I’m ideologically predisposed to favour local government over state government so I’m immediately suspicious with any attempt to overrule a local council.

I really need to sit down and go through this Coolgardie situation. My understanding of the bare bones is that the mining industry was screaming out for for more accommodation for miners. Coolgardie council responded by releasing some land for mining companies to build on and built their own “village”. The building project was mismanaged and over budget and hasn’t returned the revenue expected. Council tried to cover the shortfall by heavily increasing rates on miners which was overruled by the state govt. They have now been accused of doing nothing to get themselves out of this mess.

At a glance it looks to me like an underresourced council doing its best and overeaching and when it fell apart made a hard decision to tax higher to regain financial stability. It looks a lot like Perth wants to amalgamate Coolgardie into Kalgoorlie-Boulder and this is pretext.

But as I say, I need to be guarded with my judgement because of my ideological predisposition.

3 weeks to respond then its only a few weeks to the election. What is the point of this?

the number of guns each licence holder has is going up – gun owners now average more than four firearms for each licence.

So on our farm we have

1. A shotgun(foxes and rabbits)
2. A .22(never got rid of it)
3. A .22 Magnum (kangaroos and sheep)
4. An air rifle(fun)
5. A .303(cows and wild pigs)

3 guns is close to an irreducible minimum for a large farm or a serious hunter. I imagine club shooters similarly ‘need’ around 3-4 guns for different events. An average of more than four on each license is not a shocking figure.

With the exception of illegally acquired guns there is very little in here that is concerning. The absence of semi automatic and pump action guns combined with registration tied to valid uses remains firm.

I wonder - and I do mean wonder, I’m not putting this forward as a firm theory - if the kids pick up on contempt for teachers from their parents. Certainly a lot of people either look down on teachers as lesser or alternatively see them as invalid authority figures.

I also think that there is a drift away from community and family raising children towards the parent being the only valid authority. This has been a century long drift and again I don’t know how much this factors in.

This is the answer, plastic recycling has always been a scam. Waxed paper, cardboard, glass, anything else.

Idealistic teachers don’t last because they aren’t treated like professionals with judgement and autonomy. In my opinion this is a bigger problem than pay, although better pay would help and be the morally correct thing to do for such a vital profession.

This idea always makes me angry. As a doctor and as a member of a community I am always kind and affectionate to children. Anyone who says I shouldn’t be can fuck off back to paranoid lala land.

After all this time I’m still undecided on Rudd but I’m sympathetic to this argument. He’s cautious to a fault but moves where he can and does make real progress, not always where it’s most needed but where it’s achievable.

TBH I think the pattern is more that he can move quickly when Murdoch agrees work him.

https://slrpnk.net/comment/17534231

No, it is of course a shitty thing to do to steal a scooter. What I am saying is that this is an unreasonable way for police to behave. See my other comment in this thread.

With regards to this being a deterrent to other thieves, how? The police didn’t let anyone know they were doing it and didn’t let anyone know after the fact, the only reason anyone knows about it is that an investigative reporter dug it up.

Yep, turns out not everyone with a disability is missing an arm. This is what the NDIS is for. Certain types of politicians can’t stand that we are spending a large amount of money on helping people but don’t blink at spending even larger sums on phallic underwater machines of death.

There are ways of doing this without entrapment. If they want to catch bike and scooter thieves they can stake out the bike racks. I suspect no sane person leaves their bike unlocked there so they have to contrive an artificial situation to entice someone to commit a crime. How is this valuable policing? Had the police not bought a scooter and left it unlocked no crime would’ve been committed.

I have no illusions that the young fellow in question is an upstanding citizen but how is public interest served here? One kid gets a fine and arguably may hesitate before doing the same thing again but the problem is not this one kid, it is systemic and were it not for this news article no-one would even know about it meaning it is useless even for deterrence.

It is a waste of everyone’s time, drags a kid who likely already has a shit life through the courts further alienating him, and did not even protect the property of a real person.

The police deliberately created an opportunity for a crime to be committed, had they not created that situation the crime would not have been committed. It is a textbook case of entrapment. You may think it’s valid, but it is entrapment.

Dr Monterosso said it was difficult to find statistics to show whether this method of proactive policing reduced crime.

In order for it to be plausible that it would reduce crime the police would need to be open about the fact that they are using this tactic. The only reason more than a handful of people actually know about this is the sound journalism by Mya Kordic

It may be legal but it is thoroughly immoral and one suspects if it was a white kid with wealthy parents it would’ve been chucked out.

Its absurd to think that traffic fines are any substantial part of the budget but here you go, I did 2-3 minutes of research for you.

In the 2023-24 financial year, fines issued from road safety cameras amounted to $473 million. This figure represents a fraction of the overall cost of speed and distracted driving and seatbelt-related crashes. Link

The total state budget is 111.7 billion. Link

ie. Around half of 1%

I used victoria just because when i typed “traffic camera revenue” into DDG it was the second result.

I wondered about this also, FWIW my solution would be self reporting verified at the time of vehicle sale or end of vehicle life. I believe some states require periodic roadworthy checks which would also be an opportunity for verification.

Real time vehicle tracking is obviously unacceptable.

Governments have never been dependent on speeding fine revenue. This is a myth perpetuated by people who are indignant that they can’t drive recklessly without consequence.

Hmmm, the fact that Rudd tried and failed to carry out a difficult but fundamentally positive reform is not a very strong case against pursuing it again in the future, for better or worse political progress is almost always multiple failed attempts punctuated by small iterative steps forward.

The idea that Murdoch’s influence is down to the consumers is pretty naive. The Murdoch media is so dominant that it has the capacity to poison every narrative, while one can seek alternative sources those sources struggle financially and can’t market themselves to compete effectively. Added to this is the fact that their dominance means that nearly all incidental news exposure will be Murdoch, they are the papers on the stands, they are the news breaks after sports matches, they are favoured by social media algorithms. Not everyone has the time or inclination to put in the substantial daily work to combat this, Murdoch media dominance is a systemic problem, not one of individual choice.

As the article points out, the fuel excise tax does not pay for roads, it goes into general revenue and does not collect enough to pay for the damage done by air pollution. The argument is that roads should be paid for by a tax on vehicle weight and distance travelled whether ICE or EV in addition to the fuel excise tax.