Halo14 posted:

https://youtu.be/IKp8W1jBuHw

Halo14 posted:

https://youtu.be/IKp8W1jBuHw

Amethyst posted:

Halo14 posted:

https://youtu.be/IKp8W1jBuHw

Amethyst posted:

This si loving win

quote:

Treasurer Joe Hockey believes global growth would much slower today if it had not been for Australia's G20 leadership last year that saw world leaders agree to a two per cent growth target.

He has also warned that the Chinese government will not renegotiate its free trade agreement with Australia if Labor successfully blocks the agreement, following similar warnings from Trade Minister Andrew Robb.

Speaking after a two-day G20 finance ministers meeting in Turkey on Sunday, Mr Hockey said global leaders were frustrated by the fact that the International Monetary Fund had downgraded its world growth outlook this year.

"(But) world growth would be lower if not for our leadership and determination last year to have a two per cent target and to roll out a global infrastructure initiative," Mr Hockey said.

He said members of the G20 agreed to renew their vows to implement their structural reforms that would lift growth and create jobs across the globe.

At the G20 Leaders Summit in Brisbane last year, world leaders agreed to an "ambitious goal" to lift the G20's GDP by an additional two per cent by 2018, adding $2 trillion to the global economy.

But in June this year, the IMF downgraded its forecast for global growth in 2015 by 0.2 percentage points to 3.3 per cent – the weakest rate since 2009.

quote:

Don't waste any time worrying about it: Australia is heading into a recession. There are several indicators pointing in this direction, but what will guarantee the slide into the economic doldrums will be the fallout from the Abbott government's first policy "initiative".

The current bleak backdrop has set the scene. The number of negative economic indicators seems to grow every time a new set of statistics is released.

Real average wages are falling, unemployment is up, the quality of work is declining (fewer full-time jobs), the terms of trade have moved adversely, manufacturing is so parlous we may soon even lose our ability to make steel, capital investment has slumped, and the banks are forced to invest in a wildly overheated property market because there's no industrial expansion to speak of.

The simple sums on the car industry make this Joe Hockey decision look suspect at best, and bloody-minded
at worst.
The simple sums on the car industry make this Joe Hockey decision look suspect at best, and bloody-minded at worst. Photo: Nick Moir
Some of these indicators are heading south thanks to international factors, but several are distinctly the result of partisan policy-making and blind-eye turning, such as the deliberate under-manning of inspectors to supervise the Section 457 foreign employee program.

But the coup de grace that will deliver Australia into recession is the shabby deal by Treasurer Joe Hockey and then-Acting Prime Minister Warren Truss to force the carmakers to shut down their manufacturing operations.

The aims were superficial. The ramifications will be dreadful.

The Government would save a few dollars by cancelling the Automotive Transformation Scheme, and the Nationals would get a few cents to distribute to rural voters on marginal farming land. That was, apparently, as far as the economic planning went in their little plan. No attention seems to have been paid to the fallout, which would only affect automotive workers / Labor voters anyway.

Even though Ford is not scheduled to close its operation until 2016 and General Motors and Toyota in 2017, the chickens have started to come home to roost already.

The normal cycle in the car industry is three years for upgrades and six years for a complete new model. As neither of these are happening at the three local factories, designers and engineers are already being laid off.

Even taking into account the continuing design and development operations at GM and Ford, hundreds of engine designers and production engineers have been let go, weakening current employment numbers.

But that's the tip. The iceberg is still to come.

When all the car factories close, that will add about 12,500 people to the dole queue. Most of the parts suppliers will also close their plants, adding a further 33,000 people.

However, when you apply the six-to-one multiplier effect endorsed by the 2008 Bracks report on the car industry and the assistance provided, Senator Nick Xenophon​ reckons there will be between 150,000 and 200,000 people out of an automotive-related job.

The Department of Industry reckons there are around 930,000 people employed in manufacturing around the country. So if 200,000 automotive workers lose their jobs, that will represent more than 21 per cent of the entire manufacturing workforce.

Yet no one in the Abbott government seems to be aware of the calamity that is quickly approaching. It is going to be a body blow, not just to unemployment levels and welfare payments, but also to manufacturing output due to the loss of $29 billion in local value-adding. In addition, the trade deficit will expand because a further 150,000 vehicles will have to be imported to meet demand – and Australia will also lose the benefit of Toyota's annual export of 90,000 vehicles to the Middle East.

Add to that the elimination of the car industry's capital expenditures, which were running at a reduced $1 billion a year after the Global Financial Crisis.

Contrary to popular belief, GM and Toyota were well advanced on planning for new models that would have been exportable. Hockey's 2014-15 budget papers showed the car industry was proposing to invest $3.8 billion in new models over the four-year cycle.

That total might not look grand in comparison to what the mining industry was investing when commodity prices were at historic highs, but it would probably be gratefully received now.

The simple sums on the car industry make the Hockey-Truss decision look suspect at best, and bloody-minded at worst.

Assuming those 45,500 full-time automotive workers in the carmakers and the Tier One companies earn the average manufacturing wage of $69,000, they would pay $642 million a year in tax. If the 200,000 indirect employees in Tiers Two and Three were used, say, 25 per cent of the time on automotive projects, they would pay $705 million in tax, making a total of $1.35 billion in tax receipts from automotive manufacturing workers in a single year.

Given that the maximum assistance available under the ATS was $6.6 billion over 10 years to 2020, or $660 million each year, it is clear the car industry repays the government's investment each year, twofold. That's a pretty good return on any investment, and one unlikely to be emulated by Truss's agricultural sector.

Some of Hockey's calculations have proved wide of the mark in the past two years, where his performance as a predictor of national debt has made former treasurer Wayne Swan look like Nostradamus​. But even Hockey should be able to see that the automotive sector was a net contributor to the economy, even on the most superficial level.

When you add in the intangibles such as balance of trade, export income, rapid technology adoption by the carmakers and technology spin-off to smaller, Australian suppliers, the car industry's absence will be felt long after 2017.

But it's the 200,000 people that will hit the dole queue soon after next year's federal election that will seal Australia's fate. When those people lose their spending power and start drawing on the public purse, there will be a recession all right. It's just a question of how deep, and for how long.

quote:

Two years on from the Coalition's 2013 election victory, one of the three experts who "independently verified" its campaign costings has been found guilty of breaching auditing standards.

Len Scanlan, a former Queensland auditor general, has been penalised by CPA Australia for failing to uphold professional standards in the work he did for the Coalition.

But in an unusual move reported on the CPA website on May 25 the disciplinary tribunal found there were "exceptional circumstances" involving his work for the Coalition's Joe Hockey and ordered his name not be published.

Mr Scanlan was one of three members of the shadow treasurer's independent review panel. The other two were Geoff Carmody, a former head of Access Economics, and Peter Shergold​, a former head of the prime minister's department. Mr Scanlan is the only one who belonged to a professional accounting association, and so the only one subject to sanction.

The panel produced a four-paragraph report released two days before the vote saying it believed the Coalition's costings were "based on fair and reasonable assumptions" and represented "a fair estimate" of their impact on the budget.

It enabled Mr Hockey to claim: "all of our policies are fiscally responsible and independently verified".

But in a complaint to CPA Australia, economist Betty Con Walker and emeritus accounting professor Bob Walker pointed out that the relevant standard requires accountants offering assurance to provide a description of any significant inherent limitations on their findings. One limitation was that the finding was prepared without direct access to Commonwealth records. Another was that several of the Parliamentary Budget Office costings relied on by the panel were themselves described by the office as being of "low to medium reliability".

The panel itself did not produce a statement of the level of assurance it was prepared to provide for each item costed, as required by the auditing standard, nor did it disclaim responsibility for Coalition's achievement of the results as required by the standard.

The costing endorsed by the panel found the Coalition's program would improve rather than worsen the 2014-15 budget deficit.

Professor Walker and Dr Con Walker's complaint to CPA Australia follows another they made to the Institute of Chartered Accountants after the 2010 election which fined two Perth accountants for breaching professional standards in their work for the Coalition.

The accountants had allowed Mr Hockey to describe their work as an audit which it was not, and to say that they had certified "in law that our numbers are accurate".

A subsequent treasury review found mistakes including double counting amounting to $11 billion.

The CPA Australia disciplinary tribunal decided to impose no monetary penalty on Mr Scanlan in May and instead imposed "the penalty of an admonishment". It "exercised its discretion" to direct that his name not be disclosed.

Mr Scanlan holds the CPA National President's Award and in 2003 he was awarded a Centenary Medal for distinguished service to the public sector.

He told Fairfax Media he did not want to comment on the tribunal's finding.

Professor Walker said it was "hard to think of a more blatant ethical breach than the publication of a defective report on government finances just days before a national election". The primary responsibility of accountants was to act in the public interest.

The Coalition was forced to use an outside panel to cost its 2013 election promises because of a provision inserted in the Parliamentary Budget Office Act by Labor that prevents the office from costing policies confidentially once an election has been called.

It means that Labor will face a similar problem in this election as will any accountant who works for it.

quote:

One of four refugees sent to Cambodia in a $55 million deal with Australia only three months ago wants to quit the impoverished nation.

Three others, an Iranian couple and Iranian man, have also complained about their lives in the capital Phnom Penh, sources say.

A 24-year-old ethnic Rohingya man from Myanmar has told Cambodian officials he wants to return to his homeland.

The decision is a blow to attempts by Australian immigration officials to convince hundreds of other refugees on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru that Cambodia is a promised land of opportunity with mosques, jobs, football and martial arts, no violent crime or even stray dogs.

Ian Rintoul, Sydney-based director of the Australian advocacy group Refugee Action Coalition, said the four refugees agreed to give up their hopes of reaching Australia and take a one-way ticket to Cambodia in the belief they would receive lump sum payments in excess of $10,000.

"They all went with the idea that they would get the money that they were being told they would get and be able to go somewhere else," Mr Rintoul told Associated Press.

"The government has dribbled the money to them. They've been kept in a very isolated arrangement and there's been no prospect for them," he said.

Mr Rintoul said the Iranian couple never received enough money to "even subsist, let alone do anything with it."

"They complained bitterly that they were struggling to survive in Cambodia…the whole resettlement arrangement is going belly-up," he said.

Refugee agency sources in Phnom Penh confirmed to Fairfax Media that the four refugees have been unhappy despite living in an Australian-paid luxury villa and being promised training, help finding work, language tuition, health insurance and other benefits.

"Their movements are restricted…they want to live the way they were promised they would be allowed to," said one source who asked for anonymity.

Australia has spent a staggering $15 million to resettle the four on top of $40 million in additional development aid the Abbott government gave the regime of strongman Hun Sen for signing the controversial agreement at a champagne-sipping ceremony last year.

Cambodian Interior Ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak told Associated Press the Rohingya man had contacted the Myanmar embassy in Phnom Penh asking to return home.

He said he did not know the embassy's response.

Halo14 posted:

Yes coal can do that too!

Zenithe posted:

Admittedly I was groggy when I watched it.... but did they say that they coal lower coals emissions by like half or something?

gay picnic defence posted:

Happy Monday, I saw a few things in the news today thatstood out as amusing if they weren't so sad/stupid.

To kick it off, guess who had a big mug of their own bathwater with their cereal this morning?

lol

Not sure about his numbers but I guess we should all be really grateful that Sloppy Joe cut the car manufacturing subsidies because otherwise we'd be even deeper in government debt or something.


I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that the LNP's numbers were dodgy in the last election



Cambodia, so poo poo that people are prepared to face persecution back home than live there in a luxury mansion.

Amethyst posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF2-0Chhz1E

This si loving win

Halo14 posted:

https://youtu.be/IKp8W1jBuHw

quote:

Comments are disabled for this video.

quote:

The decision is a blow to attempts by Australian immigration officials to convince hundreds of other refugees on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru that Cambodia is a promised land of opportunity with mosques, jobs, football and martial arts, no violent crime or even stray dogs.

SynthOrange posted:

No dogs on the street! That is one lie too far!

Laserface posted:

So what the gently caress do you do if you are swabbed and they detect something you used days ago? just admit that you smoked a joint 2 days ago but not in the last 4-8 hours?

Unimpressed posted:

I love how Bolt is so in love with himself that of course Di Natale appearing on his show is "sending a signal", even when DN denies it. It couldn't possibly be that he just wants some air time with a different audience.

Burn Down Canberra posted:

Easy win for the greens. Di Natale was very impressive. He was especially impressive at the end of the interview where he saw off Bolts nonsense easily. So bolt if anything has won the greens some votes.

Di Natale might just be the most impressive politician in Australia. It's a big claim but he is articulate and can speak across audiences. He handled Bolts union bashing better than an alp politician would.

Les Affaires posted:

Net win for the Greens, because some Bolt viewers will look at him and say "hey this guy isn't bad at all". Some... not all. But some.

QUACKTASTIC posted:

Weird times

Alan Jones becomes voice of campaign fighting environment law change

SynthOrange posted:

No dogs on the street! That is one lie too far!

gay picnic defence posted:

Cambodia, so poo poo that people are prepared to face persecution back home than live there in a luxury mansion.

quote:

The coverage of the refugees in Austria has been amazing. You can really see the differences between different channels and their agendas. They even slip up and call them refugees rather than asylum seekers sometimes!

open24hours posted:

With a million or so new people all looking to start new lives Germany's going to have another economic miracle and be even more resented by the rest of Europe.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Maybe I've just been desensitised by 'boat people' being used in official government reports, but what's wrong with asylum seeker?

open24hours posted:

With a million or so new people all looking to start new lives Germany's going to have another economic miracle and be even more resented by the rest of Europe.

GoldStandardConure posted:

It implies that they are seeking asylum, whether they require it or not, where as refugee implies that we have already determined they should receive it.

Digiwizzard posted:

This seems like a bizarre semantic twist. It's very hard to reinterpret asylum seekers into "they're just seeking asylum.. for fun?!" whereas refugee is not only easier to redefine but is already being turned derogatory in the form of the dimunitive "Fugee".

MysticalMachineGun posted:

I've never heard that term outside of the late nineties band.

The term refugee implies they're proper refugees, with protected status, and hence we should help them. "Asylum seekers" says these browns might not be proper refugees They stopped using "boat people" because they didn't want us to think of them as people either.