McLean

The entire counterargument seems to be "lobbying doesn't take place at the club! it just exists to foster social relations between MPs and lobbyists, to be leveraged for lobbying efforts elsewhere! and who could possibly have a problem with that 😡"

Kicking someone out of the parliament sports club for pointing out the parliament sports club is so involved with the gambling lobby they had to officially register as a lobbying group is the very sort of action that should be referred to a 'National Anti-Corruption Commission'.

God almighty. And THEY are accusing HIM of politicising the Club. FFS.

We're meant to have these things called the Australian Federal Police and also the National Anti-Corruption Commission who are both certainly authorised to act in the scenario where a government department is recovering >$3.5m a year in fraud without even really actively looking.

"get a load of these clowns. they want us to keep mining and exporting fossil fuels. and we will 🫶"

Labor is living in the Coalition's heads and the amount of rent they pay can only be described as Australian

also they spend a lot of energy fighting an even _more_ virulently pro-fossil-fuel group, so I can see how they think their own position is pro-climate. With the coalition, the pro-coal Labor factions, the industry itself... it must be a tough job! and they're absolutely not up to it

Watt nears deal with Coalition to finally overhaul environment laws Environment Minister Murray Watt will sit down with his Liberal counterpart Angie Bell today, with quiet optimism in both parties that a deal might soon be struck to finally rewrite Australia's "broke...

Just so we’re clear: Labor is choosing to work with the worst possible party on environmental issues, instead of the Greens and teals who actually want environmental regulation.
And Watt is already admitting it won’t have a climate trigger …

any time a Labor guy talks about climate action it's guaranteed that they're talking about building renewables / buying EVs / reforestation maybe. the actual core work of shutting down fossil fuels is not even on their mind. I think they mean it, too. evil and desperate stuff

this is like a boomer dad saying he's transitioning to veganism because he got a salad with his steak

(but the steak's 0.2% smaller!!)

Independent Senator David Pocock and Labor's Penny Wong clashed in Senate estimates yesterday over whether the Parliamentary Sports Club could be considered a lobby group, as reported in Crikey last week. The club is registered as such, and lists Responsible Wagering Australia as one of its clients.

Parliament was told that the Commissioner of the NACC didn't have any duties with the Defence Force. That simply wasn't true.

It appears to me from the outside that the manual review process (which the Australian government has said it wants for the under 16s ban) led to ID docs being kept longer than needed.

There were only 21,000 requests determined in each of 2022-23 and 2023-24,13 down about a third from the 10-year peak of 34,000 in 2016-17.

Govt fearmongering about AI writing Freedom of Information requests, vexatious applicants and a swamped eSafety Commission is overstated.

The FOI workload is actually at a low point for the decade.

Government’s FOI changes could cover up the next Robodebt - new research Proposed changes to Australia’s Freedom of Information (FOI) laws would make a repeat of the disastrous Robodebt coverup more likely, rather than less, according to new research by The Australia Insti...

Proposed changes to Australia’s FOI laws would make a repeat of the disastrous Robodebt coverup more likely, rather than less, our new research shows.

The PM described Robodebt as a “gross betrayal and human tragedy”, yet his government plans to make cabinet documents harder to access. #auspol

no conclusion sorry. I'm just a poster having a reckon. barely even a poster really. maybe the way through is those people who call things that aren't AI "AI" to imply that they're fake or bad, so AI itself becomes the slur. or maybe there just aren't ways through

it's also complicated because we've got a rich history of using robots to depict oppressed classes in fiction, and so cribbing terms from those depictions still goes along the anthropomorphise-then-dehumanise route

clanker is also a weird one because I think on its face it's fine but then I see "clanka" and I'm like ooh they've retroactively made clanker gross. honestly kind of a neat trick how that works

when I first saw the AI slur discourse I was like "come on it's a computer program how can it be harmful" but then I saw "wireback" in the list of slurs and was like oh ok right yeah yuck

so we've got a faction of people who hate AI proliferation, and want pithy and catchy terms to help advance their noble cause. and we've got another faction of people who think it's fun to use slurs and are jumping on an opportunity to do it blamelessly. and a lot of people conflating those factions

so I think there're distinct categories of AI slurs? where on one hand you've got "slurs implying it's a poor-quality machine" - seems fine? and then on the other you've got "slurs created by modifying an existing racial/etc slur" - seems gross

dehumanisation is a gross thing to do. but AIs aren't human, so it can't be dehumanisation to disparage them. BUT if your route to disparaging them is to first anthropomorphise them, and then do dehumanisation on that anthropomorphisation: that's still dehumanisation! and also inefficient

An update on that insane lease term where the landlord owns everything you create during the tenancy:

Under 16s social media ban is going to:

- Push kids into worse, more dangerous content
- Risk the privacy of every adult Australian via botched age verification
- Limit Australian technology sector development

Why are we doing this again?

Two things here that are simply unbelievable: (1) that our own Prime Minister, who spent months maligning the Palestine protests, told the nation that there were "good people" at the Nazi rally, (2) our antisemitism envoy still won't comment on the Hilter Glorification Parade.

The climate targets announced by @albomp.bsky.social are so weak - imagine if we all took this attitude to work! Shame on the government for once again letting down Australia #climate #targets

This comic was done in consultation with my partner Matt :)

Labor’s real climate policy is to extend and expand fossil fuel mining until 2070, and not care abt those emissions because they’re overseas.
Local emissions volumes will be “offset” in fraudulent sequestration schemes.
They’ll bang on about renewables as if they are driving solar & battery tech.

Image shows a screenshot of the conclusion of the linked Senate inquiry submission. This text can be found on page 10. The text is too long for alt text, but here is the first three quarters of the text: Conclusion Over the past decade, Nous Group’s UniForum data has quietly taken on the status of authoritative benchmark for the quality of a range of professional and academic services performed by public universities in Australia and across the world. This authoritative status is performed through scientific-looking graphs and scientific-sounding jargon designed to imply UniForum data is generated through rigorous methods and backed by expert consensus. This performance of authority is significant: it lends UniForum data an air of credibility and facticity that makes acting upon its results irresistible. When one begins to open the black box and examine how UniForum data is actually produced, however, it becomes difficult to justify the degree to which Australian university executives are relying upon it in their decision-making. My analysis is based on a review of publicly available documents, and it is therefore possible that Nous or its clients would point to things not in the public domain that address some of the conceptual and methodological flaws that I have highlighted in UniForum. But the fact that the underlying UniForum data and methodology is not in the public domain is itself one of the key causes for concerns. When the stakes are so high, it cannot be acceptable for Nous Group and its clients to simply tell university staff and governing councils, ‘trust us, these numbers are based on rigorous methods and analysis.’ The lack of rigor, external scrutiny, and transparency in UniForum’s underlying data and methodology would be a cause for concern in any public institution, but it is especially concerning in the context of universities where rigorous, transparent, and accountable knowledge production is a core part of what we do. ...

Private consultants are taking control of how public universities are evaluated and run.

My submission to the Senate university governance inquiry raises concerns about the impact of Nous Group and their dodgy UniForum data on our universities.

www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStor...

A thread

From the same party that keeps approving massive fossil fuel projects. Worth remembering that Labor is factional, and Bowen may well be battling his hardest against the fossil-fuel-approvers behind the veil of caucus. But if he is, it's a secret they're devoted to keeping together, so, fuck them all

First climate risk assessment finds 1.5m Australians at risk from sea level rise by 2050 One and a half million Australians are at risk from sea levels rising by 2050 unless climate change can be limited, Australia’s first national climate risk assessment warns.

*Labor: approves biggest gas project in southern hemisphere out to 2070*

Sophie Labelle on the pisspoor reportage surrounding Charlie Kirk's alleged killer:

'I think that internet illiteracy and the inability for trad media to tell apart leftist discourses from far-right ironic memes may be the coup de grâce.'