Tuesday 24 June 2014

Almost 40 days later and Australian voters still not convinced that the Abbott-Hockey-Cormann federal budget is fair



Nielsen Poll of 1,400 voters on 19-20 June 2014 in the Australian Financial Review on 23 June 2014


He also admitted to basing his welfare ‘bill’ per average worker on an average monthly income of $4,800 to $6,500 per person and the projected $140.6 billion welfare spend for the 2014-15 financial year.

So let’s look at the welfare spend and income taxes paid in the last financial year to place this alleged $6,000 cost to workers in perspective.

The 2014-15 Budget Papers show that the Federal Government spent $140 billion on social security and welfare and expects to collect a total of $354.8 billion in tax in the 2013-14 financial year [Statement 5 – Revenue (continued)].

Personal income tax accounted for 63.23 per cent of total taxes collected.

However, as the government estimates it will be paying out $26,800 million in personal income tax refunds, the real total amount of personal income tax retained in treasury coffers will be 55.68 per cent of all taxes collected.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics there were an estimated 11.4 million people in paid employment during the 2013-14 financial year and, of these it is likely that around 10.2 million would receive a tax refund.

Approximately 1.1 million of those paying income tax would receive refunds in excess of $6,000. With an est. 477,970 of these taxpayers receiving refunds of $9,999 or over. While the remaining 9.1 million would receive refunds of somewhere between $1 to $5,999. [based on Budget Papers 2011-12 & 2012-13]

These figures indicate that in doing his calculations Mr. Hockey: (i) also assigned incomes to people not in the workforce; (ii) did not take into account the fact that the federal government collects taxes other than income tax; (iii) did not factor in that many workers are/will be receiving tax refunds which cancel out their supposed $6,000 cost in days worked to assist other individuals he classifies as ‘leaners’; and (iv) failed to recognise that some of the “average working" Australians he mentions would also be receiving welfare payments in the form of Family Tax Benefit.

With rubbery figures such as these, created by the old ‘back of an envelope’ method, Hockey seeks to convince voters that his first budget is fair.

What the Abbott Government has been keeping secret from Australian voters


Quotes from an IT News article dated 20 June 2014:

* Negotiations started under Labor in 2013 and are continuing under the Coalition, with trade minister Andrew Robb strongly supportive of TISA.
Robb told The Age that the proposed deal opens up new opportunities for Australia and that he wants to achieve a level playing field for the country's busineses so that they can compete on the same terms as overseas entities.
The leaked text of the Financial Services Annex shows the deal would remove much of the current right the Australian government has to block foreign takeovers of Australian banks.
Foreign banks would also be allowed to set up shop in Australia without setting up local subsidiaries, and be allowed to import workers and IT and communications equipment on a temporary basis.
The Kelsey analysis notes that TISA goes beyond provisions in the controversial Trans Pacific Trade Agreement which has currently stalled after opposition from Japan on market access.
TISA could be close to being concluded. Yesterday, US Trade Representative Michael Froman said a basic outline of the deal is in place ahead of negotiations next week.

* Law professor Jane Kelsey of Auckland University analysed the leaked Financial Services Annex on Wikileaks, and said service industry lobbyists, mostly US based firms that dominate IT and communications technology, are campaigning to stop governments from being able to demand that data be stored and processed locally.
In article X.11, the EU and Panama proposed that a TISA party should not be able to prevent data transfers by financial institutions to overseas. This, Kelsey said, means signatories would not be able to adopt privacy and confidentiality measures that breach TISA provisions.
The US wants a more direct, full ban on countries' abilities to prevent transfer of financial data to services suppliers' usual places of business.
Holding data overseas means it's almost impossible for states to control how it is used, or to impose legal liability on financial services providers, Kelsey said. It also opens up the possibility of abuse by governments.


Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2%1 of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.
Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures2, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.
TISA negotiations are currently taking place outside of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. However, the Agreement is being crafted to be compatible with GATS so that a critical mass of participants will be able to pressure remaining WTO members to sign on in the future. Conspicuously absent from the 50 countries covered by the negotiations are the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The exclusive nature of TISA will weaken their position in future services negotiations.
The draft text comes from the April 2014 negotiation round - the sixth round since the first held in April 2013. The next round of negotiations will take place on 23-27 June in Geneva, Switzerland.
Current WTO parties negotiating TISA are: Australia, Canada, Chile, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, which includes its 28 member states Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
China and Uruguay have expressed interest in joining the negotiations but so far are not included.
[1] Swiss National Center for Competence in Research: A Plurilateral Agenda for Services?: Assessing the Case for a Trade in Services Agreement, Working Paper No. 2013/29, May 2013, p. 10.
[2] For example, in June 2012 Ecuador tabled a discussion on re-thinking regulation and GATS rules; in September 2009 the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, convened by the President of the United Nations and chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, released its final report, stating that "All trade agreements need to be reviewed to ensure that they are consistent with the need for an inclusive and comprehensive international regulatory framework which is conducive to crisis prevention and management, counter-cyclical and prudential safeguards, development, and inclusive finance."

NASA: West Antarctica glacier melt "passed the point of no return"


U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Media Release 12 May 2014:


A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.
The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating 40 years of observations that indicate the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica "have passed the point of no return," according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise.
"This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come," Rignot said. "A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea."
Three major lines of evidence point to the glaciers' eventual demise: the changes in their flow speeds, how much of each glacier floats on seawater, and the slope of the terrain they are flowing over and its depth below sea level. In a paper in April, Rignot’s research group discussed the steadily increasing flow speeds of these glaciers over the past 40 years. This new study examines the other two lines of evidence.
The glaciers flow out from land to the ocean, with their leading edges afloat on the seawater. The point on a glacier where it first loses contact with land is called the grounding line. Nearly all glacier melt occurs on the underside of the glacier beyond the grounding line, on the section floating on seawater.
Just as a grounded boat can float again on shallow water if it is made lighter, a glacier can float over an area where it used to be grounded if it becomes lighter, which it does by melting or by the thinning effects of the glacier stretching out. The Antarctic glaciers studied by Rignot's group have thinned so much they are now floating above places where they used to sit solidly on land, which means their grounding lines are retreating inland.
"The grounding line is buried under a thousand or more meters of ice, so it is incredibly challenging for a human observer on the ice sheet surface to figure out exactly where the transition is," Rignot said. “This analysis is best done using satellite techniques."
The team used radar observations captured between 1992 and 2011 by the European Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1 and -2) satellites to map the grounding lines' retreat inland. The satellites use a technique called radar interferometry, which enables scientists to measure very precisely -- within less than a quarter of an inch -- how much Earth's surface is moving. Glaciers move horizontally as they flow downstream, but their floating portions also rise and fall vertically with changes in the tides. Rignot and his team mapped how far inland these vertical motions extend to locate the grounding lines.
The accelerating flow speeds and retreating grounding lines reinforce each other. As glaciers flow faster, they stretch out and thin, which reduces their weight and lifts them farther off the bedrock. As the grounding line retreats and more of the glacier becomes waterborne, there's less resistance underneath, so the flow accelerates.
Slowing or stopping these changes requires pinning points -- bumps or hills rising from the glacier bed that snag the ice from underneath. To locate these points, researchers produced a more accurate map of bed elevation that combines ice velocity data from ERS-1 and -2 and ice thickness data from NASA's Operation IceBridge mission and other airborne campaigns. The results confirm no pinning points are present upstream of the present grounding lines in five of the six glaciers. Only Haynes Glacier has major bedrock obstructions upstream, but it drains a small sector and is retreating as rapidly as the other glaciers.
The bedrock topography is another key to the fate of the ice in this basin. All the glacier beds slope deeper below sea level as they extend farther inland. As the glaciers retreat, they cannot escape the reach of the ocean, and the warm water will keep melting them even more rapidly.
The accelerating flow rates, lack of pinning points and sloping bedrock all point to one conclusion, Rignot said.
"The collapse of this sector of West Antarctica appears to be unstoppable," he said. "The fact that the retreat is happening simultaneously over a large sector suggests it was triggered by a common cause, such as an increase in the amount of ocean heat beneath the floating sections of the glaciers. At this point, the end of this sector appears to be inevitable."
Because of the importance of this part of West Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge will continue to monitor its evolution closely during this year's Antarctica deployment, which begins in October. IceBridge uses a specialized fleet of research aircraft and the most sophisticated suite of science instruments ever assembled to characterize changes in thickness of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice.
For additional images and video related to this new finding, visit:

Monday 23 June 2014

Coal Seam Gas: before it's too late another Northern Rivers council comes onboard....


Echo NetDaily 20 June 2014:

Yet another northern rivers council will be writing to the NSW premier Mike Baird demanding a ban on gasfields in the region.
The Tweed Shire Council last night approved a motion from Greens councillor Katie Milne to send a letter to the premier and relevant ministers, despite opposition from three councillors.
The motion called for all Petroleum Exploration Licences that impinge on Tweed Shire to be revoked.....
The Tweed resolution follows similar moves from Ballina, Byron and Lismore councils, leaving Richmond Valley Council isolated in its support for the gas industry.


Not happy, Mr. Shorten!


In 2003 The Howard Government introduced the Business Services Wage Assessment Tool (BSWAT) which determines the level of wages paid to people with disabilities who are employed in Commonwealth-funded Australian Disability Enterprises [ADEs].


In September 2013 the Dept. of Social Security sought an exemption from the Australian Human Rights Commission to continue to use the BSWAT. A limited  exemption for a twelve month period was granted, subject to provisions.

According to the Commission an estimated 10,000 individuals with an intellectual disability have their wages assessed under the BSWAT scheme.

In January 2014 ABC News reported that the Abbott Government announced that it would make a one-off payment to intellectually disabled workers who had been unfairly paid - but only if they were not involved in the discrimination class action which was scheduled for a first directions hearing in February.

On 10 May 2014 the Abbott Government was refused leave to appeal the Federal Court judgment.

On 17 June 2014 the Abbott Government’s Business Services Wage Assessment Tool Payment Scheme (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2014 was passed in the House of Representatives with the support of the Opposition. This bill offers for a limited period to enter into individual agreements to pay half of the lost wages owed to any affected ADE worker with an intellectual disability.

Lawyers running a class action on behalf of supported employees with intellectual disabilities have described this legislation as "an outrageous abuse of power".

Given that ADEs pay workers with an intellectual disability as little as $0.33 per hour and given that it appears the government bill locks out any of 10,000 workers taking part in the class action from receiving the half of lost wages ‘offer’ and, will see the future wages of those workers (who receive compensation for past wage discrimination if the class action is successful) cut by about half, I am amazed that Federal Labor would endorse this legislation.

The ACCC had addressed Coles misleading advertising about its in-house baked bread and rolls - now it's time for someone to look into product quality


AdNews 18 Jun 2014:

Coles has been cooked by the Federal Court and found guilty of misleading consumers with claims its bread and rolls were baked in-house despite being shipped frozen from overseas.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission launched action against the supermarket giant last year after consumers – led by former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett – began to question the veracity of the claims.
Coles had claimed that because the baking process had been completed in ovens in store, the promotions of being baked fresh in store were acceptable.
The bread and roll ranges were promoted at Coles’ supermarkets with in-house bakeries as ‘Baked Today, Sold Today’ and in some cases ‘Freshly Baked In-Store’.
Federal Court Chief Justice James Allsop handed down his judgement this afternoon and the retailer now faces potential substantial fines for each of the breaches of the Trade Practices Act.
In his judgment, Chief Justice Allsop said “It is not the place of the court to provide an advice … as to how Coles might sell bread that has been par-baked from frozen product … A start would, however, be to make it tolerably clear to the public that the recent baking was the completion of a baking process that had taken place sometime before, off site, and that 'freshly baked' actually meant the completion of the baking process of frozen product prepared and frozen off site by suppliers.”
ACCC chairman Rob Sims said that Coles behaviour not only mislead consumers placed smaller businesses that baked their bread on the premises at a competitive disadvantage.