Late Welcome to the Late Debate. Well, thanks for joining us on the Late Debate.
I'm James Macpherson with Freileitch and kel Richards coming up tonight. Fans of the newest NRL team mistakenly by memberships in a very different kind of club.
Will explain that to you a little later.
Plus, when we look at the papers, the Albanezy government looking at ending power bill rebates but wait until you find out what they're going to spend the money on, and warnings that drought in Victoria is set to send dairy and meat prices skyrocketing. All of that when we get to what's making news tomorrow. But first is the Albanese government heading for war with the Trump administration over DEEI policies. Now everyone knows Trump has shown an absolute
disdain for woke policies. He's called them ridiculous and radical, especially when it comes to the military. And if you're any any doubt about what the trumpet aministration thinks about woke policies, well have listened to US Defense Secretary Pete hegseath.
We are leaving warkness and weakness behind. No more pronouns, no more climate change obsession, no more emergency vaccine mandates, No more dudes in dresses.
We're done with that.
So what will the Trump administration make of our military? Where DEI policies are as common as car key. Take the Australian Submarine Agency as an example. They're charged with securing Virginia class nuclear subs from the US. Now have
a look at how they run their agency. Here in Australia, the acasa's diversity and Inclusion policy requires the appointment of senior leaders as diversity Champions focused on the culturally and linguistically diverse lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual, neurodiversity, First Nations, disability and mental health, and women and gender. Now, US defense contractors have quickly ditched to DEI policy so they can deal with the Trump administration, but not the
Albanesi government. Finance and Public Service Minister Katie Gallagher said the Labor government is absolutely committed to diversity, inclusion and equity, no matter what the cost. She told The Australian Today. The Australian people voted at this election to comprehensively reject a coalition platform that was built on the politics of division and imported policies from overseas. Label will continue to govern in the interests of all Australians, she explained DEEI
would continue. Kellen Freyer, it seems to me that the Albenezi government is endangering US on two fronts. Firstly, DEI is not smart in the military. I mean, no one on the battlefield asks your pronouns before they shoot you.
But second, the US is our major ally.
We're in a what a three hundred and sixty billion dollar contract re orcus and submarines. This is not the way to indea the Trump administration to ourselves.
And if this labor government thinks that the Trump administration will not crack down on Australian die policies, then they are wrong because our universities have already lost up to six hundred million dollars in grants from the US government because of their DEI policies, and that is simply going to happen with the military.
As well well.
I went to the White House website and I looked up what they require and the Trump administration quote requires federal contractors and subcontractors.
That sounds a lot.
Like people dealing with their military to comply with what they call our civil rights laws and that means the de EYE laws getting rid of all of that because they say that's discrimination.
And then in the next.
Paragraph they require quote strong affirmation subcontractors will not engage in DEI. Now, how does Australia get around that? I mean, we've got it. We have not just a policy, an official policy locked in in which we say DEI is good, We're doing DEI and they've got an official policy saying no, you won't or we can't deal with you. How do we even deal with the American military Lockheed Martin, for example, Lockheed Martin ditch DEI. We have a policy of DEI.
Do we have to say to Lockheed Martin, I'm sorry, we're not buying any more F thirty five fighter jets because you've got the wrong policy.
Lockheed Martin and Boeing have got subsidiaries here in Australia. Yes, And so they're trying to work out they've ditched DEI in the US, what do their Australian counterparts do and is it going to affect their relationship with the Trump administration.
Here's the other thing I find incredible about this.
The Australian submarine agency, established in July twenty twenty three with the intent of dealing with the Trump administration, has in its short life span, a terrible record when it comes to culture and morale, with senior officers having been reported to resign on mass because of senior leadership issues. There are one hundred and one government entities surveyed. They published their results in terms of workplace culture the ASA and they've got, you know, champions for diversity, for LGBTQ,
for women, for neurodivergent people, for First Nations people. They reported the second lowest overall well being and support of one hundred and one government agencies. They came in tenth last when it came to communication and only fifty nine percent of people working at the Australian Submarine Agency with all of their diversity champions, only fifty nine percent were willing to describe it as a good place to work.
It's almost like the more diversity champions you have, the less appealing that workplace is for potential employees.
Because the diversity, the equity and inclusion agenda is all about dividing people along the lines of race, gender, immutable attributes and what that does in a workplace is it will eventually rip colleagues apart because all of a sudden, you're not being judged on your merit. You're not being judged on how well you perform a job. You're being judged on who you are as a person, things you
can't change. Now, what kind of culture would that create in a workplace where it's not your actions that are being evaluated, but it's aspects of your identity. And then imagine the toxic relationships that flow from that, the envy. I would feel so annoyed if I knew someone next to me was going to get the promotion over me, or get a better job just because of their skin color or something silly like that.
Yeah, and we know what happens with di DEI is what gave us Kamela Harris as an election candidate. So we know it doesn't work. Talking about elections. Let's cast our minds back to me the third. It's only two weeks and two days ago. That could have been should have been the energy election, and the Liberal Party could have run a really powerful we are going to cut your cost of living by cutting down the cost of energy. But because they very closely resembled in that campaign, Ruth
Park's much love character, the muddle headed wombat. They had nothing like that. Muddled about nuclear, didn't even try to sell their nuclear policy, muddled about energy policy. Now, sadly, having been demolished in that election, they are still muddled. They still really don't know where they're going. Their coalition partners or would be partners that thats have already said we're dumping that zero, and well the that's dumped that zero.
The Liberals dither about nuclear now. Joe O'Brien was the man who helped to draw up the nuclear policy and sell the nuclear policy, and now he's the deputy leader of.
The It's Ted O'Brien, you said Joe Joe on the ABC Good Guy. I did buy cannection with the career out with Joe O'Brien.
But it's Ted O'Brien.
He's here as my submedit. He's excellent. Ted O'Brien was the man who did that.
Now he is the deputy leader of the Liberal Party and he doesn't sound all that clear.
Have a listen.
Are the National saying to you that in order to get this agreement together, you'll have to commit to a nuclear policy.
The Liberal Party has already made it very clear what our approach is, and that is we need to be listening to the Australian people. We'll be looking at the evidence of the data also as it comes in, and together we will be drawing conclusions and formulating policy. That's the approach that Susan has rightly laid out.
Ted Ted, Ted, Ted, I mean that's not even the muddle headed wombat.
That is the waffling wombat. That's really terrible.
And listening to the Australian people, I've got a better idea tech. Listen to engineers, because engineers will tell you if you don't drop NED zero, the system won't work.
I interviewed on my radio show an engineer who explained to me the way the grid works is the out put in the input have to just about balance, so the amount of energy being generated has to eku all the load, and the load varies, whereas with renewables it peaks early in the afternoon when there's not much load, and then the load peaks in the early evening when there's not much from renewables.
He said, you can't make it work in engineering terms.
Now I understand Chris Bowen doesn't understand that that baffles him, but somewhat in the Liberal Party's got to understand.
Well, I've got to say the deputy leader of the Liberal Party who we heard from just there, that is the worst ted talk I have ever heard in my life.
I'll tell you who does make sense.
So Chris Ullman was speaking to Peter Kredlin earlier this evening about just what a mess the energy policy is if the Liberals continue down this track of net zero, have a listen.
Unfortunately for the coalition along the way, they're going to tear themselves apart on this on a policy position, because clearly the Nationals, or the large part of the Nationals, have a different view to the Liberal Party. I assume now they'll spend the next three years fighting over this. It's from a Liberal point of you, what will be required to try, without succeeding, to hit net zero will be permanent COVID level intervention in your lifestyle. We've only just begun.
To see the tip of this iceberg.
Here's my big problem with what the Liberals are doing at the moment. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding them, but they're talking a lot about we're trying to work out why we lost the election and we're going to adjust our policies accordingly.
Now.
I may not be naive Freer, but this to me seems exactly the wrong way to go about establishing your policies. What they should be working out is not what we'll win them an election, but what's the right thing to do for the country. And so they're saying things like, well, we can't dump net zero now because having run with it since Scott Morrison introduced it as a policy, it would be inconsistent to walk away from it.
Well, if it's wrong to persist with net zero, then admit your inconsistency. Do what's right.
Another argument they've said is that well it will cast us Australia as a global pariah if we ditch net zero. Well, you know, there's plenty of nations, including the United States of America, who seem to be doing pretty well having cast aside net zero, and damn the consequences in terms of reputation. I think the Liberal Party need to search their souls, not about what's going to make them electable, what's the best thing for the country, promote and communicate.
That well and then see what happens.
But this well, what can we do to try and curry favor with people, regardless of whether we agree with it or not.
On principle, is the wrong way to go.
Policy making, according to the polls, is part of what lost the Liberals the last election. When you follow the pulses and just go what do the people want, turns out you end up valueless, You end up not standing for anything, and as soon as you get any pushback, you backflip, which makes the original policy even worse. And so the Liberals, if they do want to come back, pick a position and defend it and bring the Australian
people along with you. For some of the greatest political reforms in our country, they haven't happened because politicians looked at the polls and found that Australians wanted a GST, that they wanted serious tax reform, that they wanted to end the waste. Those things were often extremely unpopular, demanding politicians to make real decisions and cast a vision for this nation and then make the argument. And I think
that is what people are so afraid of now. They want to know people are on their side before they even put policy out there.
That's not how good politics work.
They're going to throw it a positive idea because it's easy to be negative about the LIPS because they've fallen apart and they're fraying continue to freight at the edges.
It would be fairly.
Easy to say, we can defend own nuclear policy by proposing dropping the moratorium on nuclear science as a moratorium, a ban on nuclear science in Australia and banning any type of science a silly if they say, we're not proposing that that we build half a dozen nuclear power stations, just drop the ban on nuclear science. You can justify it on the basis that it allows Australian universities to set up nuclear science departments and it allows them to
train people ready for ORCUS. Now you could put that up in the Parliament embarrassed the government, embarrassed Chris Bow and you'd have to oppose it and you'd actually get somewhere. There are positive things they could do and they ain't doing them.
They ain't doing them at all, and it's going to be a while, i think free before we find out what they're going to do, because they don't know at this point.
And the thing that no one really wants to take into account is the impact this is going to have on the Australian people. China's building two new coal fire power plants every week while we are shutting ours down and the people who will ultimately pay the price for
that are Australians. But moving on now, the AFL world has been absolutely shattered by the heartbreaking news that one of their great players at Selwood, who played eleven seasons for the West Coast Eagles, has tragically taken his life
over the weekend. He was just forty one years old. Now, suicide in and of itself is always a tragedy, but this is made even worse by the fact that his twin brother took his life just three months ago, and in researching for this I also found out that he was just one week away from doing a charity run in his brother's honor to raise money for mental health
and suicide prevention. So it is absolutely heartbreaking. Now an internal study by the AFL Players Association has found that the numbers of former players seeking mental health support has increased by twenty three percent in the last year and has doubled in the last three years. Now it is an absolute tragedy, and of course suicide no matter what
the circumstances are is tragic. But in this case, when you see two suicides in one family in such a short period of time, it really makes you wonder what more can we do to be supporting these people. And it does raise the idea that suicide can often end up as a social contagion, where if you see someone who's committed suicide in your close network, suicide then becomes more prevalent within that group of people.
We see it in.
Schools, in communities and in families as well.
You're right to say it's an absolute tragedy. The cell would family legendary in the AFL. If you don't follow the AFL, you just need to know that family, four young men, all of them absolutely champion footballers. If we can go back to the photograph we showed earlier of the funeral, Adam Selwood, who just took his life most recently, is pictured there speaking at the funeral of his twin
brother Troy, who had taken his life in February. So a lot of people are concluding there's a social contagion part to this. And Andrew bolt Out colleague wrote a brilliant article in The Herald Sun over the weekend talking about the fact that typically we don't speak about suicide at all, partly because of the social contagion issue.
We don't want it to be encouraged.
But he made the point that maybe we need to have a conversation about just the damage suicide does, and typically we don't talk about it because we're trying to spare the memory of the departed person. But Andrew Bock made a good point, what about the lives of those who are still here, who are so devastated by this, and some of whom do end up going down that same route. We need to talk about the devastating consequences of suicide, that it's not a noble way out, it's
not a brave or courageous thing to do. It has devastating consequences long after that person has gone.
There was a study done in South Korea which showed that in a family where one person who committed suicide, another person was three times more likely to commit suicide then a family that had lost someone to some other course of death accident and illness or whatever. So, in other words, it does work like a contagion. It does actually.
Trip the idea.
See there would be people for example, who would look at something like euthanasia legislation and misreaded or misunderstand it as saying, oh, well, our society has said suicide is a way to deal with the hurts of life. So we need to do two things. We need to persue. We need to help people with who are hurting, who've got the hurts of life. We need to be there
beside them. The community has to do that. That's why the AFL having a special round on this could really help if they are there and they're.
Supporting their AFL family.
And the second thing is we need to make it clear of the whole community suicide is not a solution. If life is hurting, it is really bad for you, that's terrible. We feel for you, we want to be there for you and help you, but suicide is not one of the options.
And the other interesting thing here is the AFL is starting to talk a lot more about the mental health of players. They they do have unique challenges. You've got young men who are earning an absolute fortune. They are feted as gods, but it's a pretty short career in professional sport. You know, you start as an eighteen year old. By the time you're thirty, you're washed up and then all of that adulation, all of that profile, it's gone overnight and you haven't even lived half your life.
You've got to figure out what do I do now.
It's not that surprising that many AFL players have suffered from mental health issues. So the AFL and the NRL and other sporting bodies do need to do something to help those young men. Hey, if you're struggling with mental health issues or you know someone who is, don't forget Help is only a phone call away. There's the Lifeline number on your screen, and so make use of Lifeline. They're a great organization who provide help to a lot
of people. I'll tell you what else is being promoted as a help to people, and that's medicinal cannabis, which was legalized in this country in twenty sixteen. But shocked surprise, it's being prescribed at an alarming rate. The explosion of prescriptions for legalized medicinal cannabis for things like insomnia, anxiety, and chronic pain is just quite shocking. There's data from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency that found eight doctors
had each issued ten thousand prescriptions for medicinal cannabis. In just six months, one doctor had issued seventeen thousand prescriptions. That's a prescription every four minutes, every working day for medicinal cannabis. If you think that's shocking, it gets worse. One practitioner had issued prescriptions for nine hundred and fifty nine thousand cannabis products in just one year. A nurse issued thirty one thousand prescriptions in twelve months, and on
and on it goes fray up. I understand that some people have been really helped by medicinal cannabis. There's many anecdotal stories from people saying, look, this really made a massive difference.
I was in chronic pain. It really helped me.
But there are a lot of people accessing this now legal drug. You have to start to ask is this being dispensed like Lolly's to people who really it's less about chronic pain that can't be treated any other way, and it's a way for people who want to access cannabis to do just that.
Well, some people maybe getting medicinal benefits from this scheme. I suspect others maybe getting financial benefits from these schemes. I mean, where do you find this many people to prescribe that much cannabis. To one pharmacist is prescribing over two six hundred doses a day. I can't imagine that they're seeing two six hundred people a day. That would be physically impossible. Well, yet they're prescribing all of this. So it does make you wonder what's going on here.
But my deeper question is how are they no restrictions around the number of prescriptions.
You can order?
Because I presume this stuff is all tracked, and if someone is prescribing thousands of doses of cannabis per day, surely that should raise some alarm bells.
Kel Oh, yes it should, And there is a doseyge gissue involved here. When it was first proposed, I interviewed on radio a psychiatrist who'd worked with legalized cannabis in New Zealand and he was advocating it here, and I said, do people get high on legalized on medicinal cannabis and he said they shouldn't. If you get the right dose, it should have a calming effect, it should treat seizures
or whatever the problem is, but you should not get high. Now, my worry is the people who are prescribed prescribing it aren't using the right There are different types, by the way, there are some types of medicinal cannabis which feature CB and others which feature THHD. THHD is the one that can get you high, but not if the dosage is right. CBD almost never will. So you almost need to say, okay, we're going to license particular doctors and they will have
to do training. They will have to be specialists in medicinal cannabis so they understand appropriate dosages for each individual person. If they're doing if they're doing a script every four minutes, they're not looking at the patient.
And part of the problem problem is telehealth, right, so a lot of yes, medicinal cannabis is.
Being prescribed over the phone by a medical practitioner that the client has never met personally, a phone call that lasts a matter of minutes. So things like how could you possibly you don't even.
Know things like their body weight and that kind of thing which will make decisions, will help you make decisions about the correct dosage. So it's obviously being done in the wrong way, and there must be a medical way, in a legal way to say, okay, do a specialist training thing it's weekend training and you learn how to do the dosage and those people and only those people are allowed to prescribe, and you've got to go there.
You can't do it on the telephone.
You're right the thin edge of the wedge of course with this.
And we've seen members of the cannabis party elected to state governments. We've got the Greens pushing continually for the legalization of cannabis just generally to the community, and this will be seen as an argument in favor of that. With the prevalence of medicinal cannabis, so one thing will lead to the other.
Except in California, where they've had a cannabis freely available as a recreational drug for a long time, the increase in paranoia has been enormous. It does cause psychiatric problems. So we can't go down that route. We have to make sure that's blocked off.
Tell you, walking around the CBD in Melbourne as I have recently, and the number of people who very clearly have got mental health issues or who are on some kind of substance wandering around the last thing we do. I know we're talking about medicinalnabis, but it's only matter of time until the push for just a broader legalization will take it and.
It makes its way into the system.
And I remember in school, by about age fourteen year nine kids had already started doing marijuana and you could see the decline. And once you start doing marijuana, funnily enough, the high ways off. It's not as strong and you move on to stronger and stronger drugs. It's a really slippery slope for us to go down.
And being in the media, I have worked with people who've had very colorful younger years in which they got into what we might call the medicine cabinet quite heavily.
And I know from working with these people.
That there are some dead brain cells in there that should not be dead. But can I take us to a different level of government that we don't talk about nearly enough.
Local government.
They should be interested in rates and roads and rubbish important things like that. But one of the things that local governments like to do is they set up what are called sister city programs or twin city programs. Quite often a town or a city will set up a sister city twin city program a city on the other side of the world in a very interesting place so they can have tax tax funded, ratepayer funded holidays. Oh no, sorry, working trips to those interesting places. But in the Borough
of Brent in London, they've done something quite different. They've decided to become a twin city with Nablus. Nablus is a city whose local government is dominated by Hamas, a registered terrorist organization, so they've just one of their local council members, a labor member, idasham Afsal, suggested to the council, which is a labor dominated council, we should twin city with this Nublus because there'd be a really good idea. By the way, it's in the West Bank, it's not
in Gaza. Hamas is still powerful and influential outside of Gaza. They simply haven't worked out what this means and what kind of signal it's sending. I wonder if in Brent there are any Jewish citizens, any Jewish ratepayers, and whether they were consulted by the Barra Council before they decided to twin up with a Hamas controlled city.
The fifteen council members in this West Bank city are members of Hamas.
So it's absolutely outrageous.
That a British local government would nominate them as a sister city or as a twinning city. And this was promoted by a council member who describes himself on social media as a Pakistani Muslim. He was wearing a cafif as he spoke to council and he said that the reason for twinning with this city in the West Bank was and I quote, to allow children living under Israeli occupation a better future, so Fara. It's pretty clear from
his own confession a couple of things. Firstly, this British councilor, by his own social media doesn't see himself first and foremost as British. He promotes himself as a Pakistani Muslim. Now there's nothing wrong with being Pakistani, there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim.
But if you're a.
British local government counselor and you see yourself as something other than British first, that's a problem. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, just recently talked about the problem we've got in the UK is we've become a quote.
Unquote island of strangers. That's a problem.
The second problem with this is not only does he not see himself first as British, but he says the reason the motivation for having a city in the West Bank as a twinning city is so that children quote living under Israeli occupation can blah blah blah blah blah. Clearly this is highly political. He's pushing a cause rather than doing something to benefit his local ratepayers who gave him the platform to speak in the first place.
This is my problem with local government.
It's full of wannabes, people who ah, no, I'm far too good to rubbish about Rhodes rates and rubbish I.
Want to change the world.
Well, if you're that good, run for the prime minister ship, run for federal parliament. Don't use rate payer money in a local borough or a local council somewhere here in Australia for instance, to push policies and things that are way beyond your pay grade.
Well over ten councils in the UK and now twin cities with cities in the West Bank or Gaza, so it's like a bit of a fad over there. They must think it's really cool. But the most ridiculous part of this story is the councilor who pushed for the twinning of the cities, said that he hopes Palestinian children can dream of a brighter future while becoming a twin city where the mayor of that city is a member of Hamas. Do you not realize that her maas are
the ones stopping children from having a bright future. As long as they hate Israelis more than they love their own people, there will never be peace, and those poor Palestinian children will never have a chance because they'll be endless cycle of war and violence. If they were serious about peace, they would be looking at real dialogue, real coming together of Israelis and Palestinians. But they're not because
this is not about peace. This is about hating Israel, which personally, I think comes down to deew hatred and that is what.
It is, plain and simple. And also keep in mind Nablus is.
Notorious for being a hotbed of terrorism. Just in the last year, the IDF recorded six thousand terror incidences in the whole West Bank. One thousand terror incidents were thwarted by Israeli security forces. This is a dangerous place. Nablus in particular, has around I think it's four refugee camps, which basically are breeding grounds for Hamas. So it's really dangerous.
So if you're a rate payer and you're listening to your local councilor say part of having a twin city with Nebulus is that we can bring young Palestinians to our borough in the UK to bond with our young people. I'm not sure that's such a great idea. One more thing before we move on. You know, there's a common feature with all these woke councils, whether they're in the UK or in Australia. You start to look at their finances and you always find they're raising their rates continually.
I don't know how rate payers put up with it. But this particular Burrow in the UK, they have just raised their rate levey to the highest permissible level.
It's an absolute outrage.
They're charging the maximum amount for people living there to pursue these internationalist policies that have nothing to do with helping locals.
And they should have They should have consulted an Australian local council Australia.
That would not have helped.
He would have.
Said, mate, mate, really bad idea twin with suv in FIGI much better beature.
Look, something weird must be going on in the UK because we have just received news that the UK and the EU appear to have agreed to the bigest reset in relations between the EU and the UK since Brexit.
Now, this is a huge deal, which.
Nigel Faraj and Brexit proponents have called a surrender summit. Kir Sama has basically backflipped on protecting Brexit and respecting the choice of Britain's to vote to leave the EU, and now he is essentially putting the UK back under European law through.
A back door.
So some of the notable features of this deal are the EU will now have access to UK fisheries for another twelve years that is three times longer than what the UK government said they would commit to. They will also bring food safety standards in line with the EU. That essentially puts the UK back under the jurisdiction of European courts. And what does the UK get in return for all of this eGate passport checks at airports, pet
passports and the ability to bid for European defense contracts. Now, Britain's voted for independence, they voted for sovereignty, they voted for democratic accountability, and Kiir Starmer appears to have signed all that away for what.
He's never queued up at an airport.
I mean, if you can get faster through the queue, you'd give up your national sovereignty, wouldn't you.
And that's the problem that this is about.
Whatever you think about Brexit, right, whether you thought it was a good idea or a bad idea, the fact remains BRIT's voted in a referendum against joining with the EU. So for Kiir Starmer, especially with his low level of support in the electorate, he's deeply unpopular. He didn't go to an election with a mandate for this to now bring the EU's control from Brussels.
But James, this is not Starmer acting alone. This is Starmer speaking for the ruling class. The ruling class in Britain never accepted brigs It. They challenged it in the courts, The bureaucracy, the civil service did all they could to slow it down and stop it from working. They've never accepted the people's decision. They've never accepted Brigsit. They've never accepted that Britain should have its own sovereignty. We should take they should all take their orders from unelected bureaucrats
in Brussels. That's been their view. He is now acting on their view. The fact that he doesn't have the support of the people doesn't matter.
The ruling classes said, this is what can I tell you.
There was an interesting study showing that over the last decade or so, Britain's trade with non EU countries has risen twenty five percent faster than trade with Europe. So there's no economic benefit in it. And in a Trump tariff world, trading outside of Europe and outside is going to be really popular, So there's no economic reason for doing this.
This is just ideological.
This is just saying we want to be in Europe, even if they are the puppet masters and we are the puppets.
This is absolute political suicide for Kirs Starmer, isn't it. Because the person who will win out of this frame, I mean you know his.
Name, don't you, Nigel for Rush.
I mean, Reform are going to absolutely benefit from this because half of labor supporters don't want to join again with the EU. So for Starma to do this, as you said, Kel, just shows how strong the globalist push is that he would do something so detrimental to his own re election chances in the name of globalization that that's how strong that urge is.
And it was that Red Wall labor heartland that pushed back the most against Brexit because they want sovereignty, they want control over their own country. They don't want to be burdened with regulations coming from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.
And Kirs Starmer has just said stuff you.
The other issue is got he just made this fine speech. I mean we were applauding Kiir Starmer. We don't do that often, but we were the other week because remember he spoke about we need to slash immigration. We don't want an island of strangers, and he committed to reducing immigration significantly.
So that's on this hand.
But now he's come out joining with the EU, which will allow pretty much unfettered access to the UK from eighteen to thirty year olds throughout Europe. So he's trying to tighten immigration on the one hand, he's opening up immigration on the other. There's all sorts of problems. I suspect he wasn't that serious when he talked about slashing immigration,
not of what he says, but what he does. We're going to go to a break now, but when we come back, we'll look at what's making headlines tomorrow, including the Albanezy government considering dropping the energy rebate. But wait until you hear what they're considering doing with that money that's coming up in just a moment. Welcome back to
the program. Let's take a look at tomorrow's headlines. As always, the Australian Newspaper's got some cracking stories on the front page, especially the one frayer about government energy policy.
Yes, apparently energy bill rebates must end. Albanese's welfare experts declare members of Anthony Albanese's Welfare Working Group are pushing labor to end it's six point eight billion dollar power bill rebates instead funneling taxpayer money into solar panels and renewable batteries for poorer Australians, reducing power prices more sustainably
and raining in the deficit. Now, I am all for cutting wasteful government spending, but I'm not sure cutting rebates to build more solar panels is going to have the desired effect, especially for poorer families, because, as I recall, we got into this mess because our grid became unstable, because we lost baseload power because we're building so many renewables, and it's leading to instability.
And power shortages very soon.
So I really don't think a cutting tangible relief for this government created crisis just to spend on creating more of a crisis is going to do anything.
They're in a massive hole, aren't they, Because if they continue with rebates, that's an admission that energy prices are not coming down, therefore we need to be subsidized. But if they don't continue with rebates, then they can't say, oh, we've done tangible things to bring down the costs that people would otherwise have faced. So through their own stupid policy, they're now.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
And what happens when the rebates come off, There'll be a sudden bump in inflation, and we know what's going to happen, then that will be the So we're told we're going to get a rate cut tomorrow. That's nice if it happens, but the rate cuts will end if the rebates come off and inflation bounces up.
But this idea that they can scrap the rebates to buy more solar powers and batteries for poorer peace people is just it's doubling down on.
Stupid exactly to just make the situation worse.
Now.
Also in the Australian six year old viewing pawn school principles say, based on schoolwork, children as young as six appear to be accessing online pornography and young female teachers increasingly subjected to sexual innuendos. This is truly shocking but kind of unsurprising in the digital age that we're living in. I think the average age of exposure to pornography is around ten or eleven years old.
It's speed there for a while, and those kids have got their own devices. When I looked at this, I'm a grandpa. One of my grand grandsons is six years old. I couldn't work out how it happened. I mean, with the six year old, you always see the screen they're looking at. There's a parent or a grand bearer or someone who sees the screen. And they play computer games, you know, they can race the cars or whatever, or they now do things like reading eggs which help them
learn to read. How a six year old gets on to pornography is something I do not understand.
If they see.
It, it's going to frighten them and confuse them and damage them. So it's really important this stops if it's happening, But I just don't understand how it's happening.
The problem is a lot of parents don't adequately supervise their children when they're on screens because it's so much easier to just give your kid an iPad and send them away than it is to actively parent. And then pornography finds children. That's the other thing. You'll get ads, you'll get pop ups, and kids are curious, they might just click things, and then before you know it, you're rubbing a child of innocence.
It's really sad.
The reason you give your kid a screen is so you don't have to supervise them.
Kel a six year old? What's that? Grade two?
Grade one?
Grade one in primary skills?
And the other interesting part of this article is young female teachers being sexualized by students even in primary school. It's a pretty shocking story and a reminder that parents really do need to take responsibility for their kids. Let's have a look at the front page of tomorrow's Herald Sun.
Milk dry reads.
The headline drought ravaged farmers sending perfectly good dairy cows to slaughter amid hay crisis, with a protest to hit the CBD. The article reads that drought stricken Victorian farmers are being forced to send, as I said, thousands of perfectly good milking cows to slaughter and transport similar numbers of beef cattle into state, with warnings the cost of dairy and meat products could soar. Hay supplies are dwindling and farmers are facing huge increases in the price of bales.
Many are struggling to even feed their animals, and livestock agents say it's so bad that abattoirs are battling to keep up with the demand to slaughter dairy cows as a massive rally plan for outside Parliament tomorrow.
You know, you really feel for.
Farmers kel because they get hit on every side, whether it's wind turb being erected on their properties without them having much opportunity to complain, whether in Victoria it's levees being forced on farmers to pay for the rural Fire Brigade because the state government has got themselves into so much debt. They just get hit on every side, whether it's indigenous heritage laws as we saw in Western Australia, that caused a massive problem for people in rural communities.
And that's before we talk about drought.
That's right, And I hadn't even heard about this until the weekend when I came across the story. This drought is huge, stretches from a Victoria across into South Australia.
So it's having a massive impact.
And you're quite right about the demonstration of Parliament House tomorrow when the budget is well. There's an Act of Parliament that's been brought down which will impose what's called
a fire levy on them. It's a tax on them and basically the firefighters Union wanted to unionize everyone, including the volunteers who did it fun nothing, so there's now not as many volunteers, more people being paid, it costs more, and the state government, the dreadful Brax government, is coming up with this notion that will just tax the farmers
more because that's the place where the bushfires are. Everything is happening to them and it matters because what the farmers produce is what you eat, so this is actually vital to Australia's life.
It'd be interesting to see what Sinta Allen does because she's backflipped on so many policies trying to make herself electable.
For she keeps making noises like this is locked in, doesn't she?
She does.
But she's flipped on a whole lot of things. And I'll tell you what she'd want to flip on this because farmers in Victoria are furious.
Now.
On the front page of the Daily Telegraph tomorrow, one of the headlines is the kind of thing that sub editors love, drawing up a slight play on words, war and preach is the headline of the story. The story says a Western Sydney Islamic preacher claims court action against him over his allegedly anti Semitic comments. Is about the Jewish lobby wanting to destroy Islam, and he says a
religious conflict is currently gripping our city. I can't think of anything sader and somehow, or rather you think, one of the roles that our federal government has got is to set the tone for our society, so our society is less divisive and more cohesive.
And it hasn't been that way for the last few years. As a James, it.
Certainly has not. Kill it certainly hasn't.
Now this is a bit of a wild one coming from the advertiser. Dead sea like a plot from a Hollywood horror movie. Marine creatures are hemorrhaging, behaving erratically and being suffocated by the algal bloom off the South Australian coast, which is only.
Expected to worsen.
The dire situation, described as a bushfire in the ocean, caused in part by sea temperature's two point five degrees higher than you comes as an expert describes the dangers posed by the bloom as the most alarming marine event in South Australia's history. Environment Minister Susan Close also says dead sea life, including sharks, have a pinkish tinge from hemorrhaging. That is just I mean, I'm kind of speech.
It's a weird story, isn't it.
It's weird, but it's incredibly sad for the wildlife.
It's not well, I mean, it's a dead shark. That's sad. I'll get in trouble for that. I recently right how they're taking care of the show.
Some of the They've got a serious story here.
But I've got to say the way that the way they frame from of their pictures is odd. Next to the picture of the.
Sting rays, it says deranged stingrays and I've.
Got no idea how they worked out the sting rays out a mental health problem.
I'll tell you what is it?
A great front page though, it's it's worth the having a look at the advertiser tomorrow just for that front page and the photographs they've got there. We're going to go to a break when we come back. Football fans rushing to join the NRL's latest team mistakenly buy memberships in a.
Very different kind of club. We'll tell you about that just the moment.
Well, if you're a rugby league fan, you'd be aware that the NRL have announced, to great fanfare, a brand new franchise beginning in twenty twenty seven in the city of Perth.
It'll be called the Perth Bears.
Now, as I said, they don't start playing until twenty twenty seven, but already people are pretty excited and wanting memberships for this new franchise. They're expecting about thirty thousand people to become members, so people from all around Australia have gone online to join.
The Perth Bears. There's just one problem.
There's another club in Perth called not the Perth Bears, but the Bears Perth and the Bears Perth, well they're not an NRL club, they're a gay club. And so people have mistakenly been buying memberships in the gay club thinking they were joining a football team. Here's the Perth the Bears Perth president gay club president on two GB radio explaining the mistake.
It's been weird because we got like fifteen or twenty membership applicants from our state, which we hardly ever get stuff from our state, right, so we got all these memberships and then we have to call them up and say, you do realize we are not the rugby club.
You've got another add online for the Bears big pool party. I imagine getting some of the rugby league players to drop in for a deep.
Well, yes, feel free to give any of them my phone number.
Oh what a shock you would get.
You think you're joining the NRL team kel and it's a very different kind of team.
Yes, there'd be some people might get a surprise having taken out membership after the very first Perth Bears game they go there for a drink.
That might be a bit surprising, mind you.
It also means the gay meta Perth now know which code of football they have to follow and which team they have to support.
There is that kel, there is that to add to the confusion.
Of course, the gay club is located right next to a major sport arena as well, so you can understand a bit of the confusion. But people are being refunded they're mistaken membership.
So funny.
Now a range of parking spaces in the Sydney CBD have sold at auction for more than what many Australians would pay for an entire home. These parking spaces have sold for six hundred and eight thousand dollars per space. Now there were six spaces up for grabs that totaled three point sixty five million dollars in car park sales.
Now, I know Sydney is expensive.
As a recent first home buy I looked at some interesting properties just to get my foot on the property ladder. But a car park would seem to be I mean that might be what first home buyers are going for these days.
Picture tens warm dry. Why not?
Well, the demand was incredible, had ninety two inquiries, sixteen inspections, truck workout imagine inspecting a car parking space. We can spect. I mean, how different can they be?
But they had thirty bids before they finally sold at what was it, three point six five million dollars for eight spaces, just over eight hundred grand space.
It's amazing.
Mind you, there would be, as fray I suggested, there would be the odd person who says, I'm going to.
Install a bathroom, but move in.
We've seen those programs on television where they do the tiny houses, and you know how much they can get in a really tiny space. So for six hundred thousand dollars, put in the bathroom, move in.
If you want to know how much of a premium these things are. Prior to this sale, the highest priced parking space in Sydney. Bear in mind these have just been sold for six hundred and eight grand. Previous highest price was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was steel It parking spaces in Sydney. You can't go wrong. Well, that's all we've got time for tonight. Thanks for your company, stick around. Coming up in just a moment is the reader Penety Show.
Good Night