eureka
@eureka@aussie.zone
- Comment on Protest photographer loses part of ear after being shot by rubber bullet 1 day ago:
You’re right, I didn’t mean to say they’re not at fault for shooting people. What I meant to say was that we shouldn’t get tunnel-vision either and assume that officers just need better training or vetting to make sure they don’t miss or don’t shoot as early.
- Comment on Aussie Government announces Loot Box and Gambling content classification changes - Vooks 1 day ago:
Be cool if they could do something about the amount of gambling ads attached to sports. But no, it must be video games that are bad.
Yes. And on the other hand, the video game loot boxes are gambling itself, ads are bad enough.
- Comment on Protest photographer loses part of ear after being shot by rubber bullet 4 days ago:
The problem is the disproportionate force. The police should not be using those weapons. If an officer panicking goes this badly, we shouldn’t be blaming that officer or the protest. The problem is that police were firing bullets into a protest, at all. That this was a plan they had on the table for this situation, and they’re clearly happy with this plan.
- Comment on Large crowd of protesters gather at Land Forces defence expo in Melbourne's CBD 1 week ago:
[Premier Jacinta Allan] also defended the state government’s sponsorship of the Land Forces conference, and said delegates attending the event had the right to gather.
“Any industry deserves the right to have these sort of events in a peaceful and respectful way.”
When your industry is undeniably dedicated to murder and maim, you don’t deserve peace (or, for that matter, respect).
- Comment on Large crowd of protesters gather at Land Forces defence expo in Melbourne's CBD 1 week ago:
Rubber bullets are especially concerning. Many of us saw the damage they did to journalists and protestors who were shot with them in the US protests by police a few years ago.
- Comment on The latest Coalition scare campaign about Labor may scare itself more than voters 1 week ago:
Hi OP, when quoting the article in your post, it’s helpful to use the quote formatting to show us you’re giving quotes and not just supplying additional commentary.
Writing: > You need to only look at the modern crossbench
becomes:
You need to only look at the modern crossbench
- Comment on Bollards installed in Melbourne CBD as tens of thousands anti-war protesters plan blockade 1 week ago:
Sounds like something out of a futuristic dystopian movie.
spoiler
I haven’t seen a terrorism act invoked in my state but police have called a few designated areas this year and they bring the cavalry mounted troops to most protests.
I’m calling it now. Somebody’s gonna die or get seriously injured
Big ten-thousands protests generally try to be more big-tent than radical, so as eager as police are to make a show of force against anti-military protesters, my bet is that it will be limited to shoving. But honestly, I won’t be shocked if your call turns out right.
- Comment on Government faces likely High Court challenge to its CFMEU legislation 3 weeks ago:
There’s a point made about his no courts were involved in the action. In wonder if the High Court has a pragmatic interest in stopping this kind of summary action. If the courts can be bypassed, what power will they have?
- Comment on Daily Discussion Thread: 🏖️🌊 🛋️🐩💤 Monday, August 26, 2024 3 weeks ago:
So their argument is:
No, that’s not what they were saying. For starters, they’re clearly pointing out that the hypocrisy is that “The CFMEU [is being forced into administration] on the back of a handful of rumours and allegations.”, not that they “should be allowed to be corrupt” (where did that strawman come from?!). Also, the ETU are not the CFMEU.
- Comment on Daily Discussion Thread: 🏖️🌊 🛋️🐩💤 Monday, August 26, 2024 3 weeks ago:
That would miss the point of the protest. It was a mass action from the community, where a broad range of unions and non-union organisations participated, to rally together and voice our response to the extreme administration bills. I’ve gone into a little detail on my perspective here. Overall, we must recognise the way this bill was handled as a knowingly-inappropriate response to the situation and a threat to the whole labour movement.
In case I need to state it, I’m not defending corruption, I’m not saying that there aren’t people who should be charged and removed. There are real problems with the CFMEU and the members should be empowered to root it out of their union. Putting in a dictator with huge conflicts of interest with the workers is not how to do that. That’s how to union-bust.
and protest outside of federal liberal party headquarters demanding equal action on political corruption
The Liberal party didn’t do this. The protest is critiquing the Labor party and their attack on the labour movement.
The Liberal party also probably couldn’t care less about the protesters, might as well be vegans threatening to boycott a butcher. Union reps are a major component of the Labor party, and union rank-and-file are a large part of their voter support base.
- Comment on Daily Discussion Thread: 🏖️🌊 🛋️🐩💤 Monday, August 26, 2024 3 weeks ago:
For those going to the CFMEU protest tomorrow, be advised the location has been changed to the Trades Hall due to expected large crowd.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 1 comment
- Comment on A bill to kill a union: What is actually in the government’s CFMEU legislation 4 weeks ago:
This article is very clear and to-the-point. Thanks for sharing.
In order to ensure the administrator doesn’t run wild, the administrator has to be satisfied that the administrator is acting in the interests of members.
Great system.
- Comment on ANU to stop long-term investments in 'controversial' weapons manufacturers following months-long Gaza protest on campus 5 weeks ago:
That’s a great start! Congrats to the students and the communities who stood in solidarity to help them stay there.
- Comment on Media companies need [the revenue from] gaming ads, government minister argues 5 weeks ago:
When we’re talking about ads and media, I highly recommend reading the relevant chapter in Manufacturing Consent (PDF version can easily be found for free online).
But really, intuition will get you the raw basics: using the ad revenue model gives the advertiser control over a media outlet. If media truly ‘need gambling ads’, then this implies they cannot afford to lose them. So, they therefore cannot offend the gambling industry or especially the companies advertising with them. And therefore, they are pressured into media bias, into failing to be critical of an obviously harmful, corrupt industry dealing in addiction manufacture AND laundering at the same time!
- Comment on 'Urgent action is required': Laws to be introduced to force CFMEU to accept administrator, after union fails to consent 5 weeks ago:
This is very bad news for the worker movement.
The bottom line is that, despite their flaws, the CFMEU management enables construction workers to fight for better working conditions, including those working in roles where people regularly die in workplace incidents, where safety standards are a life and death matter. If they are replaced by a state-supplied dictator against the will of the workers which a union is created to represent, this introduces a conflict of interest somehow even worse than that in any of the accusations. We’ve seen in history how state-enforced class collaboration screws over workers. When employees are working for huge multinational companies like Lendlease, they need ways to defend themselves from all the corruption that comes with that. The CFMEU in its current state is not ideal, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, or one assigned by the government.
This has already had a chilling effect on the other more-militant trade unions, word-of-mouth is that some are asking members not to draw attention to themselves e.g. by flying banners at the recent NSW Labor conference. Giving the government this power to weaken unions at will is a horrible precedence which I sincerely believe will cost lives when it comes to safety regulations, let alone cost of living, preventing financial abuse of immigrant workers, and the inability to support social movement, such as the Green Bans of the BLF (who were deregistered in various states in 1986 and essentially brought into the coverage of what would become the CFMEU).
- Submitted 1 month ago to australianpolitics@aussie.zone | 0 comments
- Comment on Should (and can) we ban political donations? 1 month ago:
The video does touch on this wrt. the South Australian proposal, they give a few explanations and critiques of how well it does this.
- Comment on Should (and can) we ban political donations? 1 month ago:
I’m glad the video covered some good points, I recommend viewing or at least skimming, instead of knee-jerking at the title.
One of the big issues with political donations, being a form of capital influencing politics, is that people with more available capital can have more influence. On an idealist level, this contradicts some expectations we might have of a democracy with fair representation, like the ideal of one-person-one-vote. But looking at present conditions rather than ideals, we have to consider wealth inequality: I’m no expert but I think it says a lot that in 2023, the Australia Institute claimed “Ninety-three per cent of the gains from economic growth have gone to the top 10 per cent of income earners. The rest of us — the bottom 90 per cent — have only got 7 per cent of that economic growth.” (also note, “the top 10 per cent of income earners get a lot of their income from profit”, whereas the bottom 90 per cent mainly get it from wages. The importance being they have very different political values and priorities to most workers.) So, we can see that even though the worker class vastly outnumber the owner class who make money from profit, their capital and therefore ability to influence politics, even as individuals rather than interested corporations, far outbalances the masses even if we were somehow all aligned.
When some parties have enough funding for constant print, internet and television ads while others are basically unknown by most until election day, it’s a shame. Look at Clive Palmer as an example of disproportionate funds, although the same applies to the big parties even if we’re so used to it. I’ve seen some countries give free airtime (maybe 5 or 15 minutes?) for every party or candidate to explain their platform, I think that’s a great idea at the least to reduce unfair advantage.
Another reason for removing lobbying is that I’d rather my union (for example) not waste their money on it. In a recent survey they did, one of the questions was what priorities do we think the most of their money should be spent on, and one of the options is lobbying the Labor Party. It’s just a coping mechanism for putting their preferred party ahead in a broken system.
- Submitted 1 month ago to meta@aussie.zone | 1 comment
- Comment on Low Levels of Aussie Zone association with Lemmy in Search. 1 month ago:
I agree, although it is important to have at least some plan on how to handle a sudden wave of new users. There is usually little-to-no-warning for when a place will get attention: maybe some journalist decides to mention this place, or reddit.com does another major oopsie. The Lemmy ecosystem was overall ill-prepared for the sudden massive influx, and I’d hate to repeat history.
A few things to think about (from my experiences elsewhere):
- Server backups
- How many users are too much for the current staff to handle? Are there any users you can deputize in an emergency, or even better, prior to an emergency? How will you onboard them so they act appropriately, and are you fine kicking staff who can’t behave?
- What technical measures can you take to ease the load? Auto-moderation bots? Limiting maximum signups per day? Can you set any up in advance?
- [It seems you already know this one] Which is more important: more users or good quality users? Will you take a hard stance on bad behaviours before they can become normalised?
- Comment on Compulsory voting in Australia is 100 years old. We should celebrate how special it makes our democracy 1 month ago:
On the other hand- in the age of the internet - Why we aren’t voting online over party membership, platform and policy decisions beggars belief.
Direct democracy is a neat area of exploration, and there’s been great theory on how to securely and anonymously implement verifiable voting systems. There are some major implementation problems with online voting whatsoever from a security perspective, but nonetheless I think direct democracy a good system to aim for, especially seeing the gap in (e.g.) the Labor Party policy internally between the members and the leadership.
Nobody is excluded from contributing to legislation. At least we must all chose a party every four years.
In a way, yes, although I also believe that contribution is extremely limited and astronomically overshadowed by capital (see things like lobbying and mass media bias) making direct action and indirect pressure necessary to represent the worker class.
- Comment on Compulsory voting in Australia is 100 years old. We should celebrate how special it makes our democracy 1 month ago:
There’s also a idealistic argument that making voting compulsory forces people to care. Ask anyone who counts votes whether everyone cares or not. Drawings of penises, scrawled messages, blank ballots and donkey votes aren’t rare. In local elections, my friend processed a blank ballot with “STOP OVERDEVELOPMENT!” written on it, instead of voting for either of the independents whose entire platform was “Let’s stop over development!”.
One of the upsides of compulsory voting is that it forces people to be able to vote. Look at horror stories in the US to see what I mean, where some people can’t leave work to vote, are omitted from the voting roll for garbage reasons, that kind of broken system. But obviously compulsory voting isn’t necessary to make voting availability a priority! So it’s hardly an argument for preserving it.
My attitude (and this stems from having managed and been involved in democratic organizations myself) is that the ideal democratic decision-making process is to get as many informed voters as possible. Consider Condorcet’s jury theorem - having 100 decently-informed voters is better than 5 experts voting, but 100 or even 1000 un-informed voters is worse than both! Participation alone is not valuable. Forcing people to vote is useless from a decision-making perspective, nor is it enough to encourage people to become informed and involved. I’d rather only 1 million people vote with actual reasons than 25 million just pick the team they’ve always voted for, or based on media misconceptions, or just tick a box and not mean it. I think it’s not hard to become decently informed either, but nonetheless, there should be serious effort to create an informed population if we’re going to use a democratic system of governance.
Does anyone think its “Democratic” for Tasmania to have the same number of senators as NSW ?
Are you therefore suggesting a [federal] democracy should have all votes be equal? Or, to phrase that another way, “Would you think it’s “Democratic” for the entire Northern Territory to be have the same number of ministers as the ACT, or as two-and-a-half inner-Sydney electorates?” The issue there being, major issues affecting a huge part of the country would get dismal representation, and urban issues would get all the expertise. Neither popular representation or regional representation alone is considered adequate representation, so we have a Senate focused on regional representation and the HoR for popular representation. It’s a compromise, because both extremes have serious flaws ruining representative democracy’s aim.