Goldberg suggests Bible supports transitioning children!

I can find nothing like that in the Bible.  Jesus was concerned with the spiritual welfare of chidren.  He said, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 19:14), but said nothing about hacking off their body parts.  Once again Goldberg  defiles the Ashkenazi surname she wrongfully uses.  Her real name is Caryn Elaine Johnson

Whoopi Goldberg recently made a statement that shocked many people. On Thursday’s broadcast of ABC’s daytime talk show “The View,” she suggested that the Bible would support parents having the right to subject their minor children to sex reassignment surgeries.

“Now, what the hell is going on in this country? That’s what I want to know,” Goldberg began, asserting that Republicans had simply voted to punish Zephyr because they didn’t like being forced to listen to an opposing point of view.

“What are the rules that say, ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m going to get a whole bunch of people to think like I think and we’re going to ban you from talking,’” Goldberg continued. “When did that become the law of the land?”

The conversation stemmed from a Montana lawmaker, Zooey Zephyr, who is trans-identifying and who faced disciplinary action for breaking the rules of decorum. Zephyr lashed out at Republican colleagues who opposed transgender surgeries for minors.

Goldberg and co-host Sunny Hostin criticized the move, claiming it was proof that Republicans were banning speech.

But Whoopi’s statement was the most shocking. She claimed that if the GOP believed in parental rights then parents should be able to consent to life-altering and irreversible procedures for their children. She even went as far as to say, “God was really clear!”

It’s hard to believe that Goldberg would suggest such a thing. It’s even more disturbing to think of how she could believe that the Bible would support taking away a minor’s right to make their own decision about their body.

Gender transition treatments are not only dangerous, but they can have long-term psychological and physical consequences. No one should be pressuring a child to undergo such treatments. It’s important that parents talk to their children about the risks and give them the opportunity to make their own decisions.

https://libertyonenews.com/god-was-really-clear-goldberg-suggests-bible-supports-transitioning-children/

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Aussie EV drivers will soon benefit from nation-wide fast charging program

This is amusing. It's like a dog chasing its tail. It never catches up. The facility will entice more people to go electric, which will heighten the chance that when you roll up to recharge there will always be someone there recharging ahead of you. Frequently spending hours waiting to refuel will not tbe attractive. Electric cars are ok as suburban runabouts but are a pain for long trips

Electric car owners will be able to drive from Adelaide to Alice Springs, cross the Nullarbor, and run from Tasmania to Far North Queensland without stressing about charging, thanks to a new network coming to Australian roads.

A Federally funded program working with the NRMA to put 117 fast chargers on Australian highways will bring an end to “range anxiety”, according to Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.

“EVs aren’t just for the cities, and Australians who drive long distances either for work or for holidays should be able to reap the benefits of cars that are cheaper and cleaner to run,” he said.

“We’re making range anxiety a thing of the past. This project will help close the gaps and known black spots in the network and make it possible to drive from Darwin to Perth, Broken Hill to Adelaide, and from Brisbane to Tennant Creek in the NT.

“This national rollout will help put more Australians in the driver’s seat of cheaper and cleaner cars.”

The Federal Government’s “Driving the Nation” fund will spend $39.3 million ensuring electric car chargers are placed at 150 kilometre intervals on national highways.

Full technical details – including the charging speed of the network – have not been released.

The NRMA will be using purpose built charger models for various public charging locations depending upon environmental conditions, location and power availability, sourcing chargers from manufacturers including Tritium, Kempower and ABB.

A spokesman for the organisation said plug power for the public charging locations “will initially range from 75kW to around 300kW”.

The fastest chargers currently used in Australia can add around 300 kilometres of range in about 20 minutes to high-end electric cars with more than 500 kilometres of range.

Cheaper models such as the Nissan Leaf, that can’t handle the flow of energy at need about an hour to add around 200 kilometres of range.

Mr Bowen drives a Tesla Model 3 – Australia’s most popular electric car.

Priced from about $64,000 drive-away, the Tesla offers around 491 kilometres of driving range.

Tesla has a widespread “Supercharger” network that is not available to owners of other electric cars.

Carly Irving-Dolan, NRMA chief executive for energy and infrastructure, said the network would be the charging backbone of Australia.

“The NRMA is excited to be partnering with the Australian Government to grow our regional network of fast charging stations across the country because we fundamentally believe that regional Australia should not be left behind,” she said.

“Australia’s expansive landscape presents some unique and local challenges to ensure that we are ready for more electric vehicles on our roads.

“NRMA has over 100 years’ experience helping Australia address transport challenges and we are committed to building on this work through this national charging network.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/motoring/motoring-news/aussie-ev-drivers-will-soon-benefit-from-nationwide-fast-charging-program/news-story/909066df75c6d7816031a4b8d47de804

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Australians have made the wrong choice about housing for the last 40 years

A lot of hot air below. He says that our wish for comfortable and convenient housing is all wrong and we need to completely re-do how we house ourselves. He is right that there is a housing shortage problem but seems to think that what we do about the problem has to be sweeping in some unspecified way

That is nonsense. There is only one basic problem behind the housing shortage: We are not buiding houses fast enough to match our population growth. And the big influence behind the population growth is massive immigratiom. Put a moratorium on immigration for five years and the problem would vanish. The shortage is a government-created one and with little more than a stroke of the pen, the Federal government could end it

That is not going to happen of course but we should not pretend that the problem is mysterious, complex or insoluble. It is a product of meddling in the market by governments, including local governments that obstruct new building on NIMBY and Greenie grounds.

Abolishing the right of local governments to obstruct new house-building would unleash a surge of new dwellings and thus drive prices down to more affordable levels

The weekend auction battles around suburban Australia are leaving more than just emotional scars on the losing bidders.

Our love affair with property, which has driven the cost of housing to eye-watering levels and left Australians among the most indebted people in the world, is literally destroying our way of life and that of future generations.

The series we start today is not just a response to the high-priced houses and super-sized mortgages we have inflicted upon ourselves this century. It reflects the mounting evidence that one of our most basic needs – shelter – has become a dangerous financial instrument.

People cannot afford to live where they need. Our banks’ business models are based on one asset class – housing. The Reserve Bank must make decisions about the entire economy hamstrung by the huge level of mortgage debt held by ordinary Australians.

We have an army of mum and dad landlords who churn through their properties as they chase a capital gain because of the structure of our tax system.

The young and poorly paid, who a generation ago could afford their own home, now hope for an inheritance or loan from their parents to get a slice of the property market.

According to economists Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood and housing advocate John Myers, housing is more than just the size of your mortgage or inability to find an affordable rental.

They have developed what they describe as the “housing theory of everything”, which argues high-priced housing is at the heart of the many economic ills facing the globe.

Housing costs dictate where people live, the jobs they have, the size of their families and how they lead their lives. They mean we have to spend more on mortgage repayments or rent, giving us less to spend on goods and services. More broadly, people cannot live where they will be most productive. Businesses can’t get access to the people they need to operate to their fullest potential.

The world’s most productive areas, the places where the biggest breakthroughs are made, are in cities. But if we make them prohibitively expensive, the chance of a scientific or technological innovation is reduced.

At almost every point over the past 40 years, when given policy alternatives around housing, Australians collectively have made the wrong choice.

From local council chambers to the federal parliament, the wrong policy road has been taken.

Robert Menzies, and the state governments of the 1940s and 1950s, made Australia one of the great home-owning democracies through their public housing programs. But these have withered for decades.

It’s not just buying a house. Australian renters are, by any international comparison, poorly treated, be it from owning a pet to the length of tenure they might enjoy.

That’s exacerbated by a tax system that effectively encourages investors to own a single property who often struggle to deal with the issues that come with being a good landlord.

This series outlines the problem that is staring us in the face, how we came to make the decisions that created the problem, and some prospective solutions.

The solutions are not easy. If they were, previous governments would have tackled them. Instead, they have again and again kicked the issue off into the future or, even worse, come up with proposals that would make the situation worse.

Unless something changes, we are consigning ourselves to more economic pain. That’s pain that will be passed on to the next generation and the next.

As Grattan’s Brendan Coates warns, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the world inhabited by Jane Austen, where property was the way to wealth for just the upper echelons of society.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Australian housing industry cannot continue on as if nothing is wrong.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/australians-have-made-the-wrong-choice-about-housing-for-the-last-40-years-20230406-p5cyqn.html

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Sydney statue defaced in Anzac Day protest

So much hate. Why does something that happened in 1826 still matter? Leftists are just using it to keep their hate alive

The article below closes with a reference to the Appin massacre, which was part of a war between Aborigines and settlers. Unmentioned is that Governor Macquarie was initially a peacemaker and that his orders were to capture, not kill Aborigines. The campaign he ordered was out of frustration with attacks on settlers


A community in Sydney’s north-west is angry after a statue was defaced with red paint ahead of a local Anzac Day dawn service.

The Lachlan Macquarie statue in Windsor’s McQuade Park was doused in red paint and handprints alongside the phrases “here stands a mass murderer who ordered the genocide” and “no pride in genocide”.

Mayor Sarah McMahon said she was alerted to the incident after the dawn service and said upon inspection, the paint was still “significantly wet”.

“To me, it had been done quite recently,” she said. “I am really saddened there are members of our community out there that think this is the appropriate way to get their message across.”

McMahon arranged for council staff to clean the statue and police were also called to the scene.

“We are a military community here in the Hawkesbury and to have this done on a day of such national and local significance to me is appalling,” she said. “I expect the police will do their job thoroughly.”

Local resident Tim Kelly took to Facebook to share an image of the defaced statue, receiving hundreds of horrified comments in response.

“The day was about our servicemen, not about any other agenda,” he said. “Everyone is absolutely disgusted.”

The statue has been the target of protests before. In 2017, the statue was graffitied with the words “murderer” as part of an Australia Day protest.

Monument Australia, an organisation that records monuments throughout Australia, states on their website the statue was commissioned during the bicentenary celebrations in 1994 of European settlement in the Hawkesbury.

“There is controversy around Macquarie’s treatment of Indigenous people,” the website states.

“In April 1816, Macquarie ordered soldiers under his command to kill or capture any Aboriginal people they encountered during a military operation aimed at creating a sense of terror. At least 14 men, women and children were brutally killed, some shot, others driven over a cliff.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/absolutely-disgusted-sydney-statue-defaced-in-anzac-day-protest-20230425-p5d32t.html

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I am, damn it, proud to be English

SIMON COOKE voices below a peculiarly English form of patriotism.  England is a land of emotional understatement and it shows in their form of patriotism. Their emotional understatement serves them well but is rarely understood by outsiders.  I have no feelings similar to those expressed by Cooke below despite being of substantially English ancestry and culturally in many ways English. 

But I am a 5th generation Australian and am very much a product of Australian culture  -- which is a culture of relaxation.  There was a time when Australia had a lot of half-millionaires.  When they got to that stage they decided that further financial progress required too much effort and instead retired to the golf course and fishing  

I am similar. I got into the lower rungs of being a millionaire via real estate investment but many years ago I sold all my properties and concentrated on blogging instead.  My Serbian girlfriend does not understand that decision at all. And her Serbian patriotism is intense

Australian culture is just about the opposite to the hard-driving culture of America and we feel very thankful for that.  America seems insane to us

Take in the view and whisper a little prayer of thanks for the men and women who made this place we call England. Because it is beautiful and we should be proud of those who made it beautiful.

In the latest instalment of The Hookland Chronicles, David writes about an encounter with J. G Ballard, that most suburban of England’s great writers. It starts with Ballard’s advice:

In many ways it was a ride in a BBC cab with J.G. Ballard that led to the creation of Hookland. To be achingly specific it was only one sentence. His advice was: “Concentrate on place, nothing without a sense of it is ever any good.”

Much is said about identity and lived experience. A good deal of it is little more than selfish indulgence and much else is a sort of political cosh to strike down the baddies. But identity matters and Ballard was right as are the Hookland Chronicles: our first, longest and strongest identity is with place. When, in opening his poem in praise of Sussex, Kipling spoke about men having small hearts, he described this truth.

So my identity isn’t about my sexuality, my gender or my skin colour. Nor is that identity shaped by an intersectionality implied by those things. No, my identity is defined by a series of places, by where I was born in South London, by Hull, my university, by an adult life in the South Pennines, by Upton Park and Bradford City Hall. Above all, my identity is shaped by the place that contains all these places, the thing that defines so much about what I believe and how I feel.

That place is England.

Where to begin? In my last speech as a Bradford councillor, I spoke about the places I’d represented for all those years:

“I was sat on top of Denholme Edge the other day eating a ham and tomato sandwich, admiring the view. Much of what I see from there is Bingley Rural. And it is beautiful. Anyway I was sat there and I got to thinking. Each way I looked, into every nook of the places in that view there was a story – something that had been done to make the place a little better.”

What you see from Denholme Edge is a picture of England. Denholme isn’t a posh or grand place, most of you will never have been there and, if you have, it is most likely just driving through on the A629. Like all the places I represented, Denholme exists because of wool. The town, don’t ever call it a village, was noted for wool sorting, the process of separating the different qualities of wool. Today it is an ordinary place, a mix of flats, back-to-back terraces, a few streets of semi-detached homes and a couple of modern estates. The Edge is the ridge behind the town, running from Edge Bottom up onto Thornton Moor.

Everything we see from that ridge is shaped by men and women over hundreds of years, thousands if we include the shadowy remains of a Roman camp and the last few stones from an Iron Age fort. This is England, a kempt place without wilderness, a place made by men. When we talk about England's ancient woodland or its wonderful landscape - ‘outstanding natural beauty’ as the bureaucrats call it - we are not talking of the truly natural since even the shape of the hills involves the scars of quarrying and agriculture’s management of the land. What we look at from Denholme Edge is a place shaped by the love and care of people, mostly forgotten, who lived in England.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the song “There’ll Always be an England”, it comes across ever so slightly sneering: “...the song invokes various clichés of English rural life, liberty, and the Empire”. But while it isn’t the greatest song and filled with clichés, it still makes me stand up a little straighter and smile. On occasion singing it will bring a tear to the eye because the song is uncomplicated and unquestioningly proud of England: 

“There'll always be an England

While there's a country lane

Wherever there's a cottage small

Beside a field of grain

There'll always be an England

While there's a busy street

Wherever there's a turning wheel

A million marching feet”

As with all the best patriotism, the sentiment isn’t about the great and good, there is no harking back to glorious victories, ancient monarchs, or great leaders but rather an invoking of the ordinary, of you and me as the definition of England. Everything about England was shaped by the English, not by the list of names you learned in history but, as Kipling’s charm puts it:

 “...the mere uncounted folk 

Of whose life and death is none 

Report or lamentation”

If you are in England, take a moment to pause and look around you. Not for signs of greatness but for signs of love. Look over the wall at the allotment gardens with their neat rows of beans and cabbage lined up behind a rickety old shed. Walk round the park and take in a green space within the busy city. Wander along a suburban street, have a nosey into front gardens. And find a hill to climb where you can look out at the place that your fellow English men and women have made. It doesn’t matter whether that view is a slightly tired old mill town like Denholme, the Georgian wonder of Bath or the rolling Downs of Sussex or North Kent. Take in the view and whisper a little prayer of thanks for the men and women who made this place we call England. Because it is beautiful and we should be proud of those who made it beautiful.

https://simoncooke.substack.com/p/i-am-damn-it-proud-to-be-english

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Cleopatra was black?

A further instance of such distortions can be found here, where a British historian claims that there was an African population in Britain during the Roman empire. Also see here and here

Netflix has been accused of 'blackwashing' history by casting a black actress as Cleopatra in a new docuseries about the Macedonian-Greek ruler of Egypt.

But Egyptians have reacted with horror to the denial of records which show Cleopatra was Macedonian-Greek. An Egyptian lawyer has filed a case with the country's public prosecutor demanding that Netflix be shutdown.

Meanwhile Cairo's former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass condemned the documentary as 'completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.'

Hawass said the only rulers of Egypt known to have been black were the Kushite kings of the 25th Dynasty (747-656 BC).

'Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is black,' he added and called on his countrymen to take a stand against the streaming giant.

On Sunday, lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary filed a complaint with the public prosecutor demanding that he take 'the necessary legal measures' to block access to Netflix.

He alleged the show featured content that violated Egypt's media laws and accused Netflix of trying to 'promote the Afrocentric thinking ... which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.'

Cleopatra was famously played by white English actress Elizabeth Taylor opposite Richard Burton as Mark Anthony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's historical epic from 1963.

Three years ago plans for a new movie about the queen starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot sparked a backlash from people insisting the role should go to an Egyptian or African actress.

Gadot defended the decision, saying: 'We were looking for a Macedonian actress that could fit Cleopatra. She wasn't there, and I was very passionate about Cleopatra.'

The fury at Netflix's right-on programming comes after it appeared to have ditched the woke messaging last year.

Netflix took a hit in the first half of 2022, losing about 1,170 million subscribers as rivals such as Paramount+ and Disney+ raked them in.

The huge decline was seen by some as a direct consequence of the company's late response to demands from its viewers to tone down their woke agenda.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11990657/Netflix-turns-comments-Queen-Cleopatra-trailer-blackwashing-claims.html

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Some Americans Shouldn’t Get Another COVID-19 Vaccine Shot, FDA Says

A big change: The vaccines we have all been using are now de-authorized. Only the bivalents are now approved, despite there being little evidence of their effectiveness. Amazing. A "bivalent" targets more than one strain of the virus

Some Americans cannot receive another COVID-19 vaccine dose, U.S. regulators said on April 18, as they made sweeping changes to the vaccine system.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the changes, including replacing the old Pfizer and Moderna vaccines with updated bivalent shots that had previously only been available as boosters.

Regulators are also scaling back the number of recommended doses for most individuals, including people who haven’t received a shot.

Key changes include:

Most unvaccinated Americans are still being encouraged to get a COVID-19 vaccine but only need a single dose of a bivalent, the FDA said. The exception is young children. Children aged 6 months through 5 years can receive two doses of Moderna’s bivalent while those aged 6 months through 4 years can get three doses of Pfizer’s bivalent.

Americans who have received a primary series of a COVID-19 vaccine and one of the bivalent boosters still cannot get an additional dose, unless they’re in certain groups.

Any individual 65 years old or older can receive a bivalent dose, even if they’ve already received one, provided four months or more has elapsed since their last shot.

People aged 5 and older and deemed immune compromised can get another bivalent at least two months after their last shot, even if it was a bivalent, and can get additional doses “at the discretion of, and at intervals determined by, their healthcare provider.”

Little Data to Support Bivalents

The FDA authorized the original vaccines in late 2020 based on clinical trial efficacy data. The original vaccines targeted the Wuhan virus strain, which hasn’t circulated since 2020.

The updated bivalents target the Wuhan strain and the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the Omicron strain. The subvariants were displaced in 2022.

Regulators authorized the bivalents as boosters in 2022 despite no clinical trial data being available. In letters formally announcing the bivalents as replacing the old vaccines, the FDA made clear that scientists aren’t sure whether the bivalents protect against COVID-19.

“Based on the totality of the scientific evidence available, FDA concluded that it is reasonable to believe that Pfizer-BioNTech COVID?19 Vaccine, Bivalent may be effective in individuals 6 months of age and older for the prevention of COVID-19,” the letter to Pfizer states. The same language was used for Moderna’s shot.

Most of the data supporting Pfizer’s expanded authorization comes from the old vaccines and a bivalent that has never been used in the United States. The only trial data for the available bivalent showed that children had higher levels of neutralizing antibodies when they received a bivalent. Antibodies are thought to protect against COVID-19.

No clinical trial data for Moderna’s shot was cited, and no efficacy data was cited for either vaccine.

Dr. Peter Marks, a top FDA vaccine official, claimed in a briefing that “the available data continue [to] demonstrate that vaccines prevent all serious outcomes from COVID-19, including hospitalization and death.” It’s not clear which data he was citing, and the FDA did not respond to a request for comment.

The FDA cited a single observational study in its letter to Pfizer. English researchers reported in The Lancet that vaccination with an old vaccine in addition to previous infection provided strong protection against symptomatic COVID-19 through March 2022. Other research has found that prior infection alone is as good as or better than vaccination.

Other observational studies have found the updated vaccines provide transient protection against hospitalization and poor protection against infection.

Seroprevalence data indicates a majority of Americans have recovered from COVID-19, the FDA noted. That’s an important acknowledgement, Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, told The Epoch Times in an email.

Gandhi said she agrees that only the elderly and immune suppressed should receive another dose, as opposed to the entire population. Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said that he sees the vaccines as largely unnecessary.

“The current vaccines are out-of-date, any new ones will be out-of-date by the time they are generally available, and mostly everybody already has SARS-CoV-2 antibodies anyway,” Risch told The Epoch Times via email. “At this point, the vaccines are thus not generally useful products for serving a public health function.”

Change Made to Boost Uptake

Uptake of the vaccines was high after they were authorized, but has dropped considerably since. Just 16.7 percent of the U.S. population has received a bivalent shot, compared to 69.4 percent who received a primary series of the old vaccine.

FDA officials said the changes announced on April 18 were made to simplify the vaccine composition, reduce the complexity of the available doses, and increase uptake.

“This approach will help us achieve higher vaccination coverage across the country,” Marks told reporters. “If anything comes out of this action, we’re hoping that it can encourage people who have not received the bivalent booster to go out and consider getting one.”

The newly rolled out system is for the spring, as officials are planning to meet over the summer to discuss a fall regimen. They plan to adapt COVID-19 vaccines to the influenza model, updating strains in the vaccines each year.

Advisers to the agency backed the pivot to bivalents in a January discussion. Some said they favor updating the strains in the future.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/some-americans-shouldnt-get-another-covid-19-vaccine-shot-fda-says_5203409.html

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Sending little kids to childcare is not good for them

Judith Sloan mentions a number of considerations below but fails to mention that most children in childcare have much higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol -- compared with their levels at home. Chidcare is DEMONSTRABLY bad for chidren. You can see it at the physical level. Organizational childcare stresses and worries the little kids. They feel afraid, not secure. It destroys their confidence in their environment. And it sometimes has lasting bad effects. See, for instance:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23772818/

Children develop best in a loving home. It has to be a really bad home for childcare centers to be beneficial


I have a confession to make: I never sent my children to childcare. They did go to kinder/preschool when there were four for a few days each week during the school term, but that was it. Sorry, kids.

Actually, I’m not sorry. While I was at work, they were happy at home being looked after by the same loving nanny we were lucky to have. Even to this day, I’m not convinced of the benefits of centre-based childcare, particularly for very young children.

I get it; a lot of parents have no choice but to place their kids in childcare centres for financial reasons. It’s only by going down this path that the generous taxpayer-funded subsidies are available. Notwithstanding the restricted hours these centres operate, they do provide potentially more reliable care than (expensive) nannies or relatives during the core working hours.

I also get why many parents want to believe that centre-based childcare, including the incorporated preschool programs, offers their children a range of benefits such as socialising with other children and play-based learning (whatever that is). Less mention is made of the frequent bouts of infectious diseases that children pick up at these centres and the rapid-fire phone calls from management to collect the children within five minutes.

It has got to the point where parents are brainwashed into believing that it is their civic duty to plonk their very young child in a childcare centre as soon as possible after birth and return to the workforce in order to boost the economy and pay taxes. Throw in a bit of self-actualisation and is there really any choice?

Mind you, the busybody feminists whose aim in life is to have every woman working full-time, pre- and post-partum, remain frustrated that so many young mother apparently are happy to work part-time while their children are young.

To be sure, many more women with children now participate in the workforce than was once the case. In 1991, just under 60 per cent of women with children under the age of 15 worked; by 2020, this proportion had climbed to nearly 75 per cent. But the majority of mothers with young children (4 and under) opt to work part-time.

These same activist feminists, who have generally had dream runs in the workforce ending in cushy corporate board positions, argue that it is the way that childcare fee subsidies work that explains the dominance of part-time work among new mothers. Those extra days of work are simply not worth it. It doesn’t occur to these campaigners that most mothers actually prefer to spend as much time as possible with their babies and toddlers because this is good for the children and for them.

This relentless advocacy has all the hallmarks of the old Soviet model of child-rearing. Women were forced to leave their very young children (cared for by women workers) in order to undertake full-time jobs to support the communist state. The idea that mothers would be given any choice was of course anathema to the autocratic rulers – they must be made to work for the state.

The early model of the kibbutz in Israel also involved communal child-rearing in which some women would be assigned the role of looking after all the children while the other women undertook the various other tasks at hand. In some instances, parents wouldn’t see their children all week. Unsurprisingly, this feature of the kibbutz ultimately didn’t survive as parents expressed their desire to be fully involved in bringing up their own children.

So let’s go back to current day Australia and examine the articles of faith to which the Labor party (and to some extent, the Liberal party) adhere. They are: centre-based childcare is good; it must be heavily subsidised by taxpayers, with the most generous assistance being directed to those on the lowest incomes; renaming it early childhood education and asserting that it is beneficial for children, both in the present and the future, provides the basis for even more generous subsidisation, even ‘free’ childcare.

In Labor’s case, you can throw in the potential for the unionisation of childcare workers and the scope for generous pay rises based on either arbitration or enterprise bargaining. Let’s face it, there’s no hope of getting nannies into the union and mothers staying at home are no good either.

One of the most astonishing aspects of the debate about childcare and the role of government is the relative absence of research on the impact on the children. There is a very old study – the Perry study from the US – that is often quoted to support the benefits of structured, free-of-charge childcare. But the numbers in the study were tiny and the parents selected for the study came from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds. (Some of the fathers were in jail.)

It is hardly surprising that those children who attended childcare compared with the control group did better on a number of measures, including behaviour, progress at school, staying out of jail and the like. But there was never any scope to generalise the findings because they were mainly driven by the socioeconomic backgrounds of the treatment and control groups.

A more recent study and quoted by Rod Liddle in this magazine relates to childcare in Quebec. The provincial government decided many years ago to provide close-to-free childcare; the rest of Canada did not follow suit. According to Liddle, ‘studies showed a significant development decrease in Quebec children relative to those in the rest of Canada’. He quotes some alarming figure in relation to ‘social competence, external problems and adult-child conflict.’

Perhaps the most worrying finding is that the negative effects of childcare appear to be long-lived. ‘By age 15, extensive hours before age four-and-a-half [in childcare] predicted problem behaviours… even after controlling for daycare quality, socioeconomic background and parenting quality.’

In the case of Australia, we are only too aware of declining school student performance over the past decade and a half, coinciding with a period of rising participation in centre-based childcare. Of course, this correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation but it’s not a great start for the advocates of further government subsidisation of childcare.

A final word of warning: when you read about the benefits of early childhood education in Australia, a lot of conflating goes on. Centre-based childcare for very young children is not early childhood education and a few days per week of preschool for three- and four-year-olds is not full-time childcare.

Keep these differences in mind when assessing the self-interested demands being made by the various lobbyists.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/but-what-about-the-children/ ?

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‘Grossly unfair’: Self Managed Super Fund Association wants tax proposal ditched

This would effectively be a wealth tax. Interesting that it hits super funds only. People who manage their own money (with or without advice) would not be affected. Once again it is lower income earners who would get hit. I have never liked super and the fees you have to pay for it. I have always made my own decisions. So I will not be affected

The Self Managed Super Fund Association has called on the federal government to drop its proposal to tax unrealised gains by super funds larger than $3m, describing the approach as “grossly unfair.”

“Our members are very concerned at being taxed on unrealised gains,” SMSF Association chief executive, Peter Burgess, told The Australian.

“It is grossly unfair that self managed super fund members who have balances over $3m are being asked to pay tax on unrealised gains.”

The association has expressed its views in a submission to the federal government this week on the proposal to double the tax from 15 per cent to 30 per cent on earnings from superannuation balances of $3m or more from July 1, 2025.

Concern is rising at the proposal among small business and farmers groups at the government’s plan to move into unprecedented waters in tax policy in Australia, by seeking to levy taxes on unrealised gains — a move which could pave the way for it being applied to other sectors such as shares and properties, if it is given the go ahead with regards to superannuation.

The proposed higher tax rate of 30 per cent will be levied on the increase in the total superannuation fund balance over $3m over the year, and not the actual earnings of the fund from dividends and asset sales as is the case with the tax system.

The federal government has estimated that the proposal could bring in an extra $2bn a year in the first full year it is in operation.

The new tax on superannuation was announced this year by the Treasurer Jim Chalmers despite an assurance from then Opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, before last year’s election that his party had no plans at the time to introduce new taxes on superannuation.

Submissions on the proposal, including the radical new approach to levying the higher tax rate on unrealised gains, closed this week.

Mr Burgess said some 75 per cent of the people who would be affected by the changes were those with self managed super funds.

He said the approach of levying tax on unrealised gains “could cause some significant liquidity issues” for super funds.

He said people who owned properties, including farms and business premises, through their superannuation funds were now realising the impact of the proposal if their properties or funds were worth more than $3m.

Some could be forced to sell property or farms if their value rose during the year.

Mr Burgess said the Treasury’s argument for using the much broader base of unrealised gains, rather than realised gains which is the basis for all other tax policy, was that it was much simpler to calculate the increase in value of a fund than to calculate total realised returns for the amounts over $3m.

He said the association had been told that some large super funds did not have the capacity to calculate the earnings attributable to specific member funds over $3m.

But he said other large funds did have that capacity and all self managed super funds could also do it.

He said it was unfair to penalise people with self managed super funds because of the problems of a much smaller number of people who had balances of over $3m in APRA regulated super funds.

He said the association was calling on the federal government to drop the approach of levying the tax on unrealised gains altogether because of its unfairness.

If this was a problem for some large super funds, he said funds should be given the option on which method to use – either the increase in the total super balance or the actual realised gains during the year.

“It seems that we are designing an approach to taxation based on a very small number of people (who have balances over $3m and the funds can’t identify the earnings by member.)

Mr Burgess said the association intended to “come out swinging” in expressing its concerns about the unfair impact of taxing unrealised gains on people with self managed super funds.

“The taxing of unrealised gains is unprecedented in Australia as a method of raising tax,” HLB Mann Judd’s director of superannuation, Andrew Yee, told The Australian.

“The new tax is asset based rather than the traditional model of taxing of income and this has created the most controversy,” he said.

“It is not fair in terms of it only being applied to individuals with a large amount of superannuation assets with the majority of those assets being held in self managed super funds.”

“This taxing model is not being applied to any other individuals or other taxing entities.

“This form of taxing could be applied to other assets in the future,” he said.

Mr Yee said his superannuation clients who were affected were dealing with “the initial shock of an extra tax on super” and were now awaiting the details.

“Those clients that are considering planning for the new tax are thinking of reducing their potential exposure to the tax by moving super assets to non-super entities, or by no longer growing their super benefits by reducing or not maximising contributions,” he said.

He said the clients most worried about the new tax were those people who had built up large super balances over many years, the majority of whom are now in retirement phase drawing out a pension.

“Those clients with a significant portion of the SMSF in property assets (for example an office block or commercial building which is related or leased to the family business) are concerned about the tax and having to consider whether to unwind these holdings and the consequences of doing so,” he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/grossly-unfair-self-managed-super-fund-association-wants-tax-proposal-ditched/news-story/d422ac86e2b8244843b7d950f7443c23

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Novel Estimates of Mortality Associated With Poverty in the US

That the poor have worse health is as near to a universal finding as you will get but is it a major cause of death and illness?  The study below found that the relationship was surprisingly weak:  Hazard ratios of less than 2.0. It is only one of many adverse factors

David Brady et al.

The US perennially has a far higher poverty rate than peer-rich democracies.1 This high poverty rate in the US presents an enormous challenge to population health given that considerable research demonstrates that being in poverty is bad for one’s health.2 Despite valuable contributions of prior research on income and mortality, the quantity of mortality associated with poverty in the US remains uknown. In this cohort study, we estimated the association between poverty and mortality and quantified the proportion and number of deaths associated with poverty.

Methods

Statistical analyses were conducted on February 17, 2023. We analyzed the Panel Study of Income Dynamics 1997-2019 data merged with the Cross-National Equivalent File (eTable 1 in Supplement 1).3,4 This longitudinal survey3 observed mortality from surviving family members and was validated with the National Death Index. Innovatively, our higher-quality household income measure included all income sources, cash and near-cash transfers, and taxes and tax credits and was adjusted for household size.5 With use of leading standards in international poverty research, poverty was measured relatively as less than 50% of the median income.1 Current poverty was observed contemporaneously in each year, and cumulative poverty was the proportion of the past 10 years. Cox hazards regression models were estimated using Stata, version 17.0 (StataCorp) for 18 995 respondents aged 15 years or older (135 790 person-years) (eAppendix 2 in Supplement 1). Analyses were robust to adjustment for self-rated health, overweight or obesity, smoking, acute health events, chronic disease, other confounders, and a wide variety of alternative details (see eTable 2 in eAppendix 2 and eFigures 1 and 2 in eAppendix 3 in Supplement 1). We used secondary unidentifiable archival data, so institutional review board approval was not needed.

Results

Current poverty is associated with a greater mortality hazard of 1.42 (95% CI, 1.26-1.60). Cumulative poverty—being always in poverty vs never in poverty in the past 10 years—is associated with a greater mortality hazard of 1.71 (95% CI, 1.45-2.02).

Figure 1 shows that survival of individuals in poverty mainly begins to diverge from survival of individuals not in poverty at approximately 40 years of age. The gap in survival between those in poverty and those not in poverty increases until a peak near 70 years when it begins to converge.

Figure 2 compares the number of deaths associated with poverty with other major causes and risk factors of death. In 2019, among those aged 15 years or older, 6.5% (95% CI, 4.1%-9.0%) of deaths and 183 003 deaths (95% CI, 116 173-254 507 deaths) were associated with current poverty, and 10.5% (95% CI, 6.9%-14.4%) of deaths and 295 431 deaths (95% CI, 193 652-406 007 deaths) were associated with cumulative poverty. 

Current poverty was associated with greater mortality than major causes, such as accidents, lower respiratory diseases, and stroke. In 2019, current poverty was also associated with greater mortality than many far more visible causes—10 times as many deaths as homicide, 4.7 times as many deaths as firearms, 3.9 times as many deaths as suicide, and 2.6 times as many deaths as drug overdose. 

Cumulative poverty was associated with approximately 60% greater mortality than current poverty. Hence, cumulative poverty was associated with greater mortality than even obesity and dementia. Heart disease, cancer, and smoking were the only causes or risks with greater mortality than cumulative poverty.

Discussion

Because the US consistently has high poverty rates, these estimates can contribute to understanding why the US has comparatively lower life expectancy. Because certain ethnic and racial minority groups are far more likely to be in poverty, our estimates can improve understanding of ethnic and racial inequalities in life expectancy. The mortality associated with poverty is also associated with enormous economic costs. Therefore, benefit-cost calculations of poverty-reducing social policies should incorporate the benefits of lower mortality. Moreover, poverty likely aggravated the mortality impact of COVID-19, which occurred after our analyses ended in 2019. Therefore, one limitation of this study is that our estimates may be conservative about the number of deaths associated with poverty. Ultimately, we propose that poverty should be considered a major risk factor for death in the US.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804032

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Inquiry calls for universal preschool for three-year-olds to be rolled out in SA from 2026

This is just Leftist anti-family rubbish. Karl Marx would be pleased. There is no basis for it in science. The research shows that kids do better at home rather than in preschool. Preschool in fact holds the kids back, often permanently. Mothers are the best teachers in all but the most deprived homes. See the following for summaries of the evidence:

https://patriotpost.us/articles/96091-science-says-state-run-preschool-is-not-the-way-2023-03-30

https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5525

What Gillard "genuinely believes" is of no importance


A royal commission investigating how best to launch an earlier start to education in South Australia has recommended all three-year-olds be entitled to 600 hours of preschool a year.

The Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care was launched last year to work out how best to deliver the SA Labor Party's election promise to give three-year-old children access to preschool from 2026.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who was appointed to lead the $2.45 million commission, has made 33 recommendations in her interim report handed to the state government today.

Ms Gillard said three-year-olds should be offered the same universal entitlement to preschool currently offered to four-year-old children — 600 hours a year, or 15 hours a week for 40 weeks a year.

"I genuinely believe this report should be of interest to every South Australian, whether or not they have young children in their family or young children in contemplation in their families' future," she said.

"We have a moral obligation to every child to make sure every child has the best opportunity to grow and learn and thrive."

The commission recommends 15 hours a week be viewed as a minimum and is also contemplating greater entitlements to fund extra hours for children deemed most at risk of developmental delays.

"We also, as a state, have a shared economic interest in making sure that we set our children on the best pathway in life, because the research tells us crystal clear that intervention in the early years can make the biggest difference," Ms Gillard said.

"If we do not set children up well in the early years of life, if children present to school with developmental delays then it can be very hard to catch up and that disadvantage will continue to show in their adult life.

"It shows in life expectancy, in poorer health, in poorer economic outcomes, in greater welfare dependency and even potentially in involvement with crime."

The proposed approach will cost the state about $162 million a year.

The commission recommends three-year-old preschool be delivered in a mix of government and non-government settings, including in early learning centres and long day care.

The approach will need 32 new preschools to be built, at a cost of $111.2 million.

Ms Gillard said the approach would also build on the work currently being done by those who worked in early childhood education, often informally and unpaid, to link families with other support systems.

"That can be everything from recognising that a child might need to be connected to the professional services of a speech pathologist, to recommending to a family that if they need assistance with food, that is a Foodbank in the local community," she said.

"At the moment that kind of building of connections is being done as an act of goodwill of individuals, it's not built-in as a feature of practice all day every day and we want to make sure that it is."

Premier Peter Malinauskas said it would be the biggest reform to early childhood education the state had ever seen.

"What we're doing here isn't just nation-leading, but it's global-leading," he said.

"It's important we look at these recommendations with a holistic view, that we take the time to ask questions, and critically view our education system, so that any actions from this are the right ones for the next generation."

The commission, which is seeking feedback from the public on its report, found the rollout "could be completed by 2032", but is still looking into the issue of workforce supply.

The final report is scheduled to be released in August.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-17/sa-early-childhood-education-royal-commission-interim-report/102230702

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A new super-careful estimate of a global temperature trend based on the satellite record

Some very sophisticated Chinese mathematicians have been at work. I reproduce their conclusions only below. The point to note is that they found a warming trend over the last 40 years of only fourteen hundredths of one degree per decade. I quote:

"the total tropospheric temperature trend derived from TMT was 0.142 ± 0.045 K/decade from 1979 to 2021".

That's about as tiny a trend as you can imagine and is certainly no cause for alarm. Global warming is totally trivial. It's to laugh at. The globe HAS been warming but at a not remotely catastrophic level. Whether ANY warming will take place in the future is unknown. Claims that it will are mere speculation based on a very dubious hypothesis of continuity.

Mid-Tropospheric Layer Temperature Record Derived From Satellite Microwave Sounder Observations With Backward Merging Approach

Cheng-Zhi Zou, Hui Xu, Xianjun Hao, Qian Liu

9 Conclusion

We have developed STAR V5.0 TMT time series for the period from late 1978 to present using a backward merging approach. The RTMT time series during 2002–present based on AMSU-A and ATMS observations onboard satellites in stable sun-synchronous orbits was used as the reference and earlier satellites before NOAA-19 were adjusted to RTMT in the backward merging. Brightness temperatures from NOAA-10 to NOAA-19 were recalibrated first before they were merged with RTMT and a semi-physical model was developed for diurnal drift adjustment. Adjustments of channel frequency differences between MSU and AMSU-A companion channels and instrument blackbody warm target effects were also conducted on observed radiances. The recalibration and adjustments for diurnal drift and warm target effects had effectively removed satellite bias drifts and resulted in inter-consistent satellite radiance data with small inter-satellite difference trends and standard deviations. Major differences in STAR V5.0 from the existing data sets is that recalibration has removed large spurious warming drifts in NOAA-11, NOAA-12, and NOAA-14 and a large cooling drift in NOAA-15 observations. The removal of the spurious warming drifts in NOAA-11 to NOAA-14 resulted in the warming trends in STAR V5.0 during 1979–2021 much smaller than the existing versions of the STAR and RSS data sets but close to the latest version of the UAH data set. After removal of the lower-stratospheric cooling effect, the total tropospheric temperature trend derived from TMT was 0.142 ± 0.045 K/decade from 1979 to 2021. This total trend was separated by two distinct periods with trends during the latest half period were nearly doubled the earlier half period over ocean and the globe, showing accelerating tropospheric warming. The estimated acceleration rate of the tropospheric warming was about 0.029–0.39 K decade?2 over ocean and the globe.

The STAR V5.0 data set. also include TUT, TLS and TLT time series. Similar backward merging approaches and diurnal adjustment algorithms as used in the TMT development were applied to TUT and TLS channels for their development. TLT is obtained using regressions of TMT, TUT, and TLS following approaches in Spencer et al. (2017).

The STAR V5.0 CDR for TLT, TMT, TUT, and TLS is publicly accessible from the STAR website with a URL address: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/mscat/products.php . Plans are also being developed to transition the STAR V5.0 data set to NOAA/NCEI for operational archiving and distribution for user applications.

The cut-off dates for MSU and AMSU-A observations used in STAR V5.0 from all earlier satellites were before the end of 2018. Future update of STAR V5.0 will only need update of the ATMS observations in RTMT. The update of the monthly RTMT has been made every month for ATMS observations onboard SNPP and NOAA-20. Future JPSS satellites such as JPSS-2 are planned to be launched onto the same stable orbits as in SNPP and NOAA-20. When ATMS observations from these satellites are available, they will be simply added to RTMT without the need for diurnal drift adjustment. Such a STAR V5.0 data set is expected to extend to the next 20 years for climate change monitoring and assessment in the atmospheric temperatures.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JD037472

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How fentanyl became Seattle’s most urgent public health crisis

What is described below is mass insanity.  How has America come to this?  I think the decline of religion is part of the answer.  From the  beginning with the Pilgrim fathers, religion has been a powerful influence in America and it has to a considerable extent held America together.  And Christianity has a large puritanical streak that for a long time protected Americans from the dangers of artificial sources of satisfaction.  "Prohibition" is an example of how strong that puritanical influence was.  You have to go to Muslim countries to find anything comparable elsewhere.  So many Americans have now lost their  moral anchors and have nothing to replace them

One interesting question is why there is nothing like the Seattle situation in Australia. Australia is even LESS religious than America.  There are any number of disused churches and regular church attenders are a small minority. 

One answer is that Australians of British stock DO have a strong moral code.  It is an informal one, not found in any holy book.  It is simply traditional, an informal code of mutual loyalty. I grew up with it. 

It evolved from the English working class values of yesteryear via our convict origins and was essentially a code of giving mutual assistance to the downtrodden. Australia's convict days are long past but the attitudes the convicts held have been passed down. My rough enumeration of that code is here. It includes a strong underlying value for quiet manliness and restraint. Men who cannot "hold their grog", for instance, are looked down on -- and drug dependence is similarly regarded. It is seen as "weak"

One place you can see in Australia  widespread deplorable drug and alcohol abuse reminiscent of that described below is among Australian Aborigines, who do not of course have British ancestry and the values that go with it

Illicit fentanyl kills at least two people every day in King County, and the powerful opioid was responsible for over 700 fatal overdoses last year, roughly triple the death toll of traffic crashes and gun violence combined.

How did the little blue pills — which were virtually nonexistent in the local drug supply just five years ago — become the most pressing public health crisis facing the greater Seattle area?

Today, The Seattle Times embarks on a collection of stories about the fast-moving fentanyl epidemic. We’ll explore how the dangerous drug has taken hold, why it’s so potent, and the ways it’s overwhelming emergency responders and the health care system. We’ll delve into how elected officials and social service providers are responding to the crisis. And we’ll explain how the opioid has disproportionately affected some of the region’s most vulnerable communities.

Fentanyl was first introduced in the 1960s to treat severe pain, particularly for patients recovering from surgery. Some pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl made it to the streets, but at $30 to $40 a pill, it was exorbitantly expensive compared with drugs like methamphetamine and black tar heroin.

Now, however, the Mexico-based Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, which have long run street drugs up Interstate 5, are responsible for producing the vast majority of fentanyl smuggled into the U.S.

Making the drug with precursor chemicals from China, the cartels’ chemists aren’t concerned about quality control. So the concentration of fentanyl — cut with acetaminophen when pressed into pills, and with sugars like lactose and mannitol in its powder form — varies widely from pill to pill and batch to batch.

“It is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced,” Anne Milgram, who heads the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, said earlier this year in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-fentanyl-became-seattles-most-urgent-public-health-crisis/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sunday+Morning+4-16-23_4_16_2023&utm_term=Registered%20User

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Biden's Fascistic EV Edict

David Harsanyi writing below knows his history: That Fascism was Leftist. In the 1920s Mussolini was a prominent Marxist intellectual. It is only Soviet disinformation that has propagated the myth that Fascism was Rightist

President Joe Biden is set to "transform" and "remake" the entire auto industry -- "first with carrots, now with sticks" -- notes the Washington Post, as if dictating the output of a major industry is within the governing purview of the executive branch. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing draconian emissions limits for vehicles, ensuring that 67% of all new passenger cars and trucks produced within nine years will be electric. This is state coercion. It is undemocratic. We are not governed; we are managed.

In fascist economies, a powerful centralized state -- often led by a demagogue who plays on the nationalistic impulses of people -- controls both manufacturing and commerce and dictates prices and wages for the "common good." Any unpatriotic excessive profits are captured by the state. All economic activity must meet state approval. And crony, rent-seeking companies are willing participants. Now, I'm not saying we already live in a fascist economic state. I'm just saying the Democratic Party economic platform sounds like it wishes we were.

The coverage of Biden's edict has gone exactly as one might expect. "Biden makes huge push for electric vehicles. Is America ready?" asks Politico, for instance. The conceit of so much modern media coverage rests on the assumption that the left's ideas are part of an inevitable societal evolution toward enlightenment. The only question remaining is when will the slaw-jawed yokels in Indiana and Texas finally catch on.

I'm sorry, EVs are not a technological advancement -- or much of an environmental one -- over vehicles with internal combustion engines. Most of the comforts EV makers like to brag about have been a regular feature of gas-powered cars for decades. At best, EVs are a lateral technology. And, as far as practicality, cost and comfort go, they're a regression. If EVs are more efficient and save us money, as administration officials claim, manufacturers would not have to be compelled and bribed into producing them.

The problem for Democrats is that consumers already have perfectly useful and affordable gas-powered cars that, until recently, could be cheaply fueled and driven long distances without stopping for long periods of time. Fossil fuels -- also the predominant energy source used to power electric cars -- are the most efficient, affordable, portable and useful form of energy. We have a vast supply of it. In recent years, we've become the world's largest oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of fossil fuels here at home and vast amounts around the world. By the time we run out, if ever, we will have invented far better ways to move vehicles than plugging an EV battery -- which is made by emitting twice as many gases into the air as a traditional car engine -- into an antiquated windmill.

"I want to let everybody know that this EPA is committed to protecting the health and well-being of every single person on this planet," the EPA's Michael Regan explained when announcing the edicts. No one is safer in an EV than a gas-powered vehicle. The authoritarian's justification for economic control is almost always "safety." But the entire "safety" claim is tethered to the perpetually disproven theory that our society can't safely -- and relatively cheaply -- adapt to slight changes in climate. If the state can regulate "greenhouse gases" as an existential threat, it has the unfettered power to regulate virtually the entire economy. This is why politicians treat every hurricane, tornado and flood as an apocalyptic event. But in almost every quantifiable way, the climate is less dangerous to mankind now than it has ever been. And the more they try to scare us, the less people care.

So let the Chinese communists worry about keeping their population "safe." Let's keep this one innovative, open and free.

https://townhall.com/columnists/davidharsanyi/2023/04/14/bidens-fascistic-ev-edict-n2621942

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Blaming Australia’s rental crisis on immigrants doesn’t tell the real story

The article below adds the effects of the pandemic lockdowns to immigration as the cause of the rental property shortage.  He overlooks the supply side of the problem.  

There is in fact no shortage of supply.  There are very large numbers of dwellings available for rent in most big Australian cities. The catch is that they are "holiday" rentals administered by the likes of AirBnb.  

What has has happened is that many property owners have moved their properties out of the long-term to the short term market. If all the short-term lets were moved onto the long term market there would be NO rental shortage

Governments fulminate about that and contemplate more regulations to solve the problem but ignore the fact that they are the cause of the problem.  Governments have made life so difficult for landlords that short-term lets are a better deal for them despite the much greater management requirements of short term lets.

So where exactly have governments gone wrong?  They have ratcheted up tenant "protection" to a very intrusive degree.  The universal truth that favouring one group disadvantages another seems unknown to them.  Tenant protection is landlord restriction. Control over their properties is greatly reduced by tenant protection.  And landlords stand to lose significantly from that.

A notable watershed in Queensland was when the State government introduced new pro-tenant laws about a year ago.  Part of those "reforms" was to compel landlords to accept tenants with pets.  Landlords could no longer say "no pets" as a condition to renting out their properties.  That seems kind, humane and reasonable but it imposes large potential costs on landlords.

In my past career as a landlord, I did from time to time have tenants who brought in pets despite not being allowed to.  What was the result?  In one word: stink.  Pets emptying their bladders and bowels on my carpet made it stink in such a way that no cleaning could remove the smell.  The stink made the property unlettable to subsequent tenants. As a result I had on such occasions to throw out all the carpets and spend thousands of dollars replacing them.  That often wiped out every cent that the pet-owning tenants had paid

No wonder property owners went for an escape from that government-created trap! Tenants have to have MUCH LESS "protection" if availability of long term rental accommodation is to increase. What good is a protected tenancy if you cannot get ANY property at all to live in?

As the rental crisis continues to unfold throughout much of the nation, it has left many of us wondering how this could have occurred in a nation as cumulatively wealthy as Australia. By going through some of the data from the ABS, RBA and various private providers that’s what we’ll attempt to determine today and provide a bit of insight on how things may transpire from here.

When the pandemic arrived on our shores in early 2020, the size of the average Australian household rose from 2.51 people per home to 2.55 people. While this may not sound like a lot, it in essence reduced the number of households nationally by 162,000 based on the average household size nationally, playing a significant role in falling rental demand during the early months of the pandemic.

But as lockdowns dragged on and close quarters began to take their toll, more and more Australians wanted a place of their own. Between Q3 2020 and Q2 2022, the average household size fell from 2.55 persons to 2.48. This saw demand for homes rise by 288,000, more than cancelling out the reduction in demand seen in the early months of the pandemic.

Capital city rents took a similar path. As demand faded between March and September 2020, capital city asking rents fell by 5.4 per cent according to data from SQM Research. Once demand began to pick up significantly, rents rose by 8.5 per cent during 2021, all while the nation’s borders remained largely closed.

The migration factor

Over the past three years migration has been something of a double-edged sword for capital city rental markets. Between March 2020 and December 2021, the number of temporary visa holders in categories likely to require some form of housing fell by 328,000. Based on the average Australian household size demand for homes fell by 131,000.

During 2021 when rents began take off, the number of temporary visa holders in categories likely to require housing fell by 147,000. This helped to put significant downward pressure on rents at a time when demand from existing households was skyrocketing and more Australians than ever were looking to get their own place.

But once this headwind putting downward pressure on rents was removed when the nation’s borders reopened in early 2022, capital city rents began to surge in short order. During 2021 quarterly rental price growth sat between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent. In the first quarter of 2022 capital city rents surged by 5.5 per cent, the largest increase in the history of SQM’s data series at the time.

Between the start of 2022 and the most recent data from the Department of Home Affairs, which covers up until the end of February, the number of temporary visa holders in categories likely to require housing rose by 444,000.

With a little over 2.03 million people currently in these categories, more temporary visa holders than ever require some form of housing, a figure 116,000 higher than this time in 2020.

Looking ahead

Despite surging numbers of temporary visa holders and a budget forecasting a record high level of permanent non-humanitarian migration, the origin of the rental crisis was not immigration, but instead the swift changes brought about by the pandemic in the way we live and work.

However, since the border reopened in early 2022 the normalisation of temporary visa holder numbers has exacerbated the rental crisis significantly.

It ultimately comes down to numbers, there are 444,000 more people in need of homes in this category than at the start of 2022. This has left many Australians asking an important and profound question, where are all Australia’s renters both citizens and visa holders going to live?

In recent months of data which covers up until the end of February, the shift has become more pronounced, with 198,000 temporary visa holders likely to require some form of housing arriving in the country in the past two months.

To say that it was a challenging set of circumstances would be understatement. According to forecasts from the RBA, the situation may not significantly improve any time soon. In a recent speech RBA Governor Philip Lowe shared the bank’s prediction that Australia’s population would continue to grow faster than the nation’s dwelling stock until at least 2025.

While there are signs that sharehousing is on the rise and more people are moving in with family and friends, overcoming the ongoing increase in demand in capital city areas most heavily impacted by domestic and international migration may take quite some time.

Ultimately, it is the federal government’s decision to grow the population faster than the RBA forecasts that housing can be built, not that of individual migrant households.

As the rental crisis becomes increasingly challenging for many Australians, one hopes that this is kept in mind as frustration continues to build amid the nation’s worst rental crisis in living memory.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/blaming-australias-rental-crisis-on-immigrants-doesnt-tell-the-real-story/news-story/1b5348fabf79da265bd80afcef1ed41b

Aged care rules ‘to set off collapses’

This is typical of Leftist thinking.  They think they can just pass a law and make something happen that they want to happen. That is rarely so.

The problem is that they do not first do the hard work of understanding how or why the existing situation exists.  It will almost always be the result of several interacting pressures and failing to account for those pressures will cause "unexpected" results.

The situation discussed below is a simple example of that.  We would probably all agree that nursing homes for the aged would ideally have a large, well-trained staff to give individual attention to each resident when required.  And the ALP is trying to make that happen by legislation.  But it won't happen

To understand why you need to look at the existing situation, where a small staff of not mostly not very bright people are all that are available in such homes.  And why is that so?

Cost.  Employing staff is expensive and the normal way of coping with that is to pay only minimal wages.  And the only people who will accept such wages are people who do not have much to offer in the way of skills and abilities

So mandate that staff must be paid more?  You can do that but what will be its effect?  The care offered by the home will be so expensive that few elderly will be able to afford it.  It would cast many frail elderly onto the streets.  You just can't do that.

And the proposal most discussed below is an example of that.  A qualified nurse gets wages well above the minimum so where are you going to get the money to pay her?  Short of government subsidy you cannot do it.  The home could well go broke trying.

So the nurse "shortage" is mainly a shortage of nurses who will accept nursing home pay.  There will be such a shortage for a long time.  The mandate will be largely unenforceable and will mainly result in a REDUCED availability of nursing home care.  Nursing home care will become the preserve of rich families only

It's a devil and the deep blue sea phenomenon. To get assured good care, you have to pay a lot. But not everyone can pay that much so you get the distressingly poor treatment of some residents that we often read about

The chief of the peak nursing professional body says it could take five to 10 years for the sector to ­recruit enough staff to meet ­Anthony Albanese’s target for 24/7 nurses in residential aged care facilities, warning there is “absolutely no way” the industry will meet Labor’s July 1 deadline.

Australian College of Nursing chief executive Kylie Ward also expressed concern that providers would be forced to shut down under the legislated requirement to have at least one registered nurse on site at all times.

The warnings come as the Aged & Community Care Providers Association, the overarching body representing residential, home and community care, said the government needed to ensure the pace of change was manageable for aged care providers and did not “exacerbate an already challenging situation”.

The sector is scrambling to ­implement a suite of reforms including mandated minutes of care per resident, quality and safety standards, and full-time nursing requirements as it adjusts to a new funding model bought in last October as recommended by the Aged Care Royal Commission.

The overhaul comes as financial troubles plague the sector, with the latest figures from the Quarterly Financial Snapshot of the Aged Care Sector revealing 66 per cent of private providers are operating at a loss, with facilities losing an average of $28 per resident each day.

For-profit and not-for-profit providers, which represent 90 per cent of all homes, returned a collective net loss before tax of $465.3m for the September 2022 quarter, off revenues of $5.3bn.

As the sector grapples with a major shortfall of workers and ­a deteriorating financial outlook, a number of aged care facilities have been forced to close their doors. Aged care provider Wesley Mission was the latest facility to close, announcing on Thursday the shutdown of all Sydney homes, citing difficulties in attracting and retaining staff.

The closure, to take effect next month, will displace about 200 residents but the facility said it was committed to ensuring the elderly had other suitable accommodation.

Professor Ward said the aged care sector was facing a shortfall of 10,000 nurses ahead of Labor’s July 1 deadline, and urged the government to invest in attracting overseas-trained nurses to ensure a sustainable supply of workers to help meet targets. She said the college, which had been fighting for facilities to have a registered nurse to be on site for years – had told the government of the projected staffing shortfalls ahead of the deadline.

“There is absolutely no way the sector is going to meet its legislated target by July 1,” Professor Ward said. “We needed a minimum of 10,000 workers before this came into place … where are the nurses coming from?

“If the government doesn’t start looking at developing skilled migration, or a broader approach to developing a new workforce then you’re never going to meet that target.”

Professor Ward said providers were fearful they may have to close their doors if they were unable to meet the legislated targets.

“I can guarantee you they will close. I have spoken to CEOs who are distressed and say they won’t be able to meet the requirement … the modelling of care needs to be considered as we transition to these reforms but we can’t just pluck these people out of thin air,” she said.

Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the government would not force the closure of facilities that were unable to meet nursing targets and would work with providers to help them meet new standards. Last month, Ms Wells conceded about one in 20 aged care homes would not meet Labor’s July 1 deadline, but said about 80 per cent had already achieved the target.

Ms Wells said the “vast majority” of residential facilities would meet 24/7 nursing requirements and that around the clock nursing was needed to properly care for some of the nation’s most vulnerable. Exemptions would be available for a small number of facilities in regional and remote areas if they were unable to fulfil the requirements.

Opposition aged care spokeswoman Anne Ruston attacked Labor for failing to consider the challenging circumstances the sector faced due to severe ­workforce shortages “in their rush to tick and flick election commitments” after the Prime Minister promised to “fix the crisis in aged care”.

Senator Ruston seized on the closure of Wesley Mission’s homes, arguing residential facilities were not adequately supported during the transitional period.

Sue McLean Bolter, whose 98-year-old mother Moira McLean has been a resident of the Wesley Mission home in Narrabeen since 2019, was first informed of the provider’s closure on Tuesday.

She has been scrambling to find suitable accommodation for her mother, having recently flown in from the US to celebrate Ms McLean’s birthday. So far she has been unsuccessful.

“It’s been very stressful … it’s just been horrible … my sister who lives here has been furious,” Ms McLean Bolter said.

“Had (Wesley) even notified the government that they had been planning to close and why were we given just six weeks ­notice?

“This is the northern beaches where people have their families, doctors and hospitals so to send them over to the other side of Sydney is almost unthinkable. You can’t just drop by to meet your mum, you might have to drive two hours across Sydney in traffic.”

Wesley Mission chief executive Reverend Stu Cameron said Labor’s new national staffing requirements had created challenges for the home as a smaller provider. “The aged care sector is experiencing challenges to workforce and flow-on impacts from the national reforms to aged care,” Reverend Cameron said.

“Wesley Mission supports these once-in-a-generation reforms, improving quality for all care users. It is, however, a challenging environment to be a smaller provider.’

Aged care provider Whiddon chief executive Chris Mamarelis said the Wesley closure was “unsurprising” given the financial pressures many providers were under and forecast more failures.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/aged-care-rules-to-set-off-collapses/news-story/4eebd2a2ecbdce4829aafdc1d94fdc61

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UK: Pub landlady defies police orders and puts five golliwogs back on display to applause from lunchtime drinkers just days after six officers seized 20 dolls in 'hate crime' probe

An old controversy. It is a bit odd, though. There is no doubt that the dolls are a caricature of Africans. So the do-gooders are actually demonizing African features?

There is a history of the Golliwog here. It was in fact an American invention. Excerpt: "Childhood toy, lovable rascal, cheeky jam mascot; how can anything that innocent be regarded as racist? That is certainly the view of many who were brought up with golliwogs"

Incidentally, Derek Laud is a black British political speechwriter who is quite happy with his nickname as "Golly" (The usual abbreviation of "Golliwog") . But Mr Laud and his friends are conservatives. Unlike the Left, they have a sense of humor

I had a golliwog myself when I was a little kid and regarded it with some affection. Was that wrong of me?

Benice Ryley proudly placed five of the controversial dolls behind the bar of The White Hart pub in Grays, Essex, which she has run for the past 17 years with her husband Chris.

The couple, who are in their 60s, had six officers enter the pub last Tuesday and take away 20 dolls displayed on a shelf behind the bar after an anonymous complaint was made against them.

They also seized an assortment of golliwog badges and magnets that adorned the bar.

As she placed some of them on a shelf, she told MailOnline: 'The whole thing is ridiculous. It's political correctness gone out of control. I'm not going to let the authorities intimidate me and I'm proudly putting my other gollis back on display in the pub.

'I'm still shocked that six officers came to my pub last week, surrounded me and took away my collection of golliwogs. I've not committed any crime and haven't set out to offend anyone. These gollis are a part of the pub, the customers love them, and they are reminder of our childhood.'

Ms Ryley also posted a notice at the entrance to the pub warning customers that golliwogs are on display inside and that they should not enter if this will offend them. The sign declares: 'We have golly dolls displayed inside on our shelves. If you feel offended. Please do not enter.'

She added: 'The police took 20 of my golli dolls but I've got plenty more of them upstairs. If people don't like them and feel offended by seeing them then they don't have to come into my pub. It's as simple as that. I'm not going to give into this crazy political correctness. We have customers at this pub from all different races and none of them have ever complained about seeing my gollis on display. Why did the police get involved in this?'

The White Hart pub is located on the edge of a council estate in Grays notorious for crime and drug dealing.

Ms Ryley and other regulars fumed that police rarely attend when called out for 'real' crimes and slammed the presence of six police officers who removed the golliwogs from the pub.

Two others waited outside while their colleagues placed the dolls in plastic bags to take them away.

Her husband was away in Turkey at the time with police informing her that they wish to question him for a 'hate crime' when he returns as he is the licensee.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman is said to have been furious about the approach, and has told Essex Police that bosses should be focusing on catching real criminals rather than seizing toys.

The issue of whether the dolls are racist or not often sparks fierce debate. The golliwog was created by Florence Kate Upton in 1895 in her book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog', where it was described as 'a horrid sight, the blackest gnome'.

After the author created the golliwog, it became a favourite for collectors and was popular in the UK as the mascot of Robertson's jam.

But by the 1980s, it was increasingly seen as an offensive racist caricature of black people.

Some people hark back to fond childhood memories of the dolls, whereas others argue golliwogs are a racist icon of a bygone age.

In a YouGov poll last year 53 per cent of respondents said they thought selling or displaying golliwogs was 'acceptable' compared to 27 per cent who did not.

Asked if it was racist to sell or display a golliwog doll, 63 per cent of respondents said it was not, while 17 per cent did.

Ms Ryley said: 'Surely the police have better things to do. If they arrest my Chris when he gets back, I promise you, the world will know about it.

'I totally agree with the Home Secretary. The police need to focus on real crime and not worry about what dolls people are displaying.'

Pub regular Sue Payne, 57 said: 'It's absolutely stupid and a complete waste of police time and money. You can get stabbed or mugged around here and the police won't come or if they do, it'll be after ages. But somebody complains about some dolls and six officers turn up. You couldn't make it up.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11957405/Pub-landlady-defies-police-orders-puts-five-golliwogs-display.html

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