Category: Politics (Page 6 of 43)

Walmart as an example:

“…  while the company’s revenues seem high, Walmart’s profit margin is far from fat: a mere 3 percent. The company has billions in expenses every year—so significant that in a 31-day month, all its sales in the first 30 days go toward paying expenses. Only on the 31st day does the company actually turn a profit, assuming nothing goes wrong during that month—like an unexpected jump in wages.

Just like any other firm, Walmart employs individuals who will earn the company revenue. After pay increases early this year, the average full-time Walmart employee will earn $13.38 per hour, well above the industry average of $10.29. With other benefits, including short-term disability and paid time off, the company’s actual cost per employee is significantly higher.

That Walmart pays an average of $13.38 an hour plus benefits means it expects the average employee to earn the company more than that amount. While a jump in pay of just a few dollars may seem trivial, for a company that employs 1.4 million domestic employees, it is positively massive. This is not to mention the additional costs associated with taxes paid for each employee. With such thin profit margins, Walmart cannot afford to ignore these costs.

As the cost of employing workers increases, Walmart has to decide whether its current workforce is worth the price. For example, if a worker’s hourly wage plus benefits is $30 per hour, but he or she generates only $25 in revenue, the company loses money for every hour the employee works. Under those circumstances, it would benefit the company and its shareholders to lay off workers. It has nothing to do with “corporate greed.” It’s business. Firms can’t operate at a loss.”

It really is simple. If the government forces employers to pay workers more than those workers make for the company, the company will either stop employing them or go broke. There’s no point whining about reality. No one owes you a job. If you don’t want to work for yourself, get a job by proving to an employer that you will make more than you cost.

I have pretty much gotten to the point that whenever I see news of a hate crime committed against blacks, gays or muslims I assume it is a hoax.

There is a long. Very long. And growing. List of hate crimes that featured in the mainstream media and were subsequently shown to be false.

A Syrian refugee has admitted to setting fire to a German shelter where he was staying, spray-painting swastikas on the walls to make it look like a political crime. The asylum seeker said the arson attack was in response to poor conditions at the shelter.

I guess he was used to much better food and accommodation at home ….

And no, this doesn’t speak to a larger truth. Lies don’t. They are just lies.

Two articles from the Financial Review, both warning about Australia’s debt levels.

The first about the National Australia Bank’s concern that further debt increases will risk Australia’s AAA credit rating – meaning higher interest rates, and a less attractive business and investment environment, which in turn means higher unemployment and lower tax revenues.

Treasurer Scott Morrison says the coming budget will ensure the government lives within its means: “It means you don’t make promises for which there is no money. It means that you keep your expenditure control tight”

All well and good, but the NAB is not convinced, and neither am I.

“However, NAB’s Mr Jolly expressed unease that the looming federal election and next month’s budget may see both sides of politics ease up on budget repair efforts to maximise votes.

He also pointed out that debt levels are well above the average of the past 36 years, hitting 15 per cent of GDP last year and on the way to 18 per cent over the next two years. That’s about three times greater than the last time S&P cut the credit rating to AA in 1989.

Mr Jolly said that keeping the ratings agencies happy would require demonstrating “ongoing restraint”, thereby continuing the likely drag on economic growth of recent years.

“With a general election at some point over the next six months, where the government and opposition will be releasing policy initiatives and making promises, a question for investors is whether fiscal restraint will continue.”

In January, S&P warned that Australia’s AAA rating was based on an expectation of ongoing budget restraint that would result in “consistently narrowing deficits over the forecast horizon, maintaining the general government debt near or below current levels”.

The agency cautioned that there was a need for “strong” government savings to offset the exposure caused the offshore borrowings of Australia’s banks.”

Then there are similar concerns expressed by Forbes Magazine, which says Australia is the second most likely country in the world to suffer a debt crisis within the next three years. The most likely is China. And of course, if China suffers a debt crisis, it won’t be buying our resources, which means we will be in trouble too. If China falters, so do we.

We just cannot afford generous welfare schemes or refugee resettlement programmes, or health and education systems to which those who benefit directly make no meaningful contribution, nor trendy but pointless projects like fast rail systems. We must return to a system where those most in need are cared for, and at the same time, every member of society is expected to make a contribution.

The answer, Miranda, is none.

I was a great admirer of Frank Devine. One of Australia’s greatest newspaper men, a person of imagination and integrity, and a superb writer.

His daughter Miranda is an insightful and intelligent woman, and also a talented writer. I rarely disagree with her. But Miranda Devine has lost the plot here:

“Newspoll revealed ­Abbott’s usurper Malcolm Turnbull had suffered his first defeat, with the Coalition trailing Labor by two points, 49 to 51 per cent.

The poll was manna from heaven to delusional conservatives. Abbott was circumspect when interviewed on 2GB yesterday morning. But the glee of the delcons knew no bounds.

The Newspoll is a “gamechanger”, they cried excitedly. It’s all over for Turnbull, the great “waffler”. He’s a “dud”! His challenge to state premiers to control their spending was a “humiliation”. He will lose the next election. Yay!

Yes, these are conservatives, willing a Liberal rout.”

No. Nope. There is no glee here. No will for a Liberal rout. There is just appalled despair.

I said at the time of the coup that this could not end well. People in the media and public life who supported Malcolm Turnbull were people who would never vote for him, because he is a Liberal. Ordinary Liberal Party supporters will not vote for him because he is not.

Already it is clear that those who supported Turnbull are being punished in their own electorates.

It is not that we “delcons” (and no we are not deluded, far from it!) want a Shorten victory. Shorten and the Labor Party have nothing to offer except more debt, more illegal immigrants in detention including children, more unemployment because of investment and industry moving overseas, and less credibility in international relations. No one in his or her right mind wants that.

But the social conservatives and economic libertarians who make up the Liberal Party membership do not see a party led by Turnbull as being significantly different in philosophy or outcome. What moves us is what we believe is best for Australia, for Australian society, for ordinary men, women and families, and what will help us to be the best citizens we can be on the world stage. That does not include Mr Turnbull. Nor does it include Mr Shorten and any renewed Green/Labor alliance.

And no, we are not stupid. We know putting Tony Abbott back in the leadership, much as many of us respected him and would like to see him back at some time, will not solve the problem. Nor will any change of leadership prior to the election.

Turnbull will take the party to the next election. It will be a close run thing. None of us will delight in a Labor victory, should that occur.

Our local member, Jamie Briggs, voted for Abbott in the spill, and has done a good job for his electorate. Although there are matters on which he and I disagree (the ridiculous white elephant Kingscote airport project, for example), he has worked hard, and is a person of integrity. I will be happy to vote for him again. The senate, however, gives me an opportunity to send a message to the Liberal Party mandarins, without doing anything to endanger a renewal of sensible, business and family friendly policies. And that is to vote for the ALA, with preferences to the Liberals.

For, women, it was nasty, brutish and short.  An excerpt from an article by Tony Thomas on the Quadrant Magazine website.

Newly-arrived British and French were shocked at the local misogyny they encountered. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote,

They  (Aboriginal women) are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality.

He also wrote,

When an Indian [sic] is provoked by a woman, he either spears her, or knocks her down on the spot; on this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon, which may chance to be in his hand.

Marine Lt. William Collins wrote, “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.”

Governor Phillip’s confidant, Bennelong, in 1790 had taken a woman to Port Jackson to kill her because her relatives were his enemies. He gave her two severe wounds on the head and one on the shoulder, saying this was his rightful vengeance.

Phillip was appalled that an Eora mother within a few days of delivery had fresh wounds on her head, where her husband had beaten her with wood.

In 1802 an explorer in the Blue Mountains wrote how, for a trivial reason, an Aboriginal called Gogy “took his club and struck his wife’s head such a blow that she fell to the ground unconscious. After dinner…he got infuriated and again struck his wife on the head with his club, and left her on the ground nearly dying.”

In 1825, French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville wrote “young girls are brutally kidnapped from their families, violently dragged to isolated spots and are ravished after being subjected to a good deal of cruelty.”

George Robinson in Tasmania said in the 1830s that men courted their women by stabbing them with sharp sticks and cutting them with knives prior to rape. The men bartered their women to brutal sealers for dogs and food; in one case, such a woman voluntarily went back to the sealers rather than face further tribal violence.

Also in the 1830s, ex-convict Lingard wrote: “I scarcely ever saw a married woman, but she had got six or seven cuts in her head, given by her husband with a tomahawk, several inches in length and very deep.”

Explorer Edward John Eyre, who was very sympathetic towards Aborigines, nevertheless recorded:

Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands and friends…they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences…

…few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear wounds about the body. I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds.

Louis Nowra visited outback communities and found them astonishingly brutal: “Some of the women’s faces ended up looking as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in the women’s eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission.”

Bashing of women’s heads appears to have been the custom for millennia. Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia going back 50,000 years. (Priceless bone collections at the time were being officially handed over to Aboriginal communities for re-burial, which stopped follow-up studies). Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles. In the tropics, for example, female head-injury frequency was about 20-33%, versus 6.5-26% for males. The most extreme results were on the south coast, from Swanport and Adelaide, with female cranial trauma rates as high as 40-44% — two to four times the rate of male cranial trauma. In desert and South Coast areas, 5-6% of female skulls had three separate head injuries, and 11-12% had two injuries.

… serious armed assaults were common in Australia over thousands of years prior to conquest. Settlers reported that sexual violence, including pack rapes and horrific genital wounding, was inflicted in many groups on girls barely out of the toddler stage.

Solicitor/historian Joan Kimm wrote: “The sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed often much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture, a heritage that cannot easily be denied.”

Even though our eyes are on the US presidential contest at the moment, this applies everywhere. Even in Australia.

8,000 refugee/asylum seeker children were placed in detention during the Labor/Green alliance governments of Gillard and Rudd. Some 1200 men, women and children lost at sea.

Now, for the first time in a decade, there is not a single child in detention on the Australian mainland. The last few, a baby, a toddler and a seventeen year old, left the Wickham Point detention centre in Darwin on Friday.

That is something worth celebrating!

Anyone who has ever expressed an opinion other than the currently approved opinions will find him or herself nodding in agreement throughout this video.

For some people, free speech, the exchange of ideas, discussion of evidence, is so threatening that it must be stopped, even with violence.

The left, much as they pretend to be motivated by compassion and inclusiveness, in fact responds to any divergence with rage. Those who see things differently, or even ask difficult questions, are the enemy. And therefore you only have yourself to blame for the hate, lies and violence directed at you.

The end of the road for truck owner-drivers in Australia.

How is this even possible?

“Some 35,000 people, mostly men, drive their own long-haul trucks. They have borrowed around $15 billion from Australian banks and other financiers to fund their vehicles. Most of the loans are also secured on the family home. A government body called the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal has made decisions that are set to not only destroy the livelihood of most of them but to force them to sell the family home.

Around Australia there are many tens of thousands of farmers who rely on these efficient and safe road operators to get their farm produce to market and supply them with farming needs. These farmers are going to be forced to pay between two and four times the current rate for their transport as a result of arbitrary decisions by the same government body. It will wreck many farmers.”

…

“This elimination of owner-drivers will be fairly quick. And as they are forced to sell their trucks the prices of vehicles will slump so they will be bankrupted. The actual capital of many owner-driver businesses is domestic homes so they will be sold to cover the debt to the banks because of the fall in value of trucks. As the large operators begin to control the business not only will owner-drivers be sent to the wall but the small transport companies that co-ordinate them will go. Many of those are in South Australia.”