An attempt to block a controversial abortion bill in the Texas state legislature ended in chaos after a day of high procedural drama, led by state senator Wendy Davis and fanned by nationwide support on social media, culminated in a hotly contested vote.

Republicans said the bill, which would severely restrict access to abortion in the state, passed the Republican-dominated legislature within a midnight deadline.

But reporters watching the vote were clear that it was not completed until after midnight. The Guardian, monitoring the debate on a live stream, judged a roll call was not finished until 12.01am local time at the earliest.

Democrats said they would mount a challenge if the bill was ruled to have passed.

In all, Davis spoke for 10 hours and 45 minutes in an attempt to filibuster the bill. When procedural motions brought by Republican opponents forced her to stop speaking, other Democratic colleagues attempted to run down the clock.

During one procedural tussle, just after 11.45pm, Senator Leticia Van de Putte asked what a female member had to do to be heard over a male senator. The comment prompted the public gallery, which had been filling up during the evening, to erupt. The cheers delayed a final vote on the bill to the stroke of midnight.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/26/wendy-davis-abortion-filibuster-chaos

 

I won't comment any more on the sad saga that has engulfed Labor in this country... only to say THANK YOU JULIA GILLARD for having had the guts to do what you have done and in my book you shall remain the best Prime Minister this country ever had since Ben Chifley... You can be proud. That all, folks.

 

I will still comment, though, on the sad little puppet leading the opposition and on its atrocious policies...

Family and Community Services Minister Pru Goward has repeatedly exaggerated the number of caseworkers helping the state's most vulnerable children.
Ms Goward's consistent claim that there were more than 2000 caseworkers in the system has been contradicted by an Ernst and Young audit commissioned by her department that shows there were only 1797 in March and 1809 in April.
The report commissioned in May says ''overall there appears to be a shortfall of caseworkers compared with the 2068 funded positions'' and in some areas such as child protection, this shortfall has increased.

The issue of caseworker staff shortages and failures to protect vulnerable children has come under intense focus in recent months after the mother of Tanilla Warrick-Deaves pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the two-year-old in July. It was revealed that relatives of the toddler had made 33 reports to the Department of Family and Community Services about her welfare but no action was taken by caseworkers.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/suffer-the-children-report-exposes-lack-of-caseworkers-20130812-2rsgo.html#ixzz2bnGlLODL
See story at top...

(NSW) Community Services Minister Pru Goward faces calls to resign after she denied knowing of a critical report into a shortage of caseworkers for at-risk children, despite being at a meeting where the document had been tabled.

As departmental workers went on strike on Tuesday to protest at staff shortages, Ms Goward admitted that on July 8 she was at a meeting where an Ernst & Young report was tabled. It said the department had 300 fewer caseworkers than were budgeted for.

It also emerged that her office received copies of the document in emails in June and early July.

Despite having the report, which showed there were 1797 caseworkers in the Family and Community Services department, in late June her office told Fairfax Media ''more than 2000'' were employed. On July 9, a spokesman for Ms Goward again exaggerated the number of caseworkers by about 300 when the Herald revealed three-quarters of children deemed at risk of significant harm would not see a caseworker to undergo safety checks.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/goward-under-pressure-as-staff-walk-out-20130820-2s9fh.html#ixzz2cXucaCW0

 

A spokesman for the New South Wales Family and Community Services Minister Pru Goward has hit back at accusations that she misled parliament by editing the official record of parliamentary proceedings, Hansard.

The state opposition claims the minister was trying to cover up misleading statements she made about the critical shortage of caseworkers protecting vulnerable children.

Ms Goward has faced intense scrutiny in her portfolio, and it was revealed during a Budget Estimates hearing on August 12 that the actual number of workers employed was far short of the number she had claimed.

On August 13, Ms Goward addressed parliament on caseworker numbers but the Hansard record of what she said was later changed.

Labor says Ms Goward changed the transcript to read:

There has never been a moratorium of caseworker recruitment by me.

When it originally read:

There has never been a moratorium on caseworker recruitment.

Labor's community services spokeswoman Linda Burney says it is a clear attempt by the minister to mislead parliament.

"Minister Goward has had her staff change Hansard to change the meaning of what she said about caseworkers numbers," she said.

"This is actually physical evidence of the minister misleading parliament about caseworker numbers.

"It's just more evidence of her lack of deservedness to hold this or any other portfolio."

A spokesman for Ms Goward say Hansard is not strictly a verbatim record and any minor changes have been in accordance with Hansard's policy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-11/goward-under-fire-after-record-changed-on-caseworkers/4950394

So Hansard is no longer A RECORD of what is said, but the record of what the Liberal (CONservative) ministers want us to hear.... Bollocks. Pru should resign..

 

 

The death of toddler Zoran Ivanovski has been drawn into the latest crisis involving Family Services Minister Pru Goward, after it emerged she has apparently misled Parliament over the number of child caseworkers.

In the days after his death, Ms Goward rejected claims of any staff shortages and accused the public service union of running a ''morally bankrupt'' campaign.

But now, a series of high-level government emails reveal the number of child protection workers in Wollongong fell by 25 per cent last year.

Opposition Leader John Robertson said the minister ''should be sacked today''. ''This is now the third time she has misled the Parliament over the most critical of child protection issues,'' he said.

After Zoran died from head injuries last August, child protection workers walked off the job in protest against staff shortages they said had prevented them from seeing him. They had received a number of reports about the two-year-old. His mother, Tamie Leanne Apps, has been charged with his murder.
In response to questions about a lack of resources, Ms Goward told Parliament on August 15 last year ''the truth is that not a single caseworker position has been cut in Wollongong''.

She said the staff vacancy rate at the Wollongong office had been reduced by one third.

In July this year, she maintained her position, saying Wollongong vacancy rates were at their lowest level in years. Her office told Fairfax Media ''the government has not cut front-line child protection caseworker positions''.

However, emails between senior managers from the Department of Family and Community Services and the Minister's office show the number of full-time caseworkers in Wollongong fell from 44 in June 2011 to 39 in June last year and to 33 in December. The emails suggest the number of positions would drop to 29 in January this year.
An email from the Department of Family Services executive Kate Gray to Ms Goward's chief of staff William Crook on February 25 says ''you will note there is a downward trend'' in the Wollongong numbers.

The NSW Opposition questioned Ms Goward about why she has repeatedly claimed there are 2068 budgeted caseworkers when internal documents reveal this number has never been filled.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/revealed-staff-down-by-25-20130917-2txd6.html#ixzz2fBb2ylFA

The point here, as the NSW government changing the vernacular of CSG and coal seam gas to the "gas from coal seam" possibly to make it more palatable, the minister has told that there has been no staff cuts... But normal attrition of staff that is not replaced is by definition a cut. In a "growing population", staff level that reduce by attrition by 25 per cent are actually reduced by  27 per cent over a couple of years. 

Pru Goward though she could get away with saying "there has been NO CUTS"... She should be sacked or she should resign. He predecessor Linda Burney was doing a far far better job with extraordinary compassion — also knowing the difficulties of families, herself being Aboriginal separated from her father:. 

From wikipedia:

 

Burney is of Wiradjuri descent and grew up in Whitton, a small town in South West NSW near Leeton.

 

In her inaugural speech to Parliament she (Linda) said:

 

I did not grow up knowing my Aboriginal family. I met my father, Nonny Ingram, in 1984. His first words to me were, "I hope I don't disappoint you." I have now met 10 brothers and sisters. We grew up 40 minutes apart. That was the power of racism and denial in the fifties that was so overbearing. I now have two sets of brothers and sisters. I was raised by my old aunt and uncle, Nina and Billy Laing. They were brother and sister. These old people gave me the ground on which I stand today—the values of honesty, loyalty and respect.[5]

 

 

The Financial Review, Channel Nine’s version of The Australian, taps Pru Goward on the padded shoulder to spruik on the underclass from her verandah anthropologist’s armchair of irrelevancy, writes Joel Jenkins.

 

I ONCE SAW a Wind in the Willows production at the Kew Gardens as a young fella. Travelling across the Eastern, I always noticed they had a few extra lanes than the narrow band of Western Ring Road, where you can still hear the bloodcurdling screams of people creeping home from their workplace in neverending traffic. I never liked Wind in the Willows, even back then.

In her article ‘Why you shouldn’t underestimate the underclass’, Pru Goward begins with a quote from Orwell – “If there is hope, it lies in the proles” – before she lurches into her ‘lifelong fascination with the underclass’. Oh, do tell, Pru.

So, with the arrogance of a badger, before you can whisper “Wind in the Willows”, Goward starts ripping into the ‘stoats and weasels’ whilst ignoring the rats, moles and toads and the other “river dwellers” that drink tea with her at Toad Hall. ‘Not very nice,’ she remembers her mum calling them “proles” before lazily dropping in Charles Dickens for no apparent reason other than to link to an unrelated article, or perhaps just for a laugh.

People in Lalor would never call themselves proles, and neither did people from where I grew up. In 1997, people from Lalor to Werribee were working good union jobs in the healthy and protected manufactories that supplied a skilled and localised workforce that could afford to raise families in homes they owned, whilst Pru Goward and her husband were finishing up their biography of John Howard.

I finished high school in the early 2000s and started working a couple of years before Goward’s mate Howard imposed WorkChoices on the working class. Job agencies appeared out of nowhere, insidiously controlling the local jobs for young dirty proles like me and my mates. I got a job at a chocolate factory while the full-time roles started rapidly turning into casual agency jobs.

Then the competition started with two tiers of jobs, the $36 one or the $25 one, waiting for the phone call or text each night, anxiously wanting to know which one it would be, adjusting the subsistence living from day-to-day. Every day at work, three people competing for two jobs, a fella on the gantry watching you sweat, don’t be too long on the John, don’t have a family health problem or you could be out.

Many of us proles are people who have worked like this for years — no paid holiday leave with the family, no two paychecks ever the same, part of an endless human supply chain set into motion by Pru Goward’s Australia. And now, after decades of dismantling the job security of Australians in Howard’s retinue, she pens an article blaming the people that deliver packages to her door, who brush cut her irrigated lawns, those who feign interest in all the unreasonable demands of her and the class she represents.

There is no dignity afforded to the casualised chattel packing the trucks that fill the shelves at Bunnings and Coles, that shunt around packages from far away distribution centres, the people that make the cheese, slice the eye fillets and pack the asparagus that supplies the caloric intake and subsequent energy of slack-minded elites like Pru Goward.

Then, somewhere between Martin Chuzzlewit and Soylent Green, she observes the incredible strain these people place on her society. Pru says the underclasses are viewed by government agencies ‘as huge cost centres’ that are ‘over-represented in their use of government crisis services’. She sums up the people that prop up her tuffet as citizens who ‘are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day’. Horrible and despicable people. No wonder her mum didn’t like them.

Well, at this point, we would think Pru could have realised that she may be in the wrong position to wax lyrical about sections of the society she clearly resents, that she is blinded by her privilege and cultural bias and that her three incongruous cultural references and a fistful of disdain were not going to be enough to carry such a poignant message through the remainder of the article. We’d be wrong. After talking about social workers, the tired and overworked, the underpaid and understaffed – all factors to blame on the proles, of course – she starts cosying up to hardcore eugenics.

Pru speaks from the heart: ‘Oh yes, and they don’t vote often.’ The proles don’t really like contributing to democracy, she begins the sub-human observation. ‘Despite the billions of dollars governments invest in changing the lives of proles, their number increases.’ Proles again? As the first of my spinning eyeballs gained focus, slap, ‘...birth rates far outstrip those of professional couples’. Then she tells us how badly we treat our children. I was waiting for her to say “cockroaches” — it rolls off the tongue better than “proles”.

Goward has let us in on something she probably shouldn’t as she reveals a glinting treasure dropped from the firmament that sits above the crucible of power in this country — she tells us how they really feel about us. She repeats a message that is usually muttered in the safety of cucumber sandwiches and lunchtime gin, sending it out to her golf buddies that read the AFR. There are people out there, with whom the Nine papers feel that they can make bank, that want to publish more of this message because they earnestly believe it.

The sons and daughters of the Pru Gowards come in waves of gentrification into the places where we grew up. They push out the so-called underclasses to the peripheries of urban society, into no-man’s-land out under the power line easements and industrial centres of our major and regional cities — places where Uber Eats doesn’t work. The people who built their homes in the localised economies of working-class Australia, the family ties and the intergenerational connections are all swept away by Pru’s people. Overpaying for the bungalows and villas we grew up in, with money to spare for a full renovation and a new ANCAP best-in-class car, their noise is louder than the rest.

Those from the liberal class – those educated, usually from wealth – have had a significant bearing over ordered societies since the toffs of old ate Nineveh lamingtons on the banks of the Tigris and watched the slaves pressure-wash Marduk the bull god. With wealth disparity more comparable to that of Ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia than post-WWII and with these open voices from people like Pru, why do we keep assuming that these people actually care about us?

I wouldn’t normally dare cast sweeping aspersions on the machinations of the rich and delirious but feel compelled to aim one at Pru Goward and the Financial Review. What she has just written, the news that the AFR has seen fit to print, represents the beating heart of an agenda — a fortuitously conceived idea that is arbitrated by the aristocratic heart of this incestuous backwater. 

Goward's article is a disgraceful insight into the heartless nature of the elite in this country, with all their levers of power, and made all the more insulting given it comes from a former equal opportunities commissioner. Unfortunately for Pru, for better or worse, the future of this country will be determined by the underclass and however those like Pru wish to treat it, it's the underclass that will choose how we proceed.

There are Pru Gowards in every safe seat in this country, in our public institutions and academia — their cloistered minds write our articles and their think-tanks shape our military and strategic future. Pru’s people lobby against the public interest and hoard wealth off the backs of the very people she has just king hit. In lieu of the major parties, meaningful support from educated liberal elites and non-partisan analysis in the press, it's time the proles started owning the discussion on class in Australia.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/the-gowards-punch,15677

 

Read from top....

 

See also: https://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30956

 

FREE JULIAN NOW !!!!√√√√√√