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Author Topic: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!  (Read 227575 times)

martinuzz

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #1995 on: November 13, 2016, 08:57:34 am »

There's reports of damage in Cheviot, but at least my newspaper says there's no reports of casualties yet. Let's hope it stays that way.
It's not the first time the area has been hit with an earthquake recently. In februari of this year, an earthquake caused only material damage in the Christchurch area, and in februari 2011 a 6.3 magnitude earthquake killed 185 people.
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Friendly and polite reminder for optimists: Hope is a finite resource

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http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

smjjames

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martinuzz

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #1997 on: November 13, 2016, 09:07:33 am »

Damn they keep tuning it up. I believe my news article upscaled it by a tenth or two as well in the time between me reading it and making a post about it.
It's slightly worrisome that the Fukushima tsunami was caused by a 6.6 aftershock of a 9.0 earthquake.
Having the epicentre of this one under landmass instead of ocean floor might make a difference though.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2016, 09:10:11 am by martinuzz »
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Friendly and polite reminder for optimists: Hope is a finite resource

We can ­disagree and still love each other, ­unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist - James Baldwin

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73719.msg1830479#msg1830479

TheBiggerFish

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #1998 on: November 25, 2016, 11:11:01 pm »

Yike, hope everybody's okay, including New Zealander Bay12ers.
Yikes!

Stay safe everyone over there!
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Jimmy

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #1999 on: February 23, 2017, 01:44:00 am »

So Australia's Fair Work Commission has ruled that Sunday penalty rates will be slashed.

Because people in retail and hospitality apparently earn too much.

Apparently it's supposed to increase jobs, since employers will obviously use the savings to hire more staff instead of continuing with their current rosters and pocketing the difference as profits.
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Reelya

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2000 on: February 28, 2017, 07:10:12 am »

www.heraldsun.com.au/news/terror-raid-at-remote-property-in-country-nsw/news-story/243751c524ea5085dc0c403ec15ec465

So they arrested some 42 year old Australian-born guy for planning to give missile tech to ISIS. Except ... he's a local electrician who lives in a country town, Young NSW (pop < 7000). What sort of fucking missile tech to they teach down at the local TAFE in Young, exactly?

Reudh

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2001 on: February 28, 2017, 07:14:45 am »

The TAFE of Internet, I'd say.

That, and I guess he had basic knowledge of simple rocketry and expanded outwards? I don't know.

Reudh

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2002 on: March 12, 2017, 01:00:28 am »

And with that, another state swings sharply to Labor.

Of all the states, this leaves only NSW and Tasmania as having a Liberal party Premier. The Tasmanian one is likely to stay, the islandstrayans have been pretty conservative for a long time, but are experiencing a swing towards independents rather than the main parties, and the NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian is basically still in her honeymoon period after "Casino" Mike Baird resigned.

Naturally, the Labor meme machine is in full swing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Prior to 2015 or so, only SA was Labor. Queensland ousted Campbell Newman's LNP (a fusion of the Liberal and National parties, essentially a permanent, less distinct Coalition; in other states the Libs and Nationals operate in a coalition together) and elected Annastacia Palaszczuk, the head of the Labor Party in Queensland. Queensland's state Labor is not a particularly strong unit, and Palaszczuk's government has been generally weak, more so after a member of the party was forced out after it was found he had domestic violence charges. At the time of the election, it was basically a "not Newman" vote, as he was the worst kind of conservative political crony.

Victoria elected Daniel Andrews pretty strongly. His reign so far has been divisive; but all can agree that the massive money he's pouring in to infrastructure to keep the Victorian economy (one of the largest in the country) going while the Federal government dangles trickles of our infrastructure funding above our heads.
This followed years of Baillieu (a rich boy with real estate lobby links) and Napthine, who was so ineffectual many called him Naptime. This was because Shaw, a rogue MP, had resigned earlier that day, causing Napthine to be forced to take power with a minority government.

Eventually, Labor got rid of Napthine, and Daniel Andrews has taken over. Like I said, while his deep links to various unions is kinda suspicious to the average voter, he's pouring shitloads of money into making traffic flow better (upgrading nearly all of our arterial freeways as well as removing as many level crossings as are feasible) and upgrading train lines with the intent of by 2030 decentralising our train lines from being a "hub-and-spoke" model where single points of failure exist at the terminus stations, instead making several "joined lines" that stop in the city but continue out the other side, eg. a Pakenham-Sunbury line (Pakenham is 58km SE of the city, Sunbury is ~40km NW, both lines are extremely heavily populated) bypassing some of the older city stops.

SA's Labor has had a few hiccups mainly due to the attacks by the Libs on their "renewable focus", when SA was without power after a storm, the Libs blamed the heavy investment into renewables rather than uh, "clean" coal, when in reality the power failure was due to transmission towers being destroyed; the solar panels and wind turbines were producing, they just couldn't transmit it.

And now, WA's eight year long Lib reign has been ousted in a hilariously huge landslide.

It is estimated that 60% of voters, regardless of political alignment, disliked that the WA Liberal party preferenced Pauline Hanson's One Nation above their long-time compatriots, the National Party

Additionally, Labor needed maybe nine seats to win the election initially; they've since gained almost 20 and are well and truly in a majority government. THe best bit is, Pauline Hanson's arch conservative and insane One Nation party got 0 seats. Not a one. They have no say whatsoever in WA. How great is that?

feelotraveller

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2003 on: March 12, 2017, 11:11:11 pm »

Actually it's not that surprising.  The firm trend this century is for states/territories to elect the party at the state level that does not hold power federally.  Started early in Howard's debacle - significantly from 2002-8 all state/territory governments were alp.  When Rudd got in (1st time) the states started to elect lnp governments.  Trend reversed when Abbot won the federal election.  A good graphic overview is here: http://australianpolitics.com/states/table-of-australian-governments.

The obvious conclusions are 1) that 'swing' voters are not happy with either party; and 2) that votes are cast against parties more than for them.  (No thanks to Hanson-Howard for bringing the politics of fear and hatred centre stage.  :-[)
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Reudh

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2004 on: March 13, 2017, 03:01:59 am »

Yeah, I'd say that whenever a party is in power, the other parties get elected at a state level largely due to irritation with the federal government's issues.

Anywho, apparently Elon Musk was in talks with both Premier Jay Weatherill (ALP, south australian premier) and Prime Minister Turnbull (or trumble, if you're partial to Spicer). Musk had said that he can "fix SA's energy shortages/crises in 100 days or it will be free", presumably by installing a shitload of Tesla Powerwalls.

Weatherill is being applauded across Twitter and Reddit for this, and Musk came away stating "Just spoke with @JayWeatherill, Premier of South Australia. Very impressed. Govt is clearly committed to a smart, quick solution."

Supposedly, at least on Yahoo, it's making mild international news. Jay Weatherill said on his own twitter "and we have a team in my office working on it right now - feel free to join in - SAs leadership in renewables now an intl story".

I'd quite like to see a situation where rather than relying on grids, (which are pretty fast becoming an outmoded format, especially with the Powerwalls offering long term, high MWh storage with apparently very low degradation of battery storage quality) most houses will have a coupla solar panels feeding into their Powerwall or equivalent storage, with the excess being fed into the grid. Power companies would be tearing their hair out; hypothetically that would mean that most generation could be wound back if houses were largely self-sufficient power-wise.

It's a bit of a pipe-dream, and I don't see it being realistic unless both solar panels and the Powerwalls got subsidised by the Government, which I certainly don't see happening under the Libs, and it's fairly unlikely under Labor too.

Turnbull's talks were probably more along the lines of "hey, so could you install these powerwalls at our clean coal power plants instead?"; the actual content of the talks haven't been released to the public, that I know of.

Either way, I'm starting to see why Musk is the darling of the internet these days.

Sheb

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2005 on: March 13, 2017, 03:57:53 am »

It made it into my Economist Expresso this morning. It'd be nice, I could see it turning a profit by buying cheap off-peak power and sell it during peak.
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Reudh

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2006 on: March 13, 2017, 04:15:52 am »

It made it into my Economist Expresso this morning. It'd be nice, I could see it turning a profit by buying cheap off-peak power and sell it during peak.

Yeah. The other thing is, Tesla is apparently quite late to the game regarding battery storage in SA: there's a number of other companies who've been in talks for quite some time since. The only thing Tesla has in its deck is that its powerwall is apparently better quality than most large scale energy storage solutions, and a charismatic billionaire who throws money at things.

Jimmy

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2007 on: March 13, 2017, 05:11:47 am »

Biggest downside is lifespan of the batteries and solar panels. If you're paying tens of thousands every five to ten years to replace them, it's not worth the investment. I'd personally love to install both at my house since it's Sunshine State and all, but they're a poor return on investment from a purely economic perspective.
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Reelya

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2008 on: March 13, 2017, 06:08:53 am »

Apparently it's already economical to do the thing where you store off-peak power in batteries for use at other times, one Queensland power company is getting alarmed at people doing it. Improved battery tech has made storing cheap power at night too effective, which could cause too much load to shift to the night time. So existing off-peak pricing really has to go, it's not keeping up with either storage improvements nor new power sources such as solar.
« Last Edit: March 13, 2017, 06:19:19 am by Reelya »
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Jimmy

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Re: Reudh's Hilarious Australasian politics thread!
« Reply #2009 on: March 28, 2017, 06:26:07 pm »

So China, amirite?

Can't help but feel our call on not ratifying a 10 year old document giving China carte blanche to get us to send them their political prisoners is a good call. Pollies are fussing and bellyaching over it, so that's always a good sign.
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