Annastacia Palaszczuk: "If we start to see even more cases coming out of New South Wales in the next couple of days, I think we should have a national cabinet meeting".
"We are getting great briefings from the chief health officers but I don't think we want to see what happened in Victoria happen in NSW and I definitely don't want to see it happening Queensland ...
" ... so I'm just saying if things escalate over the next couple of days I think national cabinet would be worthwhile" #auspol#covidnsw
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Another example from today's #qt Morrison: "Hazard reduction is important, if not more important,
than emissions reduction, when it comes to protecting people from fire and hotter, dryer longer summers in the future". Let's look at that statement quickly.
The first thing to say to that is it is ALL important. Mitigation. Harm minimisation. Adaptation. It's all got to happen. Now you can say hazard reduction is most important if you like, even though that's a value judgment, not a fact.
But the problem with hazard reduction is it has become much harder to do in an environment where climate change is making the environment hotter and drier. It is becoming more dangerous to carry out harm minimisation. So this cycle feeds itself. It's all connected.
From the ANAO: "The guidelines published on 2 August 2018 identified that the Minister would approve CSIG funding, with her decisions to be informed by recommendations from an assessment panel that had been endorsed by the Sport Australia board."
"Throughout the granting process all parties acted as if the Minister was able to be the approver. No section 11 directions were issued to Sport Australia in 2018–19".
"In the absence of a section 11 direction, there was no legal authority evident to the ANAO under which the Minister was able to be the approver of CSIG program grants to be paid from the money of Sport Australia".
A few quick thoughts on leadership spills. After more than ten years of this tiresome bullshit, there are a few things to learn I reckon. If a challenger needs to arrive breathlessly to declare intent, they likely don’t have the numbers.
If other people have to resign from the front bench to create the appearance of a stampede, the insurgent is likely behind, not in front. They have a need to build momentum with colleagues. Another buyer beware clue.
There will be exceptions to these observations & I’m not saying that I knew McCormack would hold Joyce out. I didn’t know who would win, and TBH I think we ought to think about getting out of the predictions business, because it doesn’t help. Just feeds the bullshit complex.
Fake news, a thread. According to new work from the University of Canberra in cooperation with the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford, a majority of online consumers in Australia, 62%, are concerned about what is real and what is fake on the internet.
This level of local concern is higher than the global average and, the more interested in politics you are, the more you worry about fake news. The new research suggests a proportion of news consumers in Australia are taking steps to try and verify what they are reading.
But before we get too excited, most people consuming information online in Australia take no steps to verify its accuracy. Australians are also more likely to share a dubious story without checking it than news consumers in many of the other countries surveyed.
No column this weekend. For the past couple of weeks I've been working intensively with @knausc to investigate what happened with the death tax fake news during the campaign. We've published the results of that deep dive this morning on @GuardianAus
First, the origins of the misinformation: a Daily Telegraph article on 21 July 2018 reporting the ACTU supported an inheritance tax, an uncritical follow-up discussion on the Sunrise program the following day, and a media release by Josh Frydenberg on 24 January 2019.
New facts. On February 6, Facebook offered Labor a briefing about how it intended to safeguard integrity during the coming election. FB acknowledged problems. ALP not convinced by what they heard. We've published that presentation this morning.