Poll respondents with attitudes

New poll results from around the place on attitudes towards climate change, Australia Day and things-in-general.

An off week in the fortnightly cycles for both Newspoll and Essential Research, but we do have three fairly detailed sets of attitudinal polling doing the rounds:

• Ipsos has results from its monthly Issues Monitor series, which records a dramatic escalation in concern about the environment. Asked to pick the three most salient out of 19 listed issues, 41% chose the environment, more than any other. This was up ten on last month’s survey, and compares with single digit results that were not uncommonly recorded as recently as 2015. Cost of living and health care tied for second on 31%, respectively down three and up six on last month. The economy was up one to 25%, and crime down one to 21%. On “party most capable to manage environmental issues across the generations”, generations up to and including X gave the highest rating to the Greens, towards whom the “boomer” and “builder” generations showed their usual hostility. The poll was conducted online from a sample of 1000.

• A poll by YouGov for the Australian Institute finds 79% expressing concern about climate change, up five since a similar poll in July. This includes 47% who were very concerned, up ten. Among those aged 18 to 34, only around 10% expressed a lack of concern. Fifty-seven per cent said Australia was experiencing “a lot” of climate change impact, up 14%; 67% said climate change was making bushfires worse, with 26% disagreeing; and only 33% felt the Coalition had done a good job “managing the climate crisis” (a potentially problematic turn of phrase for those who did not allow that there was one), compared with 53% who took the contrary view. The poll was conducted January 8 to 12 from a sample of 1200; considerable further detail is available through the full report.

• The Institute of Public Affairs has a poll on Australia Day and political correctness from Dynata, which has also done polling on the other side of the ideological aisle for the aforesaid Australia Institute. This finds 71% agreeing that “Australia Day should be celebrated on January 26” (55% strongly, 16% somewhat), and 68% agreeing Australia had become too politically correct (42% strongly, 26% somewhat). Disagreement with both propositions was at just 11%. A very substantial age effect was evident here, but not for the two further questions relating to pride in Australia, which received enthusiastic responses across the board. I have my doubts about opening the batting on this particular set of questions by asking if respondents were “proud to be an Australian”, which brings Yes Minister to mind. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the poll is the demographic detail on the respondents, who were presumably drawn from an online panel. This shows women were greatly over-represented in the younger cohorts, while the opposite was true among the old; and that the sample included rather too many middle-aged people on low incomes. The results would have been weighted to correct for this, but some of these weightings were doing some fairly heavy lifting (so to speak).

Elsewhere, if you’re a Crikey subscriber you can enjoy my searing expose on the electoral impact of Bridget McKenzie’s sports sports. I particularly hope you appreciate the following line, as it was the fruit of about two days’ work:

When polling booth and sport grants data are aggregated into 2288 local regions designated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there turns out to be no correlation whatsoever between the amount of funding they received and how much they swung to or against the Coalition.

I worked this out by identifying the approximate target locations of 518 grants, building a dataset recording grant funding and booth-level election swings for each of the ABS’s Statistical Local Area 2 regions, and using linear regression to calculate how much impact the grants had on the Coalition vote. The verdict: absolutely none whatsoever.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

2,074 comments on “Poll respondents with attitudes”

Comments Page 13 of 42
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  1. Coalition’s ‘demeaning’ parenting payment crackdown falls short of estimated savings

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/23/coalitions-demeaning-parenting-payment-crackdown-falling-short-of-estimated-savings

    In response to questions from the Greens senator Rachel Siewert, Services Australia said it had finalised 75,598 reviews between 1 January 2018 and 1 November 2019. Only 950 people (or 1.3%) of those subjected to a review were found to be partnered.
    :::
    Siewert said: “Once again we see that the government has been unfairly picking on single parents, with the so called verification of relationship status process only showing a small number of people that have not been accurately reporting.

    “This is an intrusive process for single parents when they are trying their hardest to support their kids.”

    A Services Australia spokesman said the department would continue to conduct the reviews until 2021.

    Asked how much the policy had cost and how much it had recouped, the spokesman said: “As this measure was announced under the ‘Better targeting of assistance to support jobseekers’ package in the 2017/18 budget, individual costs are not available.”

  2. Bushfire crisis: more than half of all Australians found to have been directly affected

    A quarter of those in Australia Institute survey reported illness or health effects

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/23/bushfire-crisis-more-than-half-of-all-australians-found-to-have-been-directly-affected

    As fire crews in New South Wales and Victoria prepare for the return of severe fire conditions later this week, the survey of more than 1,000 people found 57% of Australians were directly affected in some way by the fires over the past three months.

    About a quarter of those surveyed (26%) reported illness or health effects as a result of smoke haze, while a third (33%) reported a change to routine – such as not jogging outside – as a result of the conditions.

    About 15% said they had been forced to change or cancel holiday or travel plans, while 12% said regular places of business or leisure were closed as a result of the disruption.
    :::
    People who had been impacted by the fires were much more likely to be “very concerned” about climate change (58%) than those not impacted (32%). Those directly affected were also more likely (68%) to say Australia is experiencing “a lot” of climate change impacts, compared with those not affected (42%).

  3. C@t,

    One last point I’d make is that anarchist politics are fundamentally anti-statist and anti-hierarchical. Bookchin for example argues for what he terms Libertarian Municipalism which revolves around shifting decision making to face-to-face municipal based groupings. This replaces top-down power with grass-roots bottom-up power. This idea and Bookchin’s writing formed the basis of the reorganization of the Kurdish PKK in the late-1990’s and early 2000’s.

    https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/bizarre-and-wonderful-murray-bookchin-eco-anarchist

    A decade after Bookchin’s death, I travelled to Rojava, the Kurdish-controlled area of northern Syria, to meet the revolutionaries he inspired. According to a 2015 report by the American Academy of Sciences, Syria’s Fertile Crescent has experienced its worst drought in 900 years, due in large part to man-made climate change. In 2008, three years before the outbreak of civil war, Assad’s agriculture advisers cabled officials in Washington to complain that the social and economic consequences of the drought were “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.” I travelled through the parched landscape in a caravan of white Nissan pick-ups filled with young Kurdish soldiers on their way to fight Islamic State. We passed rickety oil derricks stretching into the sky. “Ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved,” Bookchin wrote, “without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it.”

    Over the next two weeks, I visited popular assemblies, female-led militias whose fighters lectured me on the evils of capitalism and patriarchy, and a mayor who told me she saw the nation-state and “hierarchical, statist mentalities” as threats as grave as IS, whose jihadists had tried to suicide-bomb her office the week before. At the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy in the city of Qamishli, the library included Bookchin’s “The Third Revolution” and Andy Price’s biographical study, “Recovering Bookchin.” His work has never been translated into Arabic; Syrian Kurds mostly learn his ideas from Öcalan’s writings, or at a PKK training academy, where Bookchin’s work, much of which was translated into Turkish in the early 1990s, is required reading. “America?” a young militiawoman guarding a checkpoint said one morning, as she handed me back my papers. “Like Bookchin!”

    :::

    Whatever its faults, and whatever criticisms Bookchin would have had, the Kurdish revolution in Rojava matters for the global left: a formerly authoritarian communist organisation is attempting to build a post-communist movement in the middle of a savage civil war. It’s putting to the test Bookchin’s ideas about libertarian municipalism as a way to organise a revolutionary society; the centrality of ecological thinking in 21st-century libertarian ideology; and hierarchy as the key to forms of oppression such as sexism, capitalism, reactionary religiosity and racism. In Biehl’s account, Bookchin’s life is a story of the personal toll taken by fighting for these revolutionary ideas in a non-revolutionary era. But in Rojava it’s a testament to the notion that, as Bookchin said, “being in the minority is not necessarily testimony to the futility of an ideal.”

  4. BW

    Any fool can slag Labor. And many fools do.

    Any fool can slag Greens. And many fools do.

    Spending so much time slagging a minor party that will not be in government in its own right is such a foolish waste of time.

  5. C@tmomma @ #566 Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 – 7:09 am

    More than half of all Australians have been directly affected by the summer’s bushfire crisis, including millions suffering health effects, according to a new survey from the Australia Institute.

    If only there was a major political party prepared to capitalize on this by having a credible climate policy geared towards preventing these kind of events from getting even worse in the future, and pointing out that the Coalition has no such policy and wants to do the exact opposite…

  6. ‘poroti says:
    Thursday, January 23, 2020 at 9:23 am

    Boerwar

    A suggestion that what Whitlam spoke of may still be there but in a different form, you are a bit of a ‘petal’ to call that “slagging Labor”.’

    Yeah, nah.

    If it were an isolated incident on Bludger, perhaps.

    But after six years of systemic Labor slagging by the Greens, nope. The Greens should be claiming some credit for Scotty from Marketing. They helped get him up. The Greens were Killing Bill and Same Old Same Old with the best of them.

  7. Anecdotal, but somewhat depressing…

    I’m on a bit of a road trip down to Sydney at the moment.

    Speaking to people in servos, shops, friends I’m staying with etc., I haven’t found ONE who, when the surface is even slightly scratched, believes that the bushfires have anything much at all to do with Climate Change.

    It’s “bloody Greenies” stopping burnbacks, arsonists, “just another hot summer”, “an ABC beat up” (they’re after more funding apparently), “greedy scientists” and so on… anything but Climate Change.

    Don’t underestimate the capabilities of the human mind to rationalise away almost anything into as comfortable corner as possible, one that makes it easier to cope with the consequences, or that confirms their view of the world and it’s supposed future.

    Belief that Climate Change is a real thing that is affecting us now is very fragile. This week’s seemingly solid polls are just a thin crust papering over a huge seething ocean of denial and excuses.

    You can explain the physical mechanisms of how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gases and receive blank, almost patronizing looks of disbelief. You can refer to temperature tables over the decades and be told the BOM is corrupt.

    People don’t WANT to believe their world is changing. Almost anyone who gives them that opportunity to deny will find an attentive audience.

  8. bakunin,
    You know what I’ve discovered about local collective decision-making cohorts? The alphas and the ambitious always try to dominate. They aren’t always the ones best qualified to lead either.

  9. https://www.goodfood.com.au/recipes/news/i-made-paris-hiltons-lasagne-and-it-tasted-like-a-shoe-20200121-h1l7qs

    Paris Hilton has launched a cooking show and it’s one of the most bonkers YouTube videos to surface in the past 12 months.

    I say “cooking show” because that’s what the former Simple Life star calls it, but the video is mostly Hilton clunking through drawers and throwing shade on utensils. “All these spoons are brutal” might be my favourite quote, but it’s tight up there at the top. “Careful with your long hair because it can light on fire” is a bloody cracker, too.

    Infamous Lasagne is … not very good. The oven-ready lasagne sheets are edible, at least, but need more sauce-based moisture to become anything close to enjoyable. The lack of herbs, spices, onion, carrot, celery, wine, parmesan and bechamel makes for terribly bland time and the cheese mix is a masterclass in clumpy stodge. Infamous Lasagne is even worse after a night in the fridge when it tastes like a pleather shoe dunked in meat pie. Irony is not a dish best served cold.

    Flashback —–

    https://www.newstatesman.com/node/162645

    This spirit sustained the museum through terrible suffering. From September 1941, Leningrad remained under siege for almost 900 days. The food ration could not sustain life. People ate dogs, cats, pigeons, rats (and worse); boiled shoes for soup; consumed wallpaper and the flour paste behind it. The Hermitage’s cellars were transformed into bomb shelters housing more than 2,000 people. Boris Piotrovsky, who later became director of the museum, describes a birthday party for his brother celebrated with frozen breadcrumbs and furniture glue for dessert, washed down with a bottle of eau de Cologne. One of the principal ways many staff survived the war was by eating restorer’s glue, served up as a kind of jelly.

    Therefore – go ye forth and be of humble spirit. Boiled shoe is not to be sneezed at. 🤧👞👠

  11. Good Morning

    https://www.thenational.ae/davos-funeral-of-free-market-capitalism-has-china-in-mind-1.411937

    Davos funeral of free-market capitalism has China in mind
    This year’s Davos meeting of the mighty is focusing on the failures of capitalism and looking favourably upon Asian-style state capitalism.
    It has been many years since the word capitalism was on so many lips. For the past two decades capitalism seemed to be part of life, and raising the slogan “down with capitalism” was as bizarre as calling for the abolition of food or sex.

    Now they have joined the mainstream. Nowhere is this more clear than at the World Economic Forum, the talk-fest for bankers, business people and politicians that meets every January in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. The theme this year is transforming capitalism, and the founder and guiding spirit of Davos, Klaus Schwab, has declared that “capitalism no longer fits the world around us”.

  12. Jeff Sparrow

    There’s nothing safe about a country in flames, and the Coalition will exploit that

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/22/theres-nothing-safe-about-a-country-in-flames-and-the-coalition-will-exploit-that

    Accordingly, in Australia in 2019, politicians spent more time discussing how best to punish environmental protesters than they did devising legislation that might protect the climate.
    :::
    No government minister used similar rhetoric about carbon polluters.

    Similarly, in Queensland, the Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk….

    She can, however, rush through Joh-era style laws to jail Extinction Rebellion members.
    :::
    As Morrison himself says, the core responsibility of a prime minister is to “keep Australians safe”.
    :::
    Global heating will make future governments seem extraordinarily weak – even as a huge new wave of refugees arrives.

    In the midst of a genuine emergency, with the army already on the streets, the likely conjunction of climate and border politics does not bear thinking about.

  15. bakunin

    Qamishli is one of the towns now dominated by Turkish armor, long range artillery, and air power. This happened following Trump’s sudden and unilateral and subsequent partially-reversed withdrawal from Syria.

    Tens of thousands of Kurds fled this latest invasion by the Turks.

    I am not sure that the Turks actually entered the town. They can flatten it any time they choose so to do. They dominate all the approaches.

  16. guytaur

    …This year’s Davos meeting of the mighty is focusing on the failures of capitalism and looking favourably upon Asian-style state capitalism.

    ‘State capitalism” must be very fashionable among the ‘power elite” . Earlier read an analysis as to what the Russian governments recent musical chairs was about and ‘Come on Down” ‘state capitalism” as being the in thing. Although what each writer means by ‘state capitalism’ may be very different.

    ….and the new government clearly indicates that, especially with the nominations of Prime Minister Mishustin and his First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov: these are both on record as very much proponents of what is called “state capitalism” in Russia: meaning an economic philosophy in which the states does not stifle private entrepreneurship, but one in which the state is directly and heavily involved in creating the correct economic conditions for the government and private sector to grow. Most crucially, “state capitalism” also subordinates the sole goal of the corporate world (making profits) to the interests of the state and, therefore, to the interests of the people.

    https://www.unz.com/tsaker/the-new-russian-government/

  17. Bushfire Bill
    Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 – 9:34 am
    Comment #605

    Anecdotal, but somewhat depressing…

    I’m on a bit of a road trip down to Sydney at the moment.

    Perhaps you are attractive to the people you describe.

    I spend a couple of hours a week talking to a nephew in Canberra who recounts conversations with his friends and acquaintances who have (what I would describe as) weird religious theories. He then wants to tell me (in minute detail) of these conversations. I am now tempted to play the “Red Card” with a threat of going to the “Black Spot” – purely in self defence you will understand.

    In your case – I wonder where are the folk who make up the respondents mentioned in William’s headline notes. You may have a repelling factor.

    • A poll by YouGov for the Australian Institute finds 79% expressing concern about climate change, up five since a similar poll in July

    The failure of polling at the last Federal Election tells me the almost unimaginable idea –

    People lie about just about everything.

    Bonjour. 😎

  18. Bushfire Bill @ #606 Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 – 9:34 am

    Anecdotal, but somewhat depressing…

    I’m on a bit of a road trip down to Sydney at the moment.

    Speaking to people in servos, shops, friends I’m staying with etc., I haven’t found ONE who, when the surface is even slightly scratched, believes that the bushfires have anything much at all to do with Climate Change.

    It’s “bloody Greenies” stopping burnbacks, arsonists, “just another hot summer”, “an ABC beat up” (they’re after more funding apparently), “greedy scientists” and so on… anything but Climate Change.

    Don’t underestimate the capabilities of the human mind to rationalise away almost anything into as comfortable corner as possible, one that makes it easier to cope with the consequences, or that confirms their view of the world and it’s supposed future.

    Belief that Climate Change is a real thing that is affecting us now is very fragile. This week’s seemingly solid polls are just a thin crust papering over a huge seething ocean of denial and excuses.

    You can explain the physical mechanisms of how CO2 acts as a greenhouse gases and receive blank, almost patronizing looks of disbelief. You can refer to temperature tables over the decades and be told the BOM is corrupt.

    People don’t WANT to believe their world is changing.

    A PB stalwart comes hard up against reality.
    Mundo is not surprised.

  19. Poroti

    The “State Capitalism” I want is the Scandinavian kind.

    People not corporations or government in charge. I truly don’t like the authoritarianism of the Asian model.

  20. On climate change, the suggestion these events have happened before is BS. There are many counter-examples, not only in Australia.

    I have several relatives and pen-friends in Scandinavian countries, and this “winter” for them has been historically mild. In southern Finland there has been no snow and there was no white christmas. The lakes have not frozen over for the first time in recorded history (>500years). For perspective, Helsinki is north of Anchorage and the top third of Finland is inside the Arctic Circle. The average January temperature is normally around -10C. This year it is around 0 C.
    https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finland_experiencing_mildest_winter_in_100_years/11160303

    The world is presently experiencing climate events that have not been seen before in recorded human history.

  22. Also who knew. The Equality for LGBTI people means a socialist society.

    The billionaire founder of Silicon Valley company Salesforce (CRM) declared on Tuesday modern capitalism is “dead”, saying business leaders now have a “responsibility” to think beyond just shareholders.

    “Capitalism as we have known it is dead,” Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, said at Davos. “This obsession that we have with maximising profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency.”

    Benioff, who is worth $7.7bn (£6bn) according to Forbes, made the comments during a panel on ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ — the idea that companies should work to maximise the value for all ‘stakeholders’ such as employees and society, rather than just maximising shareholder value.

    “Stakeholder capitalism is finally hitting a tipping point,” Benioff said.

    “Does it mean I have to fight for my employees? Yes. If they’re being discriminated against and if they’re LGBT employees, yes, we will fight for them

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/davos-2020-salesforce-founder-capitalism-is-dead-181643945.html

  23. While the debate about fuel reduction burns will come up there is one parameter that has yet to be mentioned:
    You can’t do fuel reduction burns in rainforest without destroying the rainforest.
    Extensive tracts of rainforest were burned during the fires.
    The disconnect is obvious and deliberate.

  27. [Benioff also called for higher taxes on the rich to help tackle inequality and the climate crisis.]

    Presumably he could pay for some modelling as to what the appropriate level of tax is and has been, determine the personal differential and pay the difference somewhere.

  28. Shellbell

    I think that is somewhere in the Davos forums.

    These are billionaires saying Bernie Sanders is not extreme but the new normal.

  29. If they were serious about the end of “modern capitalism”, they wouldn’t keep holding the meeting at Davos, CH, during the ski season.

    Nup, didn’t think so…

  30. shellbell
    “Doesn’t Scandinavian capitalism include Equinor which is majority owned by the Norwegian Government?”
    Not sure but my family and friends live in Finland and Sweden not Norway so I have much less knowledge of them. All the oil exploitation companies in Norway are government owned, or owned by the Sovereign Wealth Fund. In the rest of Scandinavia the Norwegian oil industry is not popular.

    At this point I would observe that the only countries with significant numbers of climate change skeptics make money out of fossil fuels. Nobody else has a motive to believe the climate denial BS.

  31. @NSWRFS tweets

    It’s going to be very hot across many across NSW today with increased fire danger well into tonight. Know the fire danger for your area and be ready to take action. #nswrfs #nswfires https://twitter.com/BOM_NSW/status/1220120722229661698

    @BOM_NSW

    A cold front is crossing the state with dust, heat, storms and wind a feature in many Districts. Stay up to date with the latest forecast and warnings: http://ow.ly/pnXx50y2x0g NSW RFS fire info: http://ow.ly/3LoA50y2x0f NSW SES storm preparedness info: http://ow.ly/Fq0r50y2x0e https://twitter.com/BOM_NSW/status/1220120722229661698/photo/1

  33. Guytaur
    “It’s going to be very hot across many across NSW today with increased fire danger well into tonight. Know the fire danger for your area and be ready to take action. #nswrfs #nswfires https://twitter.com/BOM_NSW/status/1220120722229661698”

    Fear not! Honest Scomo is back on the job now, water bomber aircraft have been flown in from USA and everything is prepared. Scomo has promised that he will not be caught napping twice.

  34. @RichardDiNatale tweets

    It’s been 136 days since the Greens bill for a federal ICAC passed the Senate. But instead of the government doing its job in the house and legislating for an anti-corruption body that the Liberals say they support, they’ve been dragging their heels https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/22/christian-porter-defends-bridget-mckenzie-over-36000-grant-to-sport-club-she-belongs-to?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

    Does anyone really trust the Prime Minister’s own department to investigate Bridget McKenzie, his Coalition partner’s deputy leader? Enough is enough. Scott Morrison needs to stop stalling and pass our federal ICAC bill in the House when Parliament returns.

  37. Yep. Just another summer day….

    The Age
    @theage
    ·
    1h
    Melburnians have woken to sludge-coated cars, a dirty orange Yarra River and swimming pools full of grime after dusty rain fell over the city. Do you have more images to share? Get in touch: picdesk@theage.com.au
    http://ow.ly/RbeH50y2uHR #melbweather
    A present from the Mallee: sludge coats cars, Yarra River and closes public pools
    Melburnians are scratching their heads at dirty-orange swimming pools and sludge-coated cars, clothes and outdoor furniture,

  38. Bushfire Bill
    Speaking to people in servos, shops, friends I’m staying with etc., I haven’t found ONE who, when the surface is even slightly scratched, believes that the bushfires have anything much at all to do with Climate Change.

    It’s “bloody Greenies” stopping burnbacks, arsonists, “just another hot summer”, “an ABC beat up” (they’re after more funding apparently), “greedy scientists” and so on… anything but Climate Change.

    If these people are older, there is a good chance that they don’t want to face the realisation that things have fundamentally changed.

    On the other hand, people like Morrison have children who will face the ravages of climate change. Does he not care about their future or is he so convinced that his family will be saved by the Rapture that he dares not interfere in what he considers to be “god’s will”?

  41. Whatever the Coalition says about accepting science, they are anti science. The media need to observe, analyse and report on what they *do*, not what they say. Their *methods* are anti science. They start with their solution and work backwards to discover a problem. It started under Abbott. It was the same under Turnbull. It’s the same under Morrison. The science minister’s methods are no different. They cherry pick the bits that suit their ideology and ignore the bits that don’t. Worse, when it comes to funding science, they play a game of patronage that rewards and includes those in favour while punishing, excluding and alienating those in disfavour. It’s been the same for a decade. They’ve not changed. It’s the same mob with different sales people.

    Why do they keep being given the benefit of the doubt, despite their consistent practices over a decade? I think the press gallery don’t understand science. They don’t understand the *processes* of science and how this mob’s processes are anathema. They don’t understand and are incapable of recognising that what the government does, and how the government does it, contradicts what the Coalition says. They’re incapable of distinguishing between a solution that is constructed as the result of a process of inquiry, and a solution that is used to define a process of inquiry. They don’t understand, and fail to report, that these two practices are different.

    For example, they never saw through Malcom Turnbull’s Mess, his “technology agnostic” sales pitch, or understood that they were comparing a political solution (Turnbull’s) to a technological solution (Labor’s). Otherwise they would not have put them on the same level. Similarly, they are now failing to report that the Coalition is anti-science when judged by their methods and practices. The Coalition don’t need to be given the benefit of the doubt, we don’t need to wait and see (to then act surprised and disappointed). We can already see what they’re doing, right now, by the processes they’ve initiated, that are no different to their usual practices.

  42. A huge dust cloud has arrived over our part of Canberra propelled by the strong NW winds.

    Crews are still mopping up the the fire that started yesterday afternoon near Canberra airport and with the current winds could still threaten parts of Queanbeyan (NSW) and the adjacent village of Oaks Estate (ACT).

  43. Republicans are losing — even if Trump will be acquitted: Columnist Max Boot

    Conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot walked through the ways that Republicans are completely failing in their attempt to defend President Donald Trump.

    The president’s trial began Tuesday with a series of votes where Republicans blocked a vote on whether to include witnesses, evidence and any information from the House investigations. It appeared that the president’s team was unprepared to argue against the witnesses and evidence, instead, demanding the trial begin immediately and arguments over witnesses be dismissed.

    Boot noted that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) came prepared with not only information but a slate of videos that used his own words against him. It was so good that lawyers watching Schiff called it the perfect example to use for law school classes and others complimented it as the most impressive they’ve ever seen.

    “The transparently false arguments by Trump lawyers will not convince those majorities that they are wrong. The Trump team will win an acquittal in the Senate no matter how badly they argue but, on the present trajectory, they won’t win in the court of public opinion,” Boot closed.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/22/democrats-are-winning-argument-even-though-theyll-lose-senate-trial/

  44. #weatheronPB. No dust or smoke in Sydney. Sunny, windy and 35° on the way to 41°. Just a one day burst of heat before showers and humidity return so hopefully no fires get going.

  45. DisplayName

    They repeatedly say they accept the science it may even be true that they do but do they ever say they will act accordingly to such acceptance ? As a former philosopher king in Australia once said “nope,nope,nope” . For religious nutters like Scrott “accepting the science” would be just accepting your fate or accepting the will of god , can’t change it , no use trying.

  47. UN report on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s hacking of Bezos’s phone raises questions over other potentially compromised elites

    “If the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally hacked Bezos’s phone via malicious files sent over text, it seems extremely likely he’s hacked heads of state the same way.”

    “Jared Kushner also has talked to bin Salman extensively over WhatsApp. This information raises the question of whether Kushner’s phone was similarly compromised by Saudi intelligence, which may be blackmailing Kushner to influence U.S. Middle East policy. Indeed, for all we know, Donald Trump’s own phone may have been hacked in this way by bin Salman.”

    https://www.rawstory.com/2020/01/un-report-on-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salmans-hacking-of-bezoss-phone-raises-questions-over-other-potentially-compromised-elites/

  50. An interesting angle.

    Eddy Jokovich
    @EddyJokovich
    ·
    11m
    Of course the Red Cross should be providing all of the $95 million they’ve raised to bushfire victims, but all the outrage has come from Liberal MPs, deflecting from their own inadequate response to bushfire management and climate change. #auspol

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