The Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo has called the tax office a “despicable tool for political persecution” over its pursuit of an alleged unpaid $140m tax bill, saying “unknown dark forces” and an Australian “deep state” were conspiring against him.

In a swingeing attack, the normally reclusive property developer – whose Australian permanent residency was cancelled on advice from Asio in December over fears of foreign political interference – condemned Australian politicians, government agencies and the media for what he described as their “amazingly synergized collaboration” in attacks on him.

“All allegations against me have been ‘groundless’ in nature,” he said. “Be it a political donation or an alleged tax burden, it all leads to fictional tales fabricated in a vacuum. Even more shockingly, some government agencies have actually taken or attempted to take some ‘deep state-style’ actions against me based on those ‘fictions’. This is the real woe of Australia and where the actual risk lies for the country.”

Huang says he was never a spy or an “agent of influence” of the Chinese Communist party.

“Over the years, some representatives of the ‘deep state’ in Australia have repeatedly accused me of being an ‘agent of influence’. Yet, despite years of stringent investigation on me, the Asio had to eventually admit that there was not even a hair of evidence for such allegation.”

The Guardian has sought an interview with Huang over a number of matters, both in Australia and overseas. He provided a statement – in English and Chinese – overnight.

Despite his exile from Australia, Huang has remained starkly prominent in public and political debate over Chinese government influence in the country.

Last month the Independent Commission Against Corruption heard evidence that he had given an illegal $100,000 donation to the New South Wales Labor party delivered in cash in an Aldi shopping bag to the party’s general secretary. Huang was banned from donating because he was a property developer but the donation was allegedly masked because it was funnelled through a series of fake donors.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/23/huang-xiangmo-chi...

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Hirst recommends limiting voting at pre-poll voting centres to a two-week period and returning the number of the pre-poll voting centres to 2013 levels.

He also condemns “appalling and illegal behaviour that took place during the election campaign, including damage to property and abuse being directed towards parliamentarians, candidates, campaign staff and party volunteers”.

“The most extreme examples included anti-Semitic vandalism directed towards the member for Berowra and the federal treasurer, damage to Liberal Party vehicles, obscene personal abuse directed towards the former prime minister Tony Abbott, and a campaign volunteer being stabbed with a corkscrew.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/23/facebook-removed-...

It has to be said that Tony Abbott did FAR worse things to the country than "personal abuse", "damage to Liberal (CONservative) vehicles" and "stabbing with a corkscrew"... Tony Abbott MASSIVELY lied and destroyed the good spirit of this nation to its core — and sent many good people to despair. He should be ashamed of himself, but he won't... 

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Scummo should go to confession for lying to the Australian public — or by "employing" ministers in his cabinet who lie with his approval. One of the worse liars in the band of Scummo liars is Angus Taylor.

As the nation continues to grapple with drought and unseasonably early bushfires, climate change remains a point of political focus.

The Morrison Government has repeatedly claimed the Coalition — through its own hard work — turned around Australia's poor record on greenhouse gas emissions that it says was inherited from the former Labor government.

The latest Coalition MP to make such a claim is Energy Minister Angus Taylor.

On Monday he told Parliament: "When we arrived into government in 2013, we were faced with not just a financial deficit but a deficit in achieving emission reductions and abatement, because they left us with a 700 million tonne deficit versus our 2020 targets. We now know, from the hard work done by this Government and by hardworking Australian businesses and industry, that we'll overachieve on that target by 367 million tonnes. That's a 1.1 billion tonne turnaround. We haven't just turned around their financial deficit; we have turned around their abatement deficit."

Senior Coalition figures, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have made similar claims on numerous occasions.

Fact Check previously examined this claim and found it to be misleading.

Among other things, the so-called emissions "deficit" referred to by Mr Morrison was taken from an October 2012 report, and merely represented a forecast of the greenhouse gas reductions needed to hit Australia's 2020 target at that time.

Soon after the Coalition came to office, it became apparent that emissions under Labor's carbon tax had been lower than expected in a report released in September 2013, which superseded the 2012 report.

Government officials also for the first time factored in a significant "carryover" from the overachievement of Australia's 2012 target.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-24/zombie---angus-taylor-emissions-a...

This ABC "fact-check" is also misleading. The truth is:

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions have been rising for five years and this trend is set to continue.

“Suggestions in the media today that our emissions are set to come down are based on magical thinking and fanciful assumptions. They rely on faith in a government that has done nothing but dampen the spirits of the renewable energy sector,” said the Climate Council’s Senior Researcher, Tim Baxter.

“If the Federal Government actually had a climate policy we could rapidly decarbonise and make great strides. However, in the absence of Federal direction the market will struggle to continue the uptake of renewables,” said Mr Baxter. 

AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW:  Senior Climate Researcher, Tim Baxter and Climate Councillor and energy expert, Andrew Stock.

Read more:

https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/australias-emissions-go-up-and-up/

Angus is a liar...

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“At no time have the false figures appeared in the City of Sydney’s publicly available annual reports,” she said.

She also pointed out that the reports were submitted to the New South Wales local government minister and uploaded on the city’s website in November 2018, and metadata proves that at no time have these documents been changed or updated.

She said the material provided by the minister on Friday did not explain where the document with the incorrect figures originated.

With significant pressure building, Taylor issued a statement late on Friday afternoon saying he would be writing to Moore to offer his apologies for not “clarifying” numbers about travel at the council before writing to her in September.

The minister said there was “clear evidence” on the council’s own website “that there are different versions of the same report online right now”.

The material supplied by Taylor’s office points to minor formatting differences between the Word and PDF versions of the annual report currently on the council’s website. This is the evidence supplied by the office to argue that multiple versions of the same report have existed. The suggestion is that Taylor’s office accessed a draft of the annual report.

But Taylor has left it to the council to “prove which documents have existed and may still currently exist”. Taylor did not address the vast discrepancy between the figures for travel expenditure he accused the council of, and the actual figures displayed in the annual report on the council’s website.

Moore explained the slight variations by saying :“The City of Sydney does have two versions of our annual report online – it is uploaded as a PDF and a Word Document. The Word Document is available to assist with accessibility.

“We present the material in two forms to aid accessibility, but the content is the same. Difference in formatting occur as a consequence of file export and operating system used to open the documents,” she said.

But she said the content in the material is “identical in both documents”.

“The figures used by the Minister are not a small variation, they are grossly inaccurate.”

The statement from Taylor’s office says the Department of Environment and Energy has confirmed that the minister’s office accessed the City of Sydney website on 9 September, but there is no evidence supplied in Friday’s statement that the report was downloaded from the council’s website.

The minister’s attempted defence of his position came after the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, formally asked the NSW police to investigatehow his office came to use a doctored document to justify a political attack on the Sydney mayor’s climate change stance.

Dreyfus wrote to the NSW police commissioner, Mick Fuller, on Friday morning asking him to investigate the “highly concerning” revelations in the Guardian about the doctored document.

“According to that article, a report published in The Daily Telegraph on 30 September 2019 regarding travel expenditure by the City of Sydney Council was based on a forged version of the Council’s annual report,” Dreyfus wrote.

“That forgery, which dramatically overstated the Council’s annual travel costs, was allegedly provided to the newspaper by the office of the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Mr Angus Taylor.

“The false figures were also reportedly referred to in a letter sent by Mr Taylor to the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Ms Clover Moore.”

The Guardian revealed on Wednesday the false figures were used by Taylor’s office to unleash a political attack on the Sydney lord mayor last month.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-25/angus-taylor-to-apologise-to-sydn...

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http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35436

“Orwell and Huxley were always arguing about who had the closest view of what dystopia might look like in the future,” said Waters, adding “I think we got a lot of both.” 

“We have the ‘Big Brother’ Orwellian dystopian nightmare, it happened two days ago in that magistrate’s court,” he explained, referring to a UK judge’s decision on Monday to deny the WikiLeaks founder a delay in US extradition proceedings. Assange’s lawyers have argued that they need more time to prepare a defense, and some of Assange’s supporters have made the case that British law forbids extradition in the first place, if the charges can be seen as political.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/471936-julian-assange-orwell-huxley-waters/

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FREE ASSANGE NOW!

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The federal government has received not a drop of water for the $80m it spent on buying water entitlements from Eastern Australia Agriculture in 2017, a company once linked to the energy minister, Angus Taylor.

Taylor was a director and co-founder of EAA, an agribusiness in Queensland, which was backed by a group of foreign investors. Taylor founded the Australian company in 2007 and served briefly as a director between 2008 and 2009, well before becoming an MP in 2013. His business partner, Tony Reid, was also a director and acted as a consultant on the controversial sale of overland flow entitlements to the government.

The commonwealth environmental water holder, Jody Swirepik, confirmed last week during Senate estimates that the rights bought from EAA have not yielded any water at all.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/31/not-a-drop-of-wat...

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A lot of cash for nothing....

Though just how much fun the Government is having is a moot point. It's all going pretty well at one level, particularly since Labor is still licking its wounds.

But there are problems within the Nationals, and between the Nationals and the Liberals. And, well, not everybody has a lot to do.

On election night, Scott Morrison said the election was a great victory for the "Quiet Australians".

"A fair go for those who have a go," for those who make a contribution and don't just seek to take, as historian Judith Brett observed.

Writing in The Monthly recently, Brett ruminated on the similarities between Morrison's Quiet Australians, Howard's battlers and Menzies' Forgotten People.

"This question is about rhetoric as much as demography," she wrote, "about how Liberal leaders project their followers and the symbolic resources they draw on.

"Each is implicitly contrasted with noisy minorities who get all the attention."

But the very idea of Quiet Australians and noisy minorities does raise some interesting questions — and sends some disturbing signals — about the virtues of being quiet, and just who represents a "noisy minority" and who represents a legitimate community view.

Staying quiet absolves the community of responsibility

On Friday, for example, the Prime Minister promised a crackdown on environmental groups which campaign against businesses that provide goods and services to mining companies. Too noisy!

GetUp! is another group who are clearly too noisy as far as the Government is concerned.

But tied up somewhere in the message about Quiet Australians is a message that not getting involved in politics, and just getting on with your life, is fine.

...

But that absolves a large part of the community from feeling any responsibility for what might be being done in its name.

And it creates disconnects when politicians talk about ideas in the broad, and as they relate specifically to particular communities.

Implicit in the conservative hostility to the 2017 Uluru statement from the Heart, calling for an Indigenous "voice to the Parliament" is the idea that Indigenous people would get some sort of special treatment that wasn't available to everyone else. An example of a "noisy minority" getting rewarded.

The Morrison Government has progressively downgraded what "The Voice" might potentially be.

This week Indigenous Affairs Minister Ken Wyatt set out a process for providing a legislated voice for Indigenous people to local, state and federal governments.

The co-chair of the panel to "co-design" this process is Professor Marcia Langton.

She observed to the ABC this week that there are about a million Indigenous people in Australia, possibly a third or living in remote and rural Australia, "and most of them have very poor relationships with government".

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-02/quiet-australians-and-noisy-minor...

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Their alchemy helped consign the Labor Party to another three years in political purgatory. Now the same team of digital gurus are working with Boris Johnson to break the Brexit deadlock.

They are Topham Guerin, or TG, a boutique digital marketing agency from New Zealand headed by Sean Topham and Ben Guerin, two Kiwis still in their 20s.

They run what has been dubbed a 24-hour meme machine — a social media firehose of attention-grabbing, emotion-manipulating, behaviour-nudging messaging designed to corral the faithful and convert the fence-sitters.

But these are not issues Topham Guerin wants to broach. In a text message, the head of TG's Australian arm, Andrew Blow, said it would be "entirely unprofessional" to discuss details about clients or the work done for them.

But on May 26, a week after Bill Shorten lost the "unlosable election", founding partner Ben Guerin was more forthcoming. In a flush of post-election euphoria, he spilled the beans.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-08/topham-guerins-boomer-meme-indust...

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GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, YOU FUCKING NZ MORONS...