The birdies are back especially for budget eve in Victoria 🐦
They've hidden the title for now but the theme of tomorrow will be 'amalgamation' aka how many loosely related things can we suddenly shove together in an attempt to save money & avoid a 'cutting' headline. Always a nice way to muddy reporting too.
As part of this keep an eye out for Weimar in the near future, as his title may end up being Captain of the Pet Projects. They will wring every drop of usefulness from this man before the bus comes along but some are starting to wonder how long he'll even last under the pressure.
Sutton is back in the witness box for the I Cook Food court case from 10am. Link to watch online: vimeo.com/event/3572546
Interesting. Seems as if there was no new info or reports given to Sutton between making the first closure order and the second closure order. Sutton maintains he was 'satisfied' to do this but seemed to stop short of being able to explain what (if any) extra info allowed this.
"Perhaps this refreshes your memory" is probably not what you want to hear while in a witness box.
The Slug Gate court case finally kicked off in Melbourne yesterday. After getting closed in Feb 2019, this has finally hit a courtroom.
Originally the case consisted of claims against both Dandenong Council & the Dept of Health over the closure of ICook Foods.
Having settled the case with the Council last week (more will come on this) it leaves the case to be fought between I Cook & the Dept of Health/ Sutton.
The case is expected to run for approx 10-15 days in court, kicking off these first two days with both sides laying their cards on the table as to how they plan to argue their side. The remainder will be picking through the various arguments & evidence.
Special birdy drop specifically as we hit July 1st 🐦
From July 1 further hidden health funding cuts come into effect that will see roughly 30 Non-Emergency Patient Transport/NEPT vehicles taken off the roads. Every single day. Immediately. They were only notified a few weeks ago about the cuts.
The govt will blame cuts to 'covid surge funding' but that's a blatant lie. The majority of the work has nothing to do with covid. For some providers up to half the jobs they do is supporting ESTA callouts for non-emergency cases eg they need medical transport but not as urgently
Reminder that 'property investors' are the ENTIRE rental market. Unless you & everyone you know can afford the stamp duty & holding costs to buy immediately, let alone in an area that allows you to keep your job & social links, pretending this is a good thing is insane.
Most landlords will either pass this cost hike on to renters or sell without warning & people can get kicked out of a rental in the midst of a shortage. Which option is better for those living paycheck to paycheck? Because public data says this is a huge 30-50% of people in Aus.
Some may still think this is great/screw those people - there are plenty who want to buy & can't. But thanks to interest rate hikes that still aren't done it's now cheaper to rent than buy in 90% of suburbs. Unless they slash interest rates too, good luck. savings.com.au/news/corelogic…
Brief timeline on the Deeming saga because there seems to be a pervasive belief the expulsion motion today is based on the same issue as the last one, which isn't the case. But it also still has genuine issues.
Backstory: Deeming was originally rejected for preselection federally due to her known campaigning on gender issues. This is a very well known advocacy topic for her in the party. VIC branches picked her anyway, with both conservative & moderate support.
She publicly advertised in Parl that she was attending the Womens Rally & even invited Labor MPs. When asked about this, Pesutto said the party didn't track the moves of every MP.
As an opinion, this was a foolish move for a new leader. There was no internal management structure.