shirro

As long as the US has wealthy safe haven states they are going to be a more attractive destination for people with high demand, high income jobs. As long as those safe havens and state rights exist I don't think US citizens are going to qualify for entry as refugees for some time. In the unlikely event the law and society breaks down completely people will need to get in line with all the millions fleeing war and genocide. Those that get in through skilled immigration will need to carefully weigh up the significant financial and career consequences.

The US might be a worse place for lower skilled jobs due to lack of public health and low minimum wage but at the other end of the spectrum most people would be giving up a lot of opportunities and income to move to countries like Australia or NZ. Our economies are comparatively small, undiversified and lacking investment.

The SA Libs sold off the rights to charge rent on our electricity grid for the next 200 years to a foreign owned company. Yeah, its not the wind farms and solar panels that are the problem. I want to hate the government that did it but the whole state was plunged into a lost decade after a state government backed bank collapsed and the taxpayer was left to cover their debts. So I should blame the Labor party in government at the time of the collapse? They were cleared by the subsequent investigation. The bank management were the problem.

Most of the blame falls to an establishment private school alumni with a double barrel surname who managed the bank like a personal plaything buying bad assets. They set a whole state's economic and population growth back even further compared with the rest of the country for years and doomed us to paying the highest worlds highest electricity prices for a couple of centuries. Nice. I suspect this is kind of the norm. People gain positions of great trust and responsibility as much by who they know as what they know and then proceed to fuck it up while receiving praise and pocketing bonuses then fuck off with no real consequences and leave the rest of us to clean up.

The worst SA premier imaginable is incomparable to the damage caused to this state by this one establishment idiot.

Reagan undeniably paved the way for Christian nationalism to take over the republican party.

I disagree on Thatcher and Howard accelerating fundamentalism, though neoliberalism is a fair call. You were damned if you did or didn't and Hawke/Keating set a lot of reforms in motion prior to Howard. We weren't equipped to cope with global changes without major economic reforms. The decision to have reforms advantage some while leaving others further behind was pure shitfuckery and Thatcher did everything as contentiously as possible.

Blair and Rudd strike me more as god botherers than Howard or Thatcher and the ALP have perpetuated and extended Howard's drive towards private religious education and service delivery. The ALP right has an equivalent group in the Libs. Its all the same here. Organised religion has an each-way bet on Australian politics and in 2 horse race they can never lose. The conservatives have had some obvious problems with religious branch stackings and people leaving in frustration and its arguable the party has shifted to its detriment. Labor and some unions have a complex history with organised religion. In some ways it might be symbiotic and reflective of membership but it can appear like cronyism.

There are lots of contradictory things about Howard. I get why people feel very strongly about him one way or another.

In the end a lot of people voted for him because he put money in their pockets whether it was tax refunds for families, economic reforms, wealth transfer or a booming resource economy. Honestly I wouldn't mind a bit of that right now. And that is the shitty bit isn't it. Like you know we wasted opportunities, increased social divides etc. Fundamentally we are just a meaner, nastier bunch. But I kind of get why Trump won so decisively despite being such a disgusting person. You have to grab those swing voters by the pussy and one of the best ways to do that is put money in their pockets and Howard understood that.

Fraser was uncompromising on things like refugees so he gets some credit for that as Howard/Fisher did for gun control. I don't think Howard was proud of the children overboard stuff and not sure Fraser would have done that but he governed in different times. I think there is at least one PM since who had no moral compass at all, like clinically lacking, there was just the mask but I am struggling to remember anything he did.

I can't be sure if Howard's government changed Australian society for the worse or if we were already changing and he was a reflection of that. Either way there is pre-Howard Australia and post-Howard Australia and they are basically different countries. A lot of people did very well under Howard, even a lot of battlers were better off for a time. He is always going to be a highly notable PM. There have been a few since who were just hopeless, ineffective, incompetent and its a struggle to pin that label on Howard regardless of politics.

The trouble with labeling Howard as best or worst is that there were very definitely winners and losers under Howard. I would say he was the worst in terms of impact on society but unfortunately I think he was more a symbol of the times. I think we probably got nasty, greedy and divided all by ourselves.

In a country where a 10yo indigenous kid can be held fully responsible for their crimes we still can't prosecute rich and powerful people who have full comprehension of their actions and know they will never face consequences. We can lower the age of criminal responsibility to sweep inconvenient social issues created by bad economic and social policy under the carpet. So why can't we lower the bar for criminal responsibility in cases of maladministration, fraud and favoritism by public officials? Surely they should be held to higher standards than some ignorant kid.

I am on aging PMG era copper with no upgrade on the horizon. I expect to die from old age before NBN offers better than 50Mbps VDSL. I will never forgive the cynical partisan politics that produced this shit show or the idiots who knew it was bullshit but went along with it due to tribalism. It was supposed to be a national network.

I think it is more about framing. The leading media frame the discussion in biased and emotive terms that then carries over unquestioning into other media, the pub, workplace and social media. Lidia isn't the only person speaking up for indigenous rights or questioning the monarchy but the others rarely get coverage. Lidia seeks attention and the media uses it for their own purposes and they both get what they want.

The media tells us there is nothing more Australian than disrespect for authority when they are exploiting the ANZAC mythology. What could be more Aussie than a digger not saluting British officers? The media tells us implicitly who can protest and who can't, who is deserving of a voice and who isn't and which authorities can be questioned and which can not.

I suspect this shit originates with social media influencers representing companies selling flavoured salt. One company in particular likes to try and mythologize it. Many countries have seasoned salt since long before us. We mostly only put it on chips and people are split on whether they like it or not. I would prefer gravy and cheese or better still put the chips in an AB/HSP. I think it is hugely overrated. In actual cooking and other snacks we still use MSG and other sources of umami like fish sauce, soy, bouillon etc.

Nobody is putting chicken salt on their sushi, kebab or banh mi or the hundreds of other takeaway foods we eat that aren't chips and actually taste good. Chicken salt is boring mainstream manufactured culture like the Bunnings sausage sizzle. People have been cooking and selling food for community fundraisers for generations but it took a hardware company to nudge it on social media to make it a talking point. Reddit/Facebook level shit.

It is historical. We have a reasonably stable political system as does the UK and so our government has evolved through consensus since the restoration of the British monarchy.

Australia slowly but steadily made all the necessary legal changes to become a fully independent sovereign nation but we retained an Australian monarch who follows the same rules of succession as the British monarch. I expect the people who worked to obtain our sovereign independence thought the monarchy would be dealt with next. There was an attempt and it got sunk by a nasty scaremongering campaign. Some of the misinformation still circulates today and it has become part of many people's beliefs.

We need a massive campaign to educate the population so we can achieve the sort of constructive and sensible consensus that are the hallmark of our successful and stable democracy. Unfortunately both social and mainstream media will promote increasingly partisan and divisive misinformation for their own purposes. I am sure many advocates for reform don't want to deal with the hyper-partisan negativity and army of cookers that will arise flying monarchist flags. Perhaps if the monarchy is left alone they will disappear up their own arses and make it easier.