• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • International student intake as a ratio of housing supply is the main issue. If dwellings were being built at the same rate of international student intake, then affordability or vacancy would not be a problem.

    Look up your local universities (they’re all non-profit organisations with financials reported in the ACNC) and realise just how much their business model has become funded by international students. Here’s a few examples:
    University of Melbourne: 69% of tuition fee revenues comes from intl students
    University of Queensland: 70% of tuition fee revenues comes from intl students

    The universities also receive government funding, pay no income tax (because they are “nonprofit”), and don’t need to contribute anything to the housing problem that they are feeding. It’s time for them to help carry the burden - they should either provide housing or help pay for it.



  • When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don’t think that you can really associate Carlson with being “free press”. This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html

    “Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

    The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”

    Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “unbelievable”.

    “I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.



  • I wouldn’t call it propaganda or even news - it’s just theories at this stage.
    What we can speculate about is motive to deceive. Russia has been incurring some notable losses from Ukrainian anti-air defences recently, so there would be a motive from the Russian side to portray those anti-air defences as either ineffective or untrustworthy so as to try and sway public opinion about its use.

    Claiming that POWs were onboard the plane aligns with that motive but it also raises questions such as:

    1. The plane was reportedly shot down after taking off from Belgorod, so if it was carrying POWs away from Belgorod, what was the intended destination? It doesn’t seem logical that Russia would fly from Belgorod into Ukraine (unless they were stupid or taking the risk).
    2. Why not transport POWs to Ukraine by road or rail, given that Kharkiv is only a 90 min drive away?








  • Why are those specific metrics more important than 5-year plans?

    Because a plan is just an intention or wishful thinking. Inflation data is an actual, measurable result.

    Inflation data is one of the most common economic measurements and it can be reasonably expected that every country should be able to not only report on the inflation metric itself, but provide details on the measurement and the methodology used so that every country, globally, knows that the metric reported by each country is transparent and credible. Understanding the methodology then allows analysts to investigate the underlying drivers of the inflation result, confirm its accuracy, and compare it between countries by using similar methodologies.

    Simply put, if a country can’t provide detailed explanations on how they determine an important metric like inflation, then what does that suggest about other metrics or results that they share?








  • The Government of the day will be able to completely ignore them like they ignore climate scientists and environmentalists.

    This is how it is supposed to be. They’re ignored, but so is everyone else. We all wish that the government would only listen and act on our preferences and beliefs, but the system is designed so that every Australian citizen receives one vote to elect their preferred representative and we must engage with that elected representative to guide parliament.
    There are always going to be lobbyists, special groups, or even corruption that interfere with this system, but these are issues that can be managed by legislation and government processes. Indigenous Australians already have The National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA), employing 1,023 full time staff and a budget of $285M each year specifically for the purpose to “lead and influence change across government to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a say in the decisions that affect them.”

    Regardless of race or ancestry, let’s all be ignored by government equally.