour of you servicing my car, there's no tax as it is not part of the organised economy, but it is making a comeback: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200821-the-rise-of-bartering-in-a-changed-world, so it may well become taxed sometime in the future. Cyrpto made many millionaires, and yes, a lot of those gains went untaxed as the income itself is impossible to trace and many held their coin in private e-wallets, so only drip-feed when they need something furtther making it difficult to tax. However, all that is changing as the major cryptos become morw organised, mature and regulated. I couldn't find too much online but a couple of articles on Macquarie's move from physcial cash. The ones I could find were on more murdoch style media outlets and one ABC article which was scant at best. I am not sure, but looking at Macquarie's website, I could not gather much about their retail and commercial banking, but it seemed to me they weren't chasing the everyday person as a client; they are looking for more of the upper and mobile clients . Yeah - they may lose some potential revenue from cash businesses, but with the explosion of eCommerce as well as cards, watch and other digital payments become more and more mainstream, even those businesses will not have much physical cash floating about. There are already shops and other business that only accept digital payments. Also, digital payments are not some form of alternative currency - it simply transfers ownership of physical legal tender sitting in a vault from one person or entity to another. And businesses and people can determine how they accept legal tender. And no dount, it will be in Macquarie's updated Ts' and C's. Spot on, although people would complain that it is a regressive tax a poor peoplee are hit harder. But the reality is they spend less. Stamp duties and GST are already a form of this, but with the latter, it is a quagmire. A simple small transaction tax of which there are no deductions would be simpler, fairer, less noticeable to the average persion and likely rake in for the guvmint.

Blimey - haven't heard this for years:

I bet Turkeye are very happy with their purchase.

Maybe they will start gracing snobby restaurants soon: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-09/riverland-winemaker-pushes-cask-wine-over-glass-carbon-footprint/102804526

I share your thoughts; the fact he got away with so much alleged illegal taxe and other alleged corproate offences for so long without even as much as in investigation before he took office has me thinking what took so long? The only thing that I can think is his modus operandi involves paper bags and taking photogrpahs. There are some 91 charges against him across 4 indictments https://www.politico.com/interactives/2023/trump-criminal-investigations-cases-tracker-list/). One of the things in his favour regardless of the cases against him and any defence he may have is the jury system. All it requires is a couple of the folks on the jury to be mad MAGAmites and they will never agree to find him guilty. And they won't be hard to find.

If you look at some of the work back bench MPs do, they certainly earn their money. The trick with the higher up ones is to go for the ones that feather their nests,, but also do at least a sembalnce (or better) of good for the country.

Spacey - the republic you refer to in England was Cromwell, was it not? An entirely different set of cicumstances to today... That republic wasn't created out of a referendum, but a civil war (well, a bunch of landed gentry fighting each other) (https://www.royal.uk/interregnum-1649-1660). That also ended the same way - with violence.. but it was a very different time and would struggle to find parrallels (well, except for MAGA and Trump, but they are hardly about indigenous rights, are they). The refendum wording only compels a voice be established and that it can advise government on ATSI matters. And that the government can make laws about the composition and how the Voice is run (my bad, I thought the thrid para meant laws on aboriginal matters in consultation with the voice - I misread it). And the wording requires that the consitution of the Voice and its operation must comply with the rest of the constitution. That is it.. It simply says "Government - you have to ensure there is an ATSI representative body.. You can't not have one. In addition, , if it is not working (or could work better) you can change it to try and make it work.. or if you really, really, want to, you can just have the Voice with only one representative such as the PM's son running it from the Chairman's Lounge, and Government, you don't even have to listen to what he says (or read what he emails), except that the food and wine is fine, but the riff-raff they let in their at times (just as Lydia Thorpe and other ATSIs) means he has to lift his head up from the gameboy (or whatever is the portable gaming device of choice). Seriously, if that is your biggest beef with it, then I would suggest your not really thinking about it those terms.

He may be looking more orange in the not-too distant as the prison wear reflects off his skin if he is found guilty of some of those 91 offences. This fella is helping hiom prepare for the ordeal of prison:

Oh, what a car! My partner is atrocious when I am driving - not because I am a crap driver, but she feels so out of control. I can be 200 feet from the car in front and she is already telling me to brake and allow more room... There was a time I was giving my partner and the mother of a friend of my daughter who lives in the same village a ride into town for a school play, and it was a nightmare. Even the mother said to me as she got out, "Thanks, Lance.. I felt very safe.". If they still make them, I am buying one! (Although, I rarely drive with her anymore)

Yes, Agree with nomadpete. It must be hard sometimes to share stuff like that, particularly on a forum where most of us have never met. But sharing these things brings back perspective and balance.

Not really a gripe, just noting a marked shift in culture. Job interviews. Since the pandemic, I have not conducted one job interview in person. Have hired 3 contractors, a permanent, and now hirign another, and they are all done online. Of course interviews I have had in Australia have been online out of necessity, but we don't see the person in the flesh until they arrive in the office - and sometimes that can be a week or two before they even start! Is it like this is Aus as well (I know many on here don't interview anymore, but wondering if anyone has the "good oil" on it. Had an interview the other day, and the interviewee's camera was focused on her forehead - got a good view of her ceiling, too.. When I told her, she was, "meh?" Oh well, she's not in contention, anyway...

Mayt not be related this this, but this is the stuff they have to put up with: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/fake-letter-scaremongering-about-indigenous-land-claims-sparks-outrage-20230912-p5e43n.html

Spacey - that is the same for every referendum - They get a vote. What it means is that the territories are not counted in the 4 out of 6 states that require a majority in addition to the vote requiring greater than 50% of the vote for the referendum to succeed.

By default, yes... You can change the default behaviour. Would have to google how to set it to shut down completely on shut down - did it so long ago. It does this tby taking a copy of what is in your memory and disk paging, and sotring it on disk. The next time you boot up, it loads that for faster loading than rebooting from scratch.

I fire up task manager and look at resource usage (cpus, etc). I think go to the process list and sort the processes on the highest usage of whatever resource looks to be the problem and kill whatever the process is. That often works. The .net framework has incremental process improvements whith each release, but that alone wouldn't have fixed it by as much as you have said. You may well have been running a process that terminated on a restart (restartsd by default close the whole system down, empty queues and stacks and remove the temp memory snapshots on disk - to speed up booting, switching off keeps a memory image on disk and reboots to this rather than a fresh system - by default). The other think is that you mat have a program running that was designed to take advantage of a big fix in a later .net version that you were running at the time.

Correct - but in there, I referenceed and linked to the principles of the voice (https://voice.gov.au/about-voice/voice-principles), which is the likely implementation, and did also caveat it using the example of using secret trials for the NACC as a risk it all doesn't go well. But as Swollen Pickles has revealed (video only released a couple of hours ago and posted by Octave), this is a normal constitutional process, and imperfections can be fixed over time. It won't impact the average non-ATSI person, given most live in towns and citites. Yes, there may be some policy recommendations that, if adopted may impact some non ATSIs, but it will eb the government departments that make that decision - not the Voice.. I am glad you do, Bruce, because, as I have posted, the rate of new infections has declimed dramatically for a few years now - from memory the adult ATSI population new infection rate is 0.2%. But, let's to a bit of role play: Scenario 1, No Voice - Some Minister of the crown: "Until you get zero new infections of trachoma, you can't have your Voice - period." Whatever is causing people not to get to zero continues and the issue persists. Scenario 2, Voice is in place - Some minister of the crown: "Jeez, we have to get these bnlighter's new infection rate down to zero as it is costiung us money." Soem advisor: "Jeez, I dunno what to do. Why don't we ask the voice what will it take to get the rate of new infections down." What happens next is the Voice may have to do some research to work out why there are pockets of new infections and determine what they think is the best way to handle it.. or goodness me, even come up with options. Or maybe they will just go to the pub and make it up.. .I guess.

Some people have too much time.

I forgot to add, my opinion is that the chance of it improving the lives of ATSIs is better then it failing (given the principles I found). I do accept there is a good chance it can fail, but I like the fact the government of the day's ability to weaponise it to the same extent as optional representative bodies is lower (but still high) and survive electorally. That is why I would be voting yes if I could. One of the problems is that it is impossible to be sure what will happen. But then, if you care enough about it, and it is not implemented right, you will make representations to the government, press, etc, to get it made right. What the government can't do ios get rid of it.. They either live with the bad press or make it right.

Research generally follows a methodology and the methodology is generally published which includes the outcome sought, the population researched and how it was selected, the questions asked and/or data measured, any calibrations performed, raw data metrics, interpretations applied, and how conclujsions are drawn. That is what is meant by research in an offical sense. Assuming The VBoice is an official body, that would be the expectation., Not being able to evidence research will open it for criticism immedately. Sadly (and I think most know of my opinioon of the NACC's secret trials), yes. But the Voice is not about anti-corruption - that is the NACC's job. The Voice is about ensuring legitimate representatives of the ATSI commuinity are consulted on matters affecting them. The limits of anti-corruption would the the transparency and governance of it's operations, which as far as I can see are legitimate research (see above) and transparent representation (again, see above, because if the representation doesn't equal the research, there will be an immediate effect. Other elements will be subject to National Audit Office, and no doubt countless senate estimates/committees as at least one side of the political fence seem to have it in for them at the get go. You're right that the previous institutions have not had the success one would hope for. As I don't know the appoitnment system to these, I can't comment on that particularly. There has also been misconduct (one president or CEO or something of ATSIC allegedly raped someone in the commission). Lack of success and extreme misconduct are not limited to these institutions (Christian Porter on alleged rape, anyone). Of course, this is not a good enough reason to say yes. But, there are differences between previous institutions. Firstly, no government agency was compelled to even consult with them. And I would be surprised if a lot of those consultations were even implemented - at least in full. I vaguely recall scathing asessments from ATSIC of the level of heeding the government took of their advice. It was also weaponsied many times, defundxed, and ultimately disbanded.. but that I don't think that was due to the incompetence of the commission itself, but by a systematic dismantiling and smearing by the Hoawrd government abetted by the press (I stress it is my opinion, but many of the facts that led up to it being disbanded seemed t point to it). The tent parliament was famously riled many times by the LNP, including baited with lies by them that required Julia Gillard to be carried from a restaruant by security. I can't speak of NAIDOC or NIAA as I know very little of them. All this referendum does is enshrine in the constitution the obligation (not the power - the government already has the power) to establish a voice and ensure it is consulted on ATSI affairs. That is it. By the way, that is exactly the same for every power and obligation bestowed on the government in the consiutution; in fact the wording for the Voice constrains the power much more than any other similar provision. If it gets up, it is a signal to the government that people will want it to work; the government will enact the legislation and regulations to implement. at the moment, the principles of the voice are an indication of what the ALP government will likely do. That is not in stone and can be changed, and the NACC secret trials are an example of where that may go wrong. The democratic process doesn't end with an election, people get involved and shape laws as required. Yes, it can be turned into a shit show, but the subsequent government can, just like any other power or obligation, fix it. What the referendum is asking, is two things: 1) Do you think that the government should establish a body of representiatives of the ATSI communities selected by the ATSI communities that must (not may) be consulted in policy and law making in ATSI matters? and 2) In order to ensure future governments can't remove that requirement without the approval of the Australian people, do you think that that obligation should be enshrined in the constitution? Their only financial management is paying for their operations, so their annual reports and the national audit office should will care of that. They have no government decision making capability. They obviosuly make internal operational decisions, but does any government department publish the reason for making a decision about internal matters like this outside of the annual reports? If you can point to anywhere in the constitution that requires the same of any other power or function (yes, there are provisions for transparency, but they are general as opposed to a specific function or organisation), I would gladly concede. What councils is it proposed the Voice has control over?

There appears to be a misconception of what the Voice actually is. They cannot make a decision and they have no power outside them being able to do their own research. And if the research is flawed, it will show up in their advice. They will be subject to transparency rules of their operation and accountable to them I am really wracking my feeble grey matter on the risk of maladministration that is beyiond any other government organisation. In fact, I would argue they will be in real life subject to a higher bar due to the political nature of the Voice and its opposition by certain people and parties highlighted by Octave. I agree with this, but on the first statement, isn't that what the Voice is for - a representative group selected by their communities giving independent advice to government departments on the best way to deal with complex matters, and as they are selected by those commnities, they are accountable for what they do and what advice they give to those communities? That was a long winded way of saying the first issue you raised is what the voice is designed to solve by consulting representatives of the communities to figure out the best solutions and spend, rather than impose ignorant ideas? Yes, it's not guaranteed to work, but these sorts of things ususally bring more success than they don't. Having said that, if you have a better way, let's table it. As for the second sentence, I am again wracking my brain on what the risk of corruption is. They can misspend their research money and drink it at the pub, I guess. That would be to the detriment of their community who hold them accountable for future selection - and the principles of the implementation will have fixed term representation anyway. I guess they could advise a government department that their mates get large government contracts, but that would breach procurement rules and require a complicit government department that can make decisions and can deliver prtograms to achieve. But, obviously Albo's team heeded the lessons as there are planned. The principles of The Voice, and I urge you all to read them, are here: https://voice.gov.au/about-voice/voice-principles. They include sanctions and dismissal of a representative for serious misconduct, and that the Voice will be subject to the NACC, which is the body established to tackle corruption. The Voice is a body established to provide advice to stop misspending of government money on futile programs. That's the rub. With better transparency of what, exactly?