Cathy Wilcox hits the nail on the head. Any societal good that clubs bring by spending some of the money they make from problem gambling is more than outweighed by the societal damage of problem gambling.
It's much like the very disingenuous astroturf campaign against plain packaging of tobacco products. They claimed it wouldn't work, and spend millions on a campaign to tell people this, which was a good indication they thought it might work. Ditto the gambling industry.
Business leaders demand say in running Sydney
Businesses are fed up ... Lord Mayor Clover Moore / Pic: Ella Pellegrini. Source: The Daily Telegraph
Limited News abandons all pretense, now it's just the Official Publisher of the Liberal Party of Australia. In this ridiculous piece it quotes three "powerful players in the corporate world" who are fed up with Clover Moore's control of the City of Sydney. They fail to mention the small matter that every one of the three "captains of industry" quoted have served as Liberal Party politicians.
Nick Griener was Liberal Premier of NSW from 1988 to 1992.
Kathryn Greiner is his wife and was a Liberal councilor for the City of Sydney, that is a direct political rival of Clover.
Patricia Forsythe was a Liberal Member of the Legislative Council from 1991-2006.
All disinterested captains of industry with no political axe to grind here. Of course. Vikki Campion, I hope you don't claim your job title is "journalist".
Mike Quigley is no more responsible for the corruption at Alcatel than John Hartigan was for the corruption at the Melbourne Storm.
A tip in Crikey pointed out this quote from AM this morning with Conroy specifically mentioning the head of News Limited (the Australian arm of News Corp). Is the ALP finally learning that appeasing these nutjobs is never going to work? It's time for the ALP to treat all News Limited media as the enemy they truly are, bent on hounding Labor out of power by any means available to them.
A good starting point would be to amend all the laws that require governments and companies to advertise in national newspapers and replace the whole system with a well-designed online space. There's really only two national newspapers in this country, and one of them is owned by Limited News. I imagine it makes a lot of its revenue from this kind of automatic printing. I bet there's no discounts for legally-mandated advertising space!
This would actually be better for the people who consume things like tender information, insolvencies, interest rate changes and the like. Instead of having to pay someone to trawl the newspapers and look up any names in the insolvency notices, as most big companies do, they could pull down a regular feed of all insolvencies and automatically data match it against their internal systems, only spitting out the potential matches.
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s
Weren't we fighting to bring democracy and the rule of law to these places?
I've been using Instapaper to push longer articles to my Kindle for later reading. The tool isn't without some significant limitations but it works well enough for me. It's great to no longer skip reading longer pieces of text, but instead read them at leisure.
I am very uneasy about laws limiting free speech.
This is the man fighting a court battle about free speech, aiming to protect his right to vilify Aboriginal people who aren't Aboriginal enough by his standards. So of course he doesn't actually say "we should shut this down", but a principled free speech advocate would say "I don't like it but I'll fight for their right to say it".
Principles and Blot. They don't go together.
Follow up question (from The Australian journalist): "So you'd like people to pay more for petrol and diesel, Senator?"
Christine: "My view is it would be fantastic to have really good public transport in Australia. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have very fast trains, wouldn't it be great to have a decent metro system in Melbourne and Sydney, wouldn't it be great to have electric cars, wouldn't it be great to redesign our cities so that people are less car-dependent and they're healthier and happier at the same time, and experience better air quality. They are the questions that need to be asked and that's what people want. If you want to get transformation and innovation, you only get it by transferring to the technologies that are low carbon and that's where we're coming from in this scenario to make sure we drive that kind of innovation in Australia."
Qn: "So you're signalling that petrol will be included?"
Christine: "Well, the transport sector is.."
QN interrupting: "When you say the transport sector, you're talking freight or people's ordinary cars?"
Did this journo already have his story written and just needed to stick the quote in the appropriate placeholder?
As Julia Gillard warned tough budget choices lay ahead, the Opposition Leader said the $36 billion network was an “expensive luxury that Australia cannot afford”.
“The one thing you don't do is re-do your bathroom when the roof has just been blown off and that's the situation that we find ourselves in right now,” he said.
That sure sounds like you're using the flood disaster to grind an axe there Tony. Your party's newspaper has been all over Bob Brown, accusing him of doing the same for pointing out coal's complicity in climate extremes. Hypocrisy much?
