Does anybody speak Biden? I’d love to know his position on this issue. pic.twitter.com/ojqhbpkSls
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) March 31, 2020
You've got to be joking.
Imagine Shorten, Albanese, Gillard or Rudd in charge now.
More school halls. Ceiling insulation. Cash for clunkers. Boat people drowning.
I don't agree with everything the Morrison government is doing.
But it's inestimably preferable to the alternative.
Under the new Home Confinement Direction, you should not leave your home unless absolutely necessary for the following permitted reasons:
If you do need to leave your home for one of these permitted reasons, you may do so with members of your household, or with one person who is not a member of your household.
We strongly urge people aged over 70, anybody over 60 with a chronic disease, and Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples over 50 to stay at home for their own protection. If you do have to go out, you can be accompanied by a support person.
Not following any of these regulations without reasonable excuse is a breach of the Public Health Act 2005 and you may be fined up to $1,330 for individuals and $6,670 for corporations.
You can:
Dear Michael,
We are living in unprecedented times.
Across the world, countries are facing twin battles – against coronavirus and against the economic ruin it can threaten.
Now is the time for Australia to dig deep.
Over the next six months, the Government will support the jobs and livelihoods of what we anticipate being around six million Australians who will need a lifeline.
We have already boosted the JobSeeker payment for those who lose their jobs.
Now, the Government is introducing a JobKeeper payment of $1,500 per employee, per fortnight.
This will be paid to employers, to keep people in jobs.
We want to keep the engine of our economy running through the crisis. It may run on idle for a time, but it must continue to run.
By keeping employers and workers together, we can help our economy bounce back.
The JobKeeper payment is a uniquely Australian solution, carefully designed using our systems, to work in our country. Most important, it is built on our values as Australians.
The JobKeeper payment is available to employers whose turnover has fallen by 30% or more (where annual turnover is less than $1 billion). Employers with a turnover of $1 billion or more will be required to demonstrate a reduction of 50% or more.
It is available to full and part time workers, sole traders, and casuals who have been with their employer for 12 months or more.
It is available to businesses structured through companies, partnerships, trusts and sole traders, as well as not-for-profit entities, including charities.
It is available for workers that are on an employer’s books as of 1 March. This means if you’re an employer who's been forced to retrench workers, you can put them back on your books and receive this $1,500 payment.
The JobKeeper payment will be administered through the Australian Tax Office.
As with our other support measures, we are using existing delivery mechanisms to ensure support gets out, without the difficulties that come with designing a whole new system.
Under our system, there is not more support for some than others. Every worker is treated the same way. This is fair.
Every arm of government and industry is working to keep Australians in jobs and businesses in business, and to build a bridge to recovery on the other side.
We will continue to do what it takes to ensure Australia bounces back stronger.
For information and updates, please go to: www.australia.gov.au
Regards,
Scott Morrison
Prime Minister of Australia
Brilliantly researched, factual and non-partisan destruction of Rudd's reinventions of a very sad history.
No matter how many times they’re exposed as untruthful, Kevin Rudd’s NBN talking points are reproduced with alacrity.
Rudd’s latest host is Junkee, which last week published Rudd’s thoughts entitled “This would be a lot easier if the Liberals hadn’t buggered up the NBN”.
Our 26th Prime Minister claimed that “after the Kevin07 campaign, my government set about connecting the whole country to a National Broadband Network – more than 90 per cent through super-fast fibre-optic cable to the home and business”. And for the avoidance of all doubt: “Bottom line is that after 2007 we acted on our promise to build a fully fibre NBN for the whole nation.”
As Rudd knows very well, there was no such promise. In March 2007, Rudd Labor committed to “the rollout of a new ‘Fibre to the Node’ (FTTN) network”, not to homes and businesses. That FTTN network would “increase speed to a minimum of 12 megabits per second”. To that end, Labor pledged to “make a public equity investment of up to $4.7 billion” and “deliver [it] over five years”.
Only in 2009 did Rudd promise fibre to the premises (FTTP) at a cost of $43 billion. “We connected some 200,000 properties,” Rudd now recalls, “before Tony Abbott came to power in 2013 and everything went to shit”. Actually, it was 98,232 properties they connected, only 51,000 of them FTTP. Rudd promised 90 per cent of us would be connected by 2012, less than 1 per cent of us were connected by 2013 (at ten times the original public cost) on a deployment schedule running out to 2021, but Abbott’s election marks when the wheels fell off?
Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull “then set about sabotaging” the NBN, Rudd says, by announcing “they would only connect remaining homes and businesses to the NBN using old, slow copper phone lines (25 megabits per second, instead of 100Mpbs under our government)”.
Which is patently false. Remaining premises have been and are being connected, variously, via fibre, copper, ethernet, Foxtel’s and Optus’ hybrid fibre coaxial, fixed wireless and satellite. Only 10 per cent of the NBN’s fixed line services do not receive a speed of at least 50Mpbs.
Rudd even contends that reverting to copper – or should we say not reverting to copper – “has also cost more than our original plan”. At $51 billion (so far), the Coalition’s scaled-back NBN did not cost more than Rudd’s “original plan” ($4.7 billion). It has cost more than Rudd’s 2009 plan because that plan’s costings were a complete fantasy. The Communications Department’s 2014 cost-benefit analysis determined that its actual cost of delivery was between $59 billion and $73 billion – and we bet that was lowball.
Finally, Rudd resorted to his Poesque fixation: the imagined destruction of his government by Rupert Murdoch rather than rank incompetence. Rudd maintains, without basis, the Coalition “hated” the NBN because it “threatened the Foxtel business owned by [Abbott’s] media benefactor”, Murdoch, “because broadband would give a platform to his major competitor Netflix”.
Rudd conceived of the NBN in 2007 (a year after Murdoch paid $US580 million for MySpace, lol). Netflix didn’t enter the Australian market until 2015 (after Rudd had blown up two Labor governments and Abbott had pretty much blown up his). The chronology is way out.
Rudd’s conspiracy theory also jars badly with the inconvenient fact Labor appointed Lachlan Murdoch’s consigliere Siobhan McKenna as NBN chairman in March 2013. Upon Abbott’s election six months later, she offered her resignation, which was accepted!
Not a shred of credible evidence that the Sun King considered the NBN a grave commercial threat has ever been presented. Rudd’s are paranoiac ravings and you don’t have to be a News Corp crony to recognise them as exactly that.
Who would take a smiling (smirking) photo, look at it and publish it?
NB - laminated advice sheet ready for the Therapeutic Albeneses on the desk.
Police found sawn-off rifle, balaclavas, machetes, Jihad book, ISIS flag, jerry cans and bomb-making equipment
The frightening thing is that Islamic State follower Agim Kruezi has Australian supporters.
A Queensland man sentenced to 17 years in jail for planning a terrorist attack on Australian soil is fighting to have his prison sentence reduced.
Islamic State ideologue Agim Kruezi was arrested in counter-terrorism raids in Logan, south of Brisbane, in September 2014, and pleaded guilty to making acts of preparation for a terrorist attack and making preparatory acts for incursion to a foreign state.
At the time he was sentenced in 2018, a judge said Kruezi had shown no remorse for his extreme views.
Kruezi has appealed the length of his 17-year sentence, arguing it and the 13-year non-parole period is “manifestly excessive”.
During his arrest, police discovered a loaded 0.22 semiautomatic sawn-off rifle, balaclavas, machetes, a letter from the Department of Foreign Affairs saying his passport was cancelled, a photocopy of a book titled Jihad, and an ISIS flag He had also purchased a jerry can of petrol and bottles to make explosives.
Kruezi, who had planned to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS, had recorded videos of himself shooting arrows into a styrofoam head.
The application to appeal was heard at the Court of Appeal in Brisbane on Monday where barrister Tony Kimmins, representing Kruezi, said the sentencing judge, Roslyn Atkinson, had made an error when assessing his client’s sentence by factoring in the totality of the offences.
Mr Kimmins said the three offences his client pleaded guilty to were conducted over seven months and were not committed as part of a continuing course of conduct and should therefore not have warranted an increased sentence based on the totality of the charges.
“They are separate charges … they seem to be brought together because the they were motivated by the same beliefs and ideological mindset and worldview,” Mr Kimmins said of the Justice Atkinson’s decision.
He said the offences were “different types of offending”.
“It was incorrect for (Justice Atkinson) to come to the conclusion that he’d engaged, over a seven-month period of time, a continuing course of conduct,” he said. “They had to be dealt with specifically.”
Mr Kimmins said Justice Atkinson had made no statement during her sentencing remarks as to by how much she had increased the sentence by dealing with the charges cumulatively.
He said she also did not indicate what benefit she gave to Kruezi to take into account his plea of guilty.
Crown prosecutor Lincoln Crowley said Justice Atkinson’s decision was bound by statutory requirements under the Commonwealth Crimes Act which stipulates judges must impose sentences of severity for terrorism offences. It also dictates that 75 per cent of a sentence must be served before an offender is eligible for parole.
Mr Crowley said there was “no real dispute” during the sentencing about whether accumulation of the charges was appropriate and that a joint submission allowed for totality of the charges to be included. “There was a period of planning which led to a number of acts that led to the offender arriving at the airport on the day and committing an offence on that day,” he said.
During sentencing, Justice Atkinson said Kruezi had shown an “absence of remorse” which meant she could not determine the realistic prospects of rehabilitation.
“There is no evidence the applicant has resiled from his beliefs or otherwise demonstrated that he has done anything to attempt to sway himself from the extremism which led to the motivation for these offences in the first place,” Mr Crowley said.
The Appeal Court will hand down its decision at a later date.