LineNoise

I said a few weeks back that, for the stakes the referendum has put on the table for First Nations people, the government isn’t fighting near hard enough.

6 weeks is not a lot of time to turn that around. They better be ready.

Rebranding ESTA isn’t going to solve Victoria’s enormous primary care crisis.

We are critically short staffed and we’ve allowed gaps to build up that prevent large numbers of people from seeking timely care throughout the health system, but it’s at the GP level that these two overlapping avalanches start.

If those are the stakes we’re showing little sign of acting on our emissions in accordance.

Want to reduce your carbon footprint? The most effective thing you can do is blockade a carbon exporter.

Fact Check estimated that Australia's domestic emissions plus the emissions embedded in its exports added to 1,712 million tonnes in 2016.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-20/fact-check-australia-carbon-emissions-fossil-fuel-exports/11645670

Our domestic emissions were about 411 million tonnes that year.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/australia#what-are-the-country-s-annual-co2-emissions

Palaszczuk‘s government, along with every other one in Australia, has had it explained at length that incarceration of children is criminogenic and increases recidivism.

Queensland Police and Labor under Palaszczuk abusing human rights may well be “standard practice” but it sure as hell doesn’t keep the public safe.

The incentive needs to be towards the lightest possible vehicles, albeit perhaps with some allowance made for the substantial additional weight of current EVs so as not to kill off uptake, and they’ll need to be substantial.

We’re in a market where almost everything is an SUV. There are manufacturer line ups and whole sectors that are little else. A levy will be ineffective at changing buying patterns.

My experience of Epic exclusives is that most become things that are never on my radar again, even after the exclusive period.

I take it from this increase in rates that I’m far from alone in that regard.

VicForests has a single shareholder, the Victorian treasurer. The end dates were brought forward only after it became clear that VicForests was facing endless legal challenges that they would likely lose and that continuing to fight before the courts was financially unsustainable.

Native timber harvesting hasn’t made any economic sense in Victoria for years and the government’s known about the environmental harms for far longer than that. They could have ended it any time after their election in 2014, and realistically this should have been on the agenda as far back as the Bracks government, if not earlier. It’s only stayed because it allowed for public money to flow into the private pockets of mates though subsidisation, board roles, and turning a blind eye to logging activity that would have landed any other entity in prison.

VicForests and the Andrews government intent on continuing their trail of environmental destruction to the bitter end.

VicForests and the Andrews government intent on continuing their trail of environmental destruction to the bitter end.

Fascists like Antic aren't going to save your rights.

The housing policy we’ve seen from Labor has been disastrously bad.

• A refusal to invest in public housing, instead intending to repeat the “social and affordable” model that has already been a dismal failure in Victoria. …well, unless you’re a housing developer.

• Housing targets that focus on commercial builds while we’ve 40+ years of public housing deficit in every state and territory.

• And now this which sees people entering into loans they’d otherwise be told they can’t afford and literally sees the government invested in continuing capital growth of real estate prices for decades to come when the policies we need, properly implemented, would diminish or even end that growth.