The voice will be able to use shame via the media / social media etc, to ensure things it wants are passed.

Indigenous Australians can already talk to the media and use social media. The Voice doesn’t change that at all.

Also - every citizen of this country has the right to advocate for things they want to see passed into law. That’s what it means to live in a democracy.

What The Voice actually does is force our government (not the media, not the general public), to listen when indigenous representatives raise important issues. It doesn’t force the government to act, only listen. And if the government does do anything that the majority of Australians disagree with… they will be voted out with prejudice at the next election and the new government will immediately reverse whatever they did. You’re worried about something that just won’t happen.

Without a doubt she will want full sovereignty over any other race.

Um… there is no way in hell Australians would allow Lidia Thorpe to have full sovereignty over this country. Have your forgotten the part where her boyfriend was president of the Victorian chapter of the largest outlaw motorcycle gang in Australia?! Sure - police have no evidence he committed a crime. But he was president of an organisation that has had gunfights in broad daylight where innocent bystanders were shot to death for simply standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not to mention selling hard drugs to kids.

Nobody should be listening to Lidia Thorpe on anything and it’s an embarrassment that the Greens allowed her to be a leading member of the party.

And if what you actually meant was “some other indigenous person” should have full sovereignty… well, which person specifically? Who exactly are you suggesting should replace King Charles as sovereign of Australia? I get it, he’s a terrible person for the role, I think we should find someone better. But I don’t see anyone putting their hand up. When someone competent does, then we can hold another referendum.

For now, it’s at best an impossibly unrealistic dream. At worst it’s a deliberate and malicious attempt to make sure no meaningful progress happens. And honestly, I’m leaning towards the latter.

There are valid reasons to vote no.

Such as? I’ve never seen one and I think if there were valid reasons the No campaign would be spreading the word far and wide.

I agree with a concern from the ‘no’ camp, that this ends up being a bandaid or virtue-signalling; and if it passes then “job well done” and we don’t keep moving forward.

I’m sorry but that argument doesn’t have any merit at all.

If you are hungry, is it a “band aid solution” to take one step towards the kitchen? Taking one step isn’t going to fill you up. There’s going to be far more work after the step, but that step is an essential component of the full solution.

This entire issue is going to take generations of hard work to fix. The fact this referendum alone will not fix everything on it’s own is totally irrelevant. The referendum will help in a few key small ways, and therefore it should be passed.

Indigenous Australians must take a leadership role in patching the rift between them and the rest of the country. It simply cannot be solved by white people alone. This referendum, if we vote Yes, will enshrine into law an essential framework for representatives of Indigenous Australia to collaborate with the broader government as a whole.

I very much fear that if the result is ‘no’, we have collectively just affirmed racism

That is exactly how the ‘no’ vote will be interpreted. Even if 90% of people vote ‘yes’ most people will see that as proof that 10% of the population are racist.

This is a litmus test of Australian society. Are we ready to make real progress or not? Voting no means we are not ready.

As someone who has lived in rural Australia - they barely service anywhere outside of metro areas.

My brother lives just an hour from a major regional city (population 150k), on the outskirts of a relatively large town, only a five min drive to a large post office that serves tens of thousands of people. He still doesn’t get mail delivery and has to pay for a PO Box.

In fact - the private couriers offer far better service for his address.

The changes needed can be achieved without a Constitutional amendment.

Australia has tried doing it without a referendum multiple times over our history, every single time they started promising and then fizzled out into nothing.

By putting it in the constitution, there would have to be a new referendum in order to undo the changes.

That has been tried in the past, more than once, by both left and right wing parties. It failed miserably every time.

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But the general premise of “No, you can’t autodebit” or “Sure, I’ll let you think you can auto-debit. Doesn’t mean I’ll have it turned on at that moment” still holds.

That doesn’t hold in Australia. I’ve never heard of a bank here that allows you to (easily) stop someone from taking money out of your account. In fact, even if the account is empty they might be able to overdraw it if they have the right level of merchant account (I had that happen once, when I booked a flight that was about to depart, and they messed up/failed to charge me for the flight. Three months later someone noticed and my account was charged/overdrawn).

As someone who runs a business that charges customers money all day every day… if I have the customer’s details then I can charge their account whatever I want. Sure, I could go to jail (or be sent out of business) if I do the wrong thing… but there isn’t really much protection below that point and if I’m only mildly scummy, I’d probably get away with it.

I’m not even sure where to deposit it if I wanted to

I’m not a BankWest customer but I expect you can deposit it at any post office, for free, and it’ll be much quicker and more convenient than going to the branch ever was.

It reinforces Western interpretations

No. It reinforces the interpretation of whoever trained the model. Those people don’t have to be western.

I’m sure there are other things that contribute, but it seems pretty clear the problem is not enough houses are available for people to live in which is a policy problem, not an organised crime problem.

In a mid 2022 report coal was 26% of Victoria’s generation capacity and the majority of that was the Loy Yang power plant (which has six coal generators, four at the A facility and two at the B facility).

From the article, they haven’t specified an end date for Loy Yang - what they’ve done is some kind of deal that guarantees Loy Yang won’t shut down if the grid doesn’t have an alternative in place yet. That seems fair enough to me? Nobody wants blackouts.

I would expect the six generators at Loy Yang won’t all be shut off at the same time. They’ll go down one by one as wind/hydro infrastructure improves.

Also - remember “95%” is a moving target. There’s ~20GW of wind power and ~8GW of battery power coming online in VIC over the next several years and that only counts major projects, it doesn’t count residential solar/batteries which are growing at a rapid clip. VIC will likely their 95% target long before Loy Yang shuts down.

As I understand it - the biggest segment is men who buy their first bike in their midlife crisis. They buy expensive, large, powerful motorcycles that are difficult to ride and combined with a lack of experience that’s basically suicide.

And yeah, when it’s a multi-vehicle incident it’s still regularly the rider’s fault. For example they might crash in a corner and slide across the road into the bullbar of a 4WD coming around the corner in the other direction. Often they’re going “too fast” as the police would call it, but realistically the corner could have been navigated safely at the speed they’re were travelling… it’s just inexperience, combined with the sudden appearance of a scary 4WD coming around the corner, tends to create a momentary panic reaction and the natural reaction is to grab the brakes. Which might serve you well in a car with ABS… but slamming on the brakes hard while leaned over in a corner on a bike will result in a crash every time.

As a rider, I think it should be illegal to ride those bikes until you’ve got at least 50,000km of experience riding a lighter weight / safer bike. We do (at least in QLD) restrict the type of bike you can ride for the first 12 months, but that’s not long enough (I see a lot of new riders who just don’t buy a bike their first 12 months after getting a license) and also it’s based on power to weight ratio… which is wrong. It should just be based on weight ignoring power. Most accidents happen cornering and braking, and those two have nothing to do with engine power. A lighter bike, however, is much easier to handle when they do start sliding.

I assume you’re not an Aussie, since you said mph?

But sure… all over the world there are idiots who ride…

The thing is though, if they weren’t on a bike they’d be going even faster and driving even more aggressively behind the wheel of a nice safe truck (safe for the driver anyway).

At least on the bike the risk encourages them to be a little less aggressive and they’re less likely to hurt anyone else.

If you have the roof space, a solar HWS could be the go,

Nah, it’s better to have panels that produce electricity so they can only heat water when they need to and sell power to the grid the rest of the day (which will be most of the day).

I bought an expensive induction stove secondhand (so it was cheap), cost a few hundred bucks to get it wired in since at full power they generate a ridiculous amount of heat and a conventional electric cooktop/oven circuit won’t cut it.

It boils water much faster than a gas stove - it’s not even close. It also changes temperature quicker than gas (which has residual heat in all the metal), and the temperature can go extremely low too. The lowest setting is basically the same as if you held the pot in your hands - it will eventually heat up to body temperature. Pretty awesome for keeping food warm after it’s finished cooking.

The temperature changes much more quickly than gas, and it’s easy to clean, and you can use the cooktop as part of your kitchen bench when you’re not cooking. I love induction.

Electric hot water heater is great - costs basically nothing to heat during the day (it’s on a timer, only heats when the sun is high, so even on an overcast day the panels produce enough power to heat the water). There’s an override switch to make it heat outside of hours if we have family visiting and need more hot water overnight. Before we had solar, the hot water heater was about a third of our electricity bill. Now it’s basically non-existent. We use a lot more hot water now, for washing laundry/etc.

but only if we get it right.

If we don’t get it right, I’ll buy a battery, hook it up to the panels/inverter I already have, and go off grid entirely.

What if instead of increasing demand, the government increased supply?

Eh - I don’t think this will drive demand up much. 600,000 homes were bought last year in Australia. This scheme is only available to 10k buyers per year.

Also, it’s not a new scheme, it’s a modification to an existing one. I bought my home a few years ago under it… the modified scheme is a little more generous but I don’t think it will move the needle on house prices, but for those 10k lucky families per year it will definitely move the needle.

Owning our own home has been life changing for us.

Also - it could be argued that raising the value of homes will increase supply. It’ll incentivise more people to build, and therefore more homes will be built.

In any car built in the last ~20 years, you can monitor your real time consumption either on the dashboard or else by hooking up your phone into the mechanic’s diagnostics port (there are cheap bluetooth dongles).

In general, fuel consumption is infinite when the engine is running while you’re not moving. At very low speeds economy is terrible and as you increase speed fuel efficiency improves until the sweet spot which is usually at about 60km/h. That sweet spot is fairly wide - up to around 80km/h in most cars and then it starts getting bad again.

It’s different for every car - but as a rule of thumb if your car uses X amount of fuel at 60-80km/h, then it probably uses about twice that much fuel at 20km/h and 130km/h.

HOWEVER that 130km/h number assumes the car hasn’t been modified. If you’ve installed a roof rack for example then it could be more like triple the consumption you had at 80km/h! Low speed would be less affected by modifications.

Ultimately the only number that matters is the number for your car, so why not measure it? Modern cars use a computer to calculate the fuel injection speed and it’s possible to monitor that number.