As I recently reported, after nearly three weeks, the Tasmanian election result was finally decided… or was it? On the face of it, we’re exactly where we were before we were forced to waste millions of dollars on an election no one wanted. The numbers in parliament are exactly the same, the Libs are still in government and Jeremy Rockliff is still premier.
Why did we have to bother? Because training-wheels Labor leader Dean Winter thought he could play big-boy games and pulled a silly parliamentary stunt that blew up in his face. Voters punished him accordingly: while Labor managed to hold on to its seats, its primary vote plunged to a record low. Winter himself failed to even win a quota (a peculiarity of Tasmania’s Hare-Clark electoral system) in his own right in his own seat.
By contrast, Jeremy Rockliff pulled so many votes that he personally won two quotas.
So, what is Winter planning to do?
Labor leader Dean Winter has confirmed Mr Rockliff’s government will face a motion of no-confidence when that happens, barely two months after a successful no-confidence motion triggered July 19’s snap state election.
What do they say about doing the same thing and expecting different results?
But the biggest task now sits with Mr Winter, who sat at the helm while his party suffered a 3.1 per cent statewide swing against it and failed to win a quota in his own right in the seat of Franklin.
He’s got to make Tasmanians understand why the parliament is again debating kicking out a premier who received more than two quotas in his seat of Braddon.
And convince people that this time, a no-confidence motion is a positive move to install a Labor government, not a negative tactic to oust a popular premier when he’s got no plan to lead the state himself.
If he thinks Tasmanians won’t be absolutely ropeable when Labor pulls the same silly stunt again, he’s about to get a very, very, harsh lesson.
Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese’s idiotic, authoritarian attempts to ban 16-year-olds from social media just keeps digging itself deeper. Leaving aside that Labor thinks that people who are too young and impressionable to watch YouTube videos are A-OK to vote, Albanese is once again proving that politicians understand technology about as well as your granny who can’t figure out the remote on her new telly. Not only has Labor apparently never heard of VPNs, they actually think that AI isn’t a pile of mis-named digital slop.
A government-commissioned trial of available age assurance technology found last week that options existed to verify the ages of users “privately, robustly and effectively”, but the preliminary report did not include any details of the specific tests nor how the 53 different technologies involved fared.
With good reason: the technologies were about as able to verify age correctly as a public servant passing off a balding, wrinkled, Muslim illegal immigrant as a ‘teen’.
Children as young as 15 were repeatedly misidentified as being in their 20s and 30s during government tests of age-checking tools, sowing new doubts about whether the teen social media ban is viable.
ABC News can reveal that face-scanning technology tested on school students this year could only guess their age within an 18-month range in 85 per cent of cases.
Which, when you’re trying to evaluate if someone is 16 or 17, is something of a biggie.
“I don’t think the ban is viable,” said Lisa Given, professor of information sciences at RMIT University, who has closely analysed the government’s policy […]
“The accuracy level at 85 is actually quite low, and an 18-month range is significant when you’re trying to identify a very particular age grouping,” she said.
That is something of an understatement.
But then, this is the same technology which tried to pass off a bloke who looks like a bulldog in a wig as a ‘woman’. Real women took one look at his picture and burst into laughter.
Not satisfied with beclowning themselves on technology, Australia’s indefatigably moronic leftist politicians are proving (yet again) that they’re not much chop at economics, either.
All Australians would receive $3300 a year in exchange for accepting a higher and broader GST under a plan which proponents claim would boost the budget by $28 billion a year while driving up the nation’s living standards.
Let’s do the maths, while Kate Chaney struggles with whether socks or shoes go first…
Raising the GST will cost Australian taxpayers $3425 each. Then the government will generously give us 95 per cent of it back. Then there’s the cost of the public servants to administer all this churn.
I’m reminded of an old Wizard of Id cartoon: The Duke proposes that the King lower taxes. ‘The people will have more money to spend, the economy will boom!’
To which the King dryly responds, ‘Taxes pay your salary’.
‘Uhh… for my next idea…’ responds the Duke.
People who’ve spent their entire working lives suckling on the public teat have a hard time conceiving that anyone would actually work for a living in private enterprise. For instance, during her brief, lamentable tenure as prime minister, Julia Gillard outlined her plan to grow jobs: by recruiting thousands more in teaching and healthcare. Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, are almost entirely taxpayer-funded.
We’re living in the Red Ferret’s glorious socialist utopia.
While employment figures appear buoyant on the surface, labour market data shows that more than four out of five jobs – 82 per cent – created across the past two years were government-funded positions, either public service positions or jobs in the non-market sector (often in the care economy and in healthcare and education), funded by taxpayers and driven by government spending decisions.
Soon, we’ll be living in a truly Soviet worker’s paradise, where there’s no unemployment, but nobody actually works, because everyone is on the government payroll.
After all, it worked out so well last time, didn’t it?
