Lewens General, Welcome to the Late Debate.
Good evening and welcome to the program. I'm Caleb Bond with freyer Leitch and Liz Storer.
Coming up in the.
Program, a third of UNI students are being admitted with special dispensation for some problem or another. We'll tell you what they are and why a little later in the show. In the papers, one state is scrapping its renewable energy targets. Will tell you who that is. And the former foreign prime minister who's been attacked by an ostretch will show
you the vision a little later. But of course, the big story of the evening is the Sky News Daily Telegraph People's Forum, which was broadcast right here just a few hours ago. We know that the winner of that debate, though not by a majority, was the Prime Minister Anthony Alberanzi. The numbers were forty four percent of attendees these are undecided voters when they walk into the room saying that
they thought Alberizi had won. It was thirty five percent for d and twenty one percent said they were undecided. Here's a few of the questions that were asked tonight. How are we going to cope with the Trump pandemic that we're going through right now.
I was wondering, if we're getting any sort of funding towards public education in the near future.
How will those universities pick up the shortfall?
And will will my son's unifees increase?
Our taxes are going towards the funding of weaponry, eating the onslaught on the innocent people of Gaza.
What are you doing to stop this primement asay opposition lead.
And what you're going to do for some of our all sort of areas like Tamil.
Do we want to increase Medicare funding so we want to have to bear a strug up fee?
What will you do to ensure migration discussions remain respectful and avoid demonizing migrants?
Now, look, I thought largely this was a who hum sort of debate. No one made any major mistakes, nor did anyone have any great wins, and that probably is reflected in the twenty one percent who walked out of that room still undecided on.
Who they would vote for.
They hit the points that they ought to hit, but you didn't particularly get a feeling that anyone was landing major blows in this debate. Probably the best performance I've seen from Peter Dutton thus far, as Andrew Clonel said earlier this evening here on skytes the best he's seen, and if he still couldn't win that it gives some indication of how much trouble he and the Liberal Party
in the coalition may well be in. I do think one of his strongest moments of the night, though, was when he went back to someone who'd asked a question about Medicare to ask, well, when you go to the doctor are you just using that Medicare card that Anthony Albanezi keeps waving around?
Can I just ask, please? It's a great question, but can I just ask what's your experience? So when you go to the doctor that you talk about with the gap fee, do you have to use your just your Medicare card or do you have to use your credit card as well?
Sport because billing doesn't cover the full chance I have.
To pay something.
But plead you tried when you were the healthman stuff you tried to abolish folk billing by having a fee every time people visit a doctor.
I mean you'd have to say, Liz, on the basis of the numbers that came out of there, tonight, they're really pushing it uphill the coalition at this point. I thought it was a great performance from Dutton, albeit not a stiller one, but it was certainly better than we'd seen on the campaign.
Trail thus far.
And Albinisi, I don't think, really brought his a game. He was just sort of meandering through the points that he walked into the room with.
Doesn't fill you with a great deal of confidence.
No it doesn't.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling profoundly under welmed. I mean, look, nobody with a single firing neuron actually thinks the Libs can win this thing. Flipping twenty three seats is you know that would take an absolute act of God. But I think watching this debate for many people, and as you said, it's reflected in the undercided voters still leaving the debate.
I think Clive Palmer.
Hit it on the head in the ad that I saw tonight, being like, this is the UNI Party. I mean, other than cheaper petrol and some new clear what is the differences that these two major parties are taking to the election.
Can you imagine if Trump ran against the Dems.
With this new policies, strong, well articulated policies that set.
Him apart from the Dems.
Goodness knows what the outcome would have been. People are hungry for change. Dutts and the Libs had a great opportunity to actually just put the pedal to the metal, being like, look, we're not going to flip twenty three seats, but let's go our hardest, let's put the biggest dent in it that we possibly can.
But I think more and more Australians instead.
Are waking up to the fact that there's very little points of difference, especially on the issues that we bang on about every single night.
They know it was the Libs that created.
The e Safety Commission, the supported restrictions on.
Free speech in other legislation.
They know this is the party that oversaw the burning dumpster fire that was the pandemic response. They haven't done anything about men in women's sports.
They refuse to leave the Paris Accords.
Even though with Trump with America pulling out of them, they're completely useless. People are hankering to see this widening gap between the two major parties that makes it clear all right on these issues. That's where these guys get my vote. That's where I'm putting it instead.
All I'm seeing.
Across socials, especially because that's where you see feedback in real time from just the average punter on the street who are going to be going to the polling box, is saying, what's the difference, I'm voting independent, I'm voting independent. That seems to be popping up everywhere, and never more so then directly after this debate.
And it reflects, of course, when you look at the primary vote for the parties, because if you look at the latest News poll, which of course showed that Labor was back fifty two forty eight a two party preferred, it wasn't because of a great surge in the labor vote. It was because one percent had been wiped off the coalition's primary vote. So the primary vote is collapsing for
the major parties. And I know you've been campaigning with the Libs Pray, so you've got a bit of a view from the inside about how all this is going.
Do the numbers tonight worry you?
I think, Look, I think Dutton did well tonight and I think that is his to be commended for that. Also, his father had a health episode right before coming out, and I thought Dutton did a really good job at not being baited by Alban easy, not coming across as to sort of domineering or hardline. He's really had to work hard at trying to soften his image a bit, and I think he did well at that aspect of
the debate. One of the things that disappointed me about the debate, and particularly the questions that were asked, was just how shallow there they were. There was nothing about
long term reform. There was nothing about how we're going to pay down the debt, how are we going to reign in government spending, how are we going to actually fix cost of living beyond a tiny tax cut or twelve months of fuel excise relief, nothing around that, And I just thought, if this is the state of political debate in Australia where we're just worried about, you know, my bits of funding for this and that and my
you know backyard. That stuff's all important, but there was there was really very little in the.
Way of long term vision.
And so I think Dutton can still win this election one hundred percent. He still can, but it will take him inspiring a new vision for Australia, something that is bold. That is different, and I think he has it in him. He showed during the voice he can be bold, he can be courageous.
He's just got to tap.
Back into that and then I think there is a really good shot for the Liberals this election.
They certainly need something.
And you mentioned talk about debt and deficit and all these kinds of things. Dutton did hit on it briefly. He pointed out that Albanezi has been the highest spending prime minister since Whitlam, but Albo falsely claimed that. In fact, no, it was the Liberal Party that did that during COVID.
Take a look, are you the biggest spending government since Whitlam so forty years? In forty years, there has not been a higher spending government than your government. Is that correct?
Well, that's not true, except for the one that you were a part of. Jeria's course, it's true, and it's also true. It's also true that there was a seventy eight billion dollar deficit.
Well, hold tight, because we have a story on the front of The Australian a little later that dispel all of that. But I suppose it's indicative of the fact that it just seems to have dropped off the agenda as an issue now. I mean, you know, we're hurtling towards trillion dollars of debt in the next financial year. And that wasn't really the headline that came out of the budget, was it. It's that you'll get a measly five dollars a week tax cut. It's almost like it's
disappeared from the public consciousness. And of course it was something that was so strong for the Libs for a long time that almost seemingly they can't fight on anymore.
No, and neither of them are talking about any kind of reduction in government spending, which we know is what drives inflation, which we know is what's killing us all right now. Not one of them is like, oh, okay, kids, time to pull our socks up tight now, belts. Things are going to be tricky for a while, but we're doing this for your children's children, so they won't be paying down a ginormous debt. Not one of them has said a word about that, And it's just another day
in government, isn't it. I guess they all know, as Milton Freeman said, we're the ones responsible for the ridiculous government spending because we incentivize them to keep promising us all these freebies in the lead up to an election. We all know winning election doesn't come cheap. You've got to make all the promises that people want to hear. Now, whether you deliver on them or not is a whole
nother thing once you actually get into power. We're all still waiting for that two hundred and seventy five dollars.
Of our power bills.
But before he went to the debate and I Prime Minister Alban Easy was doing a presser in Ashfield, Sydney on the campaign trail when he was accosted by this climate protester.
When it came to working from home and the sacking of forty one thousand public services.
He's getting elected.
And the Prince.
And I haven't been.
Her name is Alexis Stewart, and I don't know about you, but it breaks my heart to see that young woman.
Who's clearly a true believer in.
The climate change narrative that has no doubt been fed to her from a very young age. Indeed, here she was later talking to reporters saying that she's suffered from climate anxiety since she was fifteen.
I have experienced eco anxiety since I have been fifteen. I am worried that my future will be full of increased floods, fires, famines and drought.
And I know that the number one driver of that.
Is the continued approval of new coal and gas projects.
Is it any wonder?
According to a youth mental health organization here in Australia by the name of Origin, last month they released.
Some research which showed that sixty.
Seven percent of the youth of today in Australia are saying that this climate change narrative is having a very negative effect on their mental health. Gen zas are the fruits of the left's labor. When it comes to the fact that they have been taught this from a very young age, they are facing imminent doom.
And when we.
Put this together with how prevalent we know anxiety already is, depression already is in these younger generations, is it any wonder that for many young people like Alexis Stewart there this is a very real and terrifying reality. And of course, as we've discussed before, Freyer, absolutely nobody is being held to account for the fact that these guys are suffering due to having been indoctrinated in to this climate cult.
Yeah.
Well, I also saw some pretty scary statistics that forty three percent of young Australians between sixteen and twenty five were hesitant to have children because of climate change. And when you make those kinds of decisions, they live with you for the rest of your life. So if you put off having kids when you're young, that's it. You're done.
And to think that people like their whole lives are being determined by these narratives that they've been taught, it's very sad and it is no wonder Like I went through the education system recently, went through university, and the sense of doom and despair is palpable. Palpable on the climate change front, but also more broadly, there is a sense that the West is in decline, that where the first generation that will be worse off than our parents. That is all very real, but I think our leaders
have to step up and go. You were right to be concerned. The world is uncertain. It is a scary place, but human beings have always innovated our way out of crises.
In the early.
Nineteen hundreds, everyone thought London would be covered in horse manure because everyone was driving horses and carriages, and where was all all the pooh gonna go? Well, guess what, We invented cars, And you know, people are scared of emissions, of course, but we've invented nuclear and clean energy, and there are a whole bunch of other innovations that are
now overcoming these problems. But it's the lack of optimism in humanity that I think is just so sad, and that bears itself out in climate change, but also in a whole range of other areas. And I think we've really let our young people down.
There's a number of things that play here. One I think everyone who educated this woman ought to be put in the gulag. I mean, and we should know, we should point out out, we should point out she rocked up to a presser that ALBERANIZI was giving to announce a billion dollars of funding for mental health.
And so the point she was making.
Is the reason my mental health is so bad and the mental health of other young people in Australia as well, is because we have this existential dread and crisis over the future of the world that we are expected to live in. Well, it's nonsense. I mean, the world's not going to blow up tomorrow. She's not mentally ill or experiencing any form of mental illness because the world is going to end. She's experiencing dread and eco anxiety, as she calls it, because people have put that in her brain.
People have convinced her that she should be anxious. She's not actually anxious because she's looked at the world. She's anxious because people have convinced her that.
She ought to be.
And the people who are pushing this stuff on kids should hang their heads in shame. Take a good look at yourself in the mirror and consider what you are doing to young people. You are sapping them of their will to live. I mean, these are the young people of tomorrow who could actually go out and achieve the advancement of the human race. And until this point, that is what we have always driven to do to advance
the human race. We had the Industrial Revolution. At every point in our existence, we have tried to move forward. And for the first time in history, we're reaching a point where we're actually regressing, and we're willingly regressing because we are being told we have to regress in order to save the planet. It's just not how it works. We are an adaptable species. I mean, are you telling me that if the planet goes up another two percent that we won't find a way to live with it.
Of course, we will find a way to live with it. But of course, the other thing you have to consider in all of this is that it's about the destruction of the capitalist system. And so if you convince people that the world is going to end if we keep advancing humanity, and of course humanity has been advanced through business and the capitalist system, well we better dismantle the
capitalist system. It all plays in together, and what you end up with in the end, all these young people who just can't hack the world they're living in because they're told they're.
Going to die, they are the victims. Gen Z in particular are the victims.
Goodness knows what kids today now coming up through whichever gen that is coming up through Alpha.
They're being taught this.
As young as jolly pre school because we have these lefty activists in our educational system and there seems to be no rooting.
Them out, and certainly no political will to do.
So anyway, and they don't have the brain capacity, particularly primary school age children to understand these massive concepts that are being put in front of them that the world is going to end.
And any wonder then that people like Violet Coco and many others who when they're finally bought before a court of law because you know, you've held up the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
You can't do that.
People just trying to go about their lawful business. They get let off with a slap on the risk. Why because of climate anxiety.
As Pink Floyd once saying, we don't need no education, we don't need no thought control. All in all, just another brick in the wall. And so it goes as well when we.
Talk about universities.
I mean this stuff is just going on in primary and high schools, etc. It's going on in the universities as well. And we don't have record numbers of people being admitted to universities with special dispensation for problems such as divorce, disability, and poverty.
A third of all university.
Students are now being admitted with some sort of special dispensation. Now there's been a large increase because in twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, there was this system brought in where they take into account your postcode and the school you went to, so you would be able to get further up the queue if you perhaps came from an area with a lower socioeconomic background.
That accounts for some of it.
But there's been a forty two percent increase in people getting into university with a special requirement because of a disability or a medical condition, or what they call family disruption, which comes in the form of a death in the family, or domestic violence or divorce, or they say they're going
through financial woes. So you get an extra chance or an extra shot to go into university above someone else who perhaps hasn't had their parents divorce, or perhaps doesn't have a disability, etc. Or isn't struggling with money right now, or happened to be born in a suburb that had a higher socioeconomic background than yours. A third of all university entrants now fall into that category. And I think there's two points here. We are continually afraid at getting
people into university. You probably shouldn't be there in the first place. We just say come one, come more. We don't care, and the unis don't care because they get your money once you sign up. I think you've just got to be there for a year and then if you drop out, it doesn't matter. They still get your
funding anyway, so they don't particularly give a toss. But surely you're then sending a bunch of people perhaps ant up to the job and then will eventually discover that they're not really cut out for UNI and they've wasted one or two or three or four years of their lives getting there, and then they've got to go and find something else to do.
Well, that's exactly the problem, because our universities in Australia have turned into multi billion dollar corporations and for them to keep expanding and keep climbing the global rankings, they need to keep growing. And so how do you do that, Well, you recruit more students. So it's actually in the university's interest to open up access to university, whether or not it is in the interests of those students to actually
attain a university degree. And the problem is it's actually these children, these kids that are being admitted to university with a lower ATA score than is required, are being put into an environment where they are already at a disadvantage. Because if you haven't attained the ATA, Chances are you will struggle to keep up with the curriculum, with the academic rigor that's required to complete the degree, and at the very least you're going to be behind the rest
of your peers in your degree. And what this actually does is it sets the kids up for failure. So if you look at kids entering university, those who had an ATAR ninety five and above, the dropout rate was only four percent. If you had an ATAR below seventy seventy is the average. So if you have a below average ETAR, around one third of those students are dropping out. Now dropout rates across the board are around twenty five percent.
Now that is terrible for the students because they finish without a degree and with a whole bunch of debt and having lost years of their lives.
But who wins from that the universities. And so this is the problem we're in.
How do we actually refocus universities on not just being huge profit making juggernauts and actually serving the interests of one our nation and two the Australian public they're supposedly here to serve.
And the fact that they've ordered down the academic standards in order to allow more students in simply because oh, well, you've qualified for being at some sort of disadvantage.
Just means how are these kids going to do even if.
They did graduate, How are they going to do if they've been modelly, model goddled.
Through their entire degree?
And I witnessed that when I was at you said, just three years ago, people doing the same degree as me, a jurist doctor. It was one of the most intensive courses I've certainly ever done. They were struggling, some of them couldn't read properly, but they were being mollycoddled by the system.
And I'm thinking, how.
On earth are you going to be a lawyer, much less a good one if you have trouble reading? Come on, where is just the practical set in this?
Now?
When this made the news today that one in three of we're talking over one point six million university students. So when we say one in three, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of kids availing themselves.
Of these.
I'm at a disadvantage points in order to get into UNI. Kim Paino, the University Admissions Center managing director, explain this away by saying, oh, this reflects a combination of factors, increased awareness of the scheme, more accurate diagnosis of neurodivergent conditions like ADHD and ASD, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. More students are now increasingly confident in seeking support, and it's critical they know that higher education remains firmly
within reach regardless of their circumstances. But like you say, Freyer, maybe it shouldn't be within reach. Maybe we are doing these kids a disservers. And in the line term, any society that isn't built on a hierarchy of competence, you are inviting complete chaos. So it doesn't matter whether these kids are trying to be lawyers or they're trying to be social workers or whatever. The course, the path that they've chosen to take is how are they going to go in the workforce?
Or mss Pain, whether she knows it or not, has pointed out one of the large.
Problems here when she says, you.
Know, we've now got accurate diagnoses of neurodivergent conditions like ADHD. I mean, every man and his dog and his dog's cousin's brother now has ADHD alleged, right, And these are the things that they're using to say, well, I need to be at an advantage because I'm at a disadvantage in order to get into university. And ADHD is very different in some people to what it is in other people. I mean, you know, I went to school with kids you absolutely say we're ADHD. Like they were bouncing off
the walls, disrupt in the class all the time. They couldn't get their school work done.
They had a problem.
But now you walk into a psych's office and you sort of fit it with your leg a bit too.
Much, and they'll tell you you've got ADHD.
I mean, all of a sudden, you're in university with a lower ATAR than you ought to be in there with.
This is a big problem, I think, Liz.
It absolutely is.
And this is one that psychiatrist Pat McGrory has talked about in today's paper. He says the uncertainty around this boundary that is qualifying to be ADHD explains the variation as ADHD traits overlap with a lot of typical thinking and behavior. Almost everyone can qualify to some extent. The criteria for diagnosis includes such things as poor time management, losing things, being forgetful, or easily distracted and disliking tasks like schoolwork or homework.
Guys, I think I've just realized I have a HDD.
Me too, My goodness, self.
Jokes to one side.
The latest PBS data shows that there's over a million ossies supposedly with ADHD. But get this, the number of ossies on ADHD medications surged by almost three hundred percent in the last ten years. The real question we need to be asking is why, where the heck has.
This come from?
Prescriptions more than doubled between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three.
Those are the COVID years. I wonder why was it?
Because a lot of really healthy people were locked up in their homes like animals, left with nothing but the thoughts in their head, and started self diagnosing themselves. Because there's a big relationship between ADHD and anxiety and depression. If you extend that data back to twenty and thirteen, we're talking about a four hundred and ninety six percent
increase in adult prescriptions for ADHD in Australia alone. This is a pandemic of ADHD prescriptions and a lot of people now on these medications and nobody I'm aware of is doing any research to ask the basic question of why you saw a four hundred and ninety six percent increase over the last ten years, and you're not curious about what the heck is going on.
It's negligent.
It is absolutely crazy.
And if you think about the impact on productivity of all of these people suddenly self diagnosing with ADHD and then excusing behaviors that are symptomatic of ADHD that we in maybe past years, we'd just call ill discipline or laziness or disorganization. Now, all of a sudden, you can pathologize it, and it's not your fault, it's someone else's fault, and you can just get on drugs to fix it without actually fixing your own personal will or basically absolving
yourself of responsibility. I just think this is ridiculous, and this is part of the broadest shift we've seen in our society where everything has to have a name, everything has to have a medical diagnosis. I mean, it's crazy. The fact that ten percent of almost ten percent of five to seven year old children are on the ndis for example, ten percent, ten percent of children should not be disabled like that is a terrible, terrible outcome and so I think we have to You're exactly right, Liz.
We have to ask, well, why is this happening? Sure, there is there has been a destigmatization of mental health, and that's a good thing. It is good that more people are seeking help and dealing with things that in days gone past would have been brushed under the pushed
under a carpet. But then I think we also have to address the environmental factors that could be leading to this huge increase, because you don't suddenly get a generation whose brains have completely rewired themselves and literally stopped working. That doesn't just happen miraculously over one decade.
There has to be something that's going on here.
And so I think we have to be looking at screens, how we're parenting children, what's going on in our schools, the diets, exercise, like, there are so many factors that go into this.
Caleb, Yeah, And I mean it's social contagion to some degree. You've got the element of self diagnosis. People see, you know, things like Patrick gor Is talking about, oh, you know, I forget my keys all the time.
Oh geez, I think I might have ADHD.
And then they go and shop for a doctor who will give them the official diagnosis and then hey, presto, you've got ADHD. And this goes on to some degree with autism as well, because when you're talking about children, of course, the is funding attached for schools and other outfits for children who were diagnosed with autism or ADHD. Not in the case of ADHD, but certainly in the
case of autism. You get on the NDAs you get funding right, and so parents will go and push sykes to say, well, my kid deserves the day, needs the diagnosis. You've got to give in the diagnosis, and they'll cut crook if a doctor actually says, well, no, I don't think your kid qualifies, and then they'll go to someone else who will give it to them. These things have been so overblown and there is taxpayers money tied up
in all of it. There was a story not that long ago where the largest the schools sorry, where the largest number of students were getting special requirements in their exams were not as you would suspect maybe lower socioeconomic schools. They were schools in higher socioeconomic areas, particularly private schools. So this might be things like you get an extra ten minutes in your exam or you get to do it on a computer instead of writing with a pen.
Special requirements that you get given because apparently you've got something that means you needed. It's going on mostly in higher socioeconomic and private schools because they've worked out how to game the system. Oh this kid's got adhd well, they can be at an advantage. Now that's going on, and that's what needs to be stopped. Now another council story. I know it's yet another night on the Late debate, isn't it when I've got a negative council story for you?
But here is one. We'll go down to Victoria tonight. Melbourne Merrybeck Council, the council with a made up name, and yes that is true. You may well remember when they changed their name to Mery Beck because it was allegedly an indigenous name. A local indigenous elder came out and said, no, we've never heard of Mary Beck in the language. But so woke they are that they've got their fake indigenous name that they're now going to paint Pride flags on footpaths and on streets.
This is going to the council this week to be endorsed.
They've got eight places where they say they potentially want to do this. It's going to cost them forty five grand to put some colorful paint in eight places on the road and the footpath.
Number one.
We don't need Pride flags on the road anyway, or the foot bath. I thought the point of the foot bath was to put my feet on it, and the point of the road was to put my car on it. I would have thought it was rather insulting to trample on a flag or drive over a flag. I'm not sure why that's the place you'd want to put it in the first place.
They're going to.
Spend five grand on public consultation, so they've already decided the eight places where they think they're going to do it. But they could have just been five grand asking people whether they should put them there in the first place.
Why do councils do their stuff.
I mean, you want to talk about painting on the roads for forty five grand, how about finding some potholes.
Just go and fill the potholes in right.
There's so many other things you could be doing with roads instead of painting gay.
Flag the well.
Apparently there's no cost of living crisis in Merribeck Council. If you think that this is a good use of forty five thousand dollars, get this though, the size of these flags will be large enough to stretch across entire intersections, measuring an estimated eight meters in length and four meters Why these things are going to be absolutely ginormous jokes on me because I laugh every time I go to Wavery Council, which is Bondi way here in Sydney. They've
got a ginormous rainbow around their council building. You have to step or drive over it in order to get into the council chambers.
And I've always thought that this is just as ridiculous as the racism not welcome.
He assigns that councils have also spent tens of thousands of dollars on because again, why are you infering that people in your patch are racists?
Why are you infering that they're bigoted?
That you need to have these massive, grandiose signs and displays of these kinds of people are welcome here. If you're a man that sleeps with men, you are welcome here. What in God's name is going on that this has become a trend. Now, how about we just say everyone's welcome everywhere.
We are one, but we are many. This is Australia.
We're a melting pot of races creeds from all.
Over the world.
And yes that includes any gender identities.
And it just goes without saying.
But now, Freyer, we've created this culture in which, unless you fly the flag and put up your racism not welcome here, it's implied that those people.
Aren't welcome in your council.
This is the ridiculous situation we've created.
And here's the thing. If you actually put these up in a council, that worsea anti LGBTIQ, right. So I don't how you'd figure that out.
But let's say that they thought they were addressing an actual, real issue in their community.
You just show the flames of resentment. It's going to be an absolute own goal.
I just don't understand why councils keep doing this. Now I'm in the Inner West Council and they spent a whole They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a pride statue, like literally just a statue, a rainbow statue in Newtown. Meanwhile, I'm driving through the streets of Roselle, and it's like you could be driving in a country town. Sometimes the roads are so bad, poorly maintained, the grass and the median strips aren't moan.
It's like, what are we.
Paying rates for some of the highest rates, by the way, for pride statues in Newtown when our own grass is not moan and the roads aren't maintained.
It is just ridiculous.
Now.
I was going to say, I don't know if anyone in Marybeck voted for this, but then I started digging into the council att bit more, and look, I think they deserve exactly what they get because they have a socialist on the council and until two months ago they were flying the Palestinian flag, and back in twenty twenty four they wanted to double the rates just for landlords in Merriback. So I will not be moving to Merriback
anytime soon. And if they're voting for socialist councils, then their rates can be spent on pride flags.
Look, look, I deserve the right to drive over the Pride flag. I've have forgotten, no sake, what I'm not living in a serious city unless there is a.
Pride flag on the road that I can drive a va over. That's how it goes in this coming.
Seriously, don't build one in La Kimber and see how it goes. After the break, we'll get into the papers. One state is getting rid of their renewable energies targets. Yes, it's only one that can.
It should cause the dominos to fall. We'll find out apple this well.
Earlier on in the Sky News Daily Telegraph People's Forum, Anthony Albert these he said, no, he's not been part of the higher spending government since whittlerm He said, it was you, mister Dutton in the COVID years in the highest spending government.
Well, I think we have some new numbers on the front of the OS.
Indeed, the OS seems to have pre empted this claim by Alban Easy with this headline smacking his claim down. Labor lifts spending higher than COVID years.
The headline reads.
Labor's spending will reach more than thirty thousand per person within four years, eclipsing government expenditure during the pandemic and reaching the highest per capita levels on record. As Peter Dutton says, the country will be plunged into recession. If Anthony Albanesi is returned to office, well I guess we're getting plunged into a recession then. But of course Anthony Albanisi will just blame this on Trump's global trade war.
It's all those tariffs and the effects that it's hard on the supply chains, and I can see it now. It'll just be too easy for him to dodge being like, oh, this isn't really at all.
I think the whole Trump situations would have been manner from heaven for Albanizi desert. He's been loving it because again it's something else he can point to. But the fact that even tonight he was carrying on about the fact that, oh, well you know, you don't were part of a COVID government, so you spend a lot of money. How do you point out how much money I've been spending. I mean, I didn't see labor come up with a better plan throughout COVID.
I'll maintain it.
I said at the time that the inflation that came afterwards was entirely predictable, because what happens when you pump a lot of government money into an economy.
Exactly what we saw happen.
But I didn't see Albanizi or anyone else jumping up and down at the time saying I know how to.
Do it for least money.
No.
In fact, labor wanted to spend more, fifty billion dollars more if I recall correctly, and remember when labor came in, inflation was already running it around six percent. There was no reason. Unemployment was already very low, inflation was high. There was absolutely no reason for them to spend an extra four hundred and twenty five billion dollars, which is
what they've done over the last three years. So when they should have been raining in government spending to bring down inflation, so the RBA didn't have to hike rate so much, they just went, heck, let's provide cost of living relief that actually just pushes up inflation and makes the cost of living worse. Like they are just their understanding of economics. I hate to say, it is just so limited. They should stick to the political science.
Like doctor Jim, you won't get any argument from us. Another extraordinary story on the front of the OS. If you're with Australian super you might want to check your bank, well, not your bank balance, but your superbalance. Australian Super sat on its hands for almost a week after scammer's wiped out more than four hundred thousand dollars from a member's account and funneled it through the Commonwealth Bank, only alerting the bank six days after the victim raised the alarms.
So get this. This was revealed by The Australian on Monday. But this is further on the story. Scammers siphoned four hundred and six thousand dollars from a seventy four year old Queensland woman's account between March twenty and March twenty seven, wiping out ninety percent of her retirement seetings. She called them up. Props to her for noticing. I certainly wouldn't. Can't remember the last time I checked my super.
She called, this is what's going on?
And whoever she spoke to you in the call center didn't even escalate it, didn't even tell anyone.
Hey, this woman's just had almost half.
A million dollars disappear, just be withdrawn from her account.
What an extraordinary.
Sorry, she obviously knew it was not there because she's relying on this Money's bloody, she's gone hang on a Minuifi retirements able to.
This is piece poor by Australian Super.
I mean you expect a certain level of service, of course, but I suspect that they were so embarrassed by what happened here.
The idea that.
Someone could just take someone else's super annuation away and they were like, oh, well, we'll just kind of bury it and think we'll get away with it.
That is really bad back.
But the fact that it took them six days from when she called up to when they actually notified the bank, Like, that's what I don't understand. If someone calls you up, going, hey, I think ninety five percent of my retirement savings are gone, you go straight to the top alarm pell should be ringing, But no, I don't know what the call center was doing, but they should be sacked.
Indeed, imagine being this pensioner.
She was actually notified by two letters from Australian Super just being like just confirming these withdrawals, because there were six different withdrawals, just confirming these withdrawals that you made.
Can you imagine reading those letters? You'd feel sick to your stomach.
Third headline on the front of the oards Queensland, you acts renewable targets in blow to labor federal government.
Do you have any states left on board at this rate?
Queensland will dismantle the mining state's renewable energy targets and keep call fired power stations operating for at least another decade, throwing Anthony Albanesi's climate vision into jeopardy.
My goodness, I genuinely.
Don't know that there's a state left on board with this. I can't name a state now that doesn't have green hydrogen projects or ice or they've just turfed them all together. And that's just to name one of the kinds of projects that the FEDS have been pushing their entire ten You well.
Reality bites, doesn't it eventually, And they're saying, we've got to keep the coul fired power stations open. I hope Peter Dutton's reading that story tomorrow and taking some inspiration from it, because, as we're talking about earlier, we need something bold on the table, and that sounds like something good to me, saying, look, we all know we're not
going to meet these zero by twenty thirty targets. We're not going to meet our renewable energy targets by twenty thirty, so let's just throw it all out and start again.
Well, and you've seen in Victoria and New South Wales, both labor states, and they've been forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money extending coal five power plants because you simply cannot wish your way into a net zero world. Eventually you actually have to confront reality and deal with the hard reality that hey, we need always on power, not power that just stops when
it's not sunny and it's not windy. And now over in the Newcastle Herald on that energy theme, reactors drought of luck. Five of the coalition's seven planned nuclear power stations, including the one slated for the Hunter, could be turned off or run at a trickle during drought to avoid rewriting the way scarce water resources are distributed in Australia.
Now opposition leader previously announced his plants to build the nuclear plants at existing col fire facilities, costing around three hundred and thirty billion dollars, and one of these in Newcastle was one selected. But part of this pitch was that no extra water would be required. Except now the group liberals against nuclear have commissioned a study which says, no, you would need a lot of extra water to run
these nuclear plants. But look, I would rather have nuclear that may not work in a drought than solar and wind that will definitely not work when it's dark and it's not windy. It's like, obviously there are risks with nuclear, but the risks with solar and wind are so much more obvious.
Well, and we know what happened in South Australia when they had a storm as well, back in twenty sixteen.
But so what if it requires more water.
I mean, sure you can make the environmental argument that sits not great, but they know what happens with the solar panels and wind turbines when they get decommissioned, don't they. And there's no way of doing this that is one hundred percent good for the planet. No.
And as we've discussed before, these locations aren't set in stone. So if new research like this were to come to light that makes certain locations no longer feasible or affordable for whatever reasons, they'll just come up with we're not getting the picks out. There's no tractors turning sod. Yet, everyone calm down. There will be so much homework that goes into finalizing, should it come to this, finalizing the locations of these nuclear energy plants very.
Quickly before we get to the break.
On the front of the cans Post tomorrow, it says Neil for Trump they're in p candidate in a must win Queensland seat, previously blamed feminists for aiding Donald Trump's election loss and label China a grub of a country.
I'm not sure what the problem is, to be.
Honest, Larkhardt hopeful Jeremy Neil, on the social media platform previously known as Twitter, also railed against COVID nineteen restrictions, vaccines, and for the ABC to be defunded. He has now apologized and said that his comments were poorly worded, and he offered an unreserved apology. But I mean, for goodness sake, you can't even tell the truth anymore without ending app on the front of the paper with some sort of gotcha. This is why we don't get people going into politics,
because they don't want to deal with this stuff. After the break, politician versus Ostrich, who's going to win?
We'll show you the footage soon.
Now, if you can get over your eco anxiety and leave the house, you may well want to go to an eco retreat, which people had been doing in Sweden until it all came undone Forreyer.
Well, that's right.
A Danish couple is on the run, having fled to Guatemala evading tax authorities in Denmark.
Except the awkward part.
Is they ran this eco retreat, but upon the vanishing, it's now been discovered that in their wake they have left behind no less than one hundred and fifty eight barrels of human waste. They also pumped waste water directly into the forest, and they abandoned animals. Some ducks even died after being left outside overnight by this couple that claimed to be running a luxury eco retreat.
It's like, I just love this from the eco warriors.
It's like, we'll claim to stand for the environment, but then we're gonna leave behind one hundred and fifty eight barrels of human effluent and destroy the environment around us.
How had no one picked up on the smell before all of this happened. But what the bit I don't get is you've got one hundred and fifty eight barrels of the stuff, so you've been hoarding this for quite.
Some time as your prize jewels.
But if you were an eco warrior and you've got barrels full of Pooh and Wii, wouldn't you just bury them and enrich the soil.
On your hand?
That would be eco friendly. But what a sham. Just another another day, another sham. Well.
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in what appears to be Texas at a wildlife park on a holidays, taking the todd largest to see the sights and sounds when an ostrich decided to take him on, despite him sitting there in the safety well he thought the safety of his own car. The video was shared to social media by his wife, Carrie Johnson, with the caption too funny not to share hilarious. The toddler thought it was hilarious.
Would they let your dad gets picked by bloody osby? I just want to know which of the policies this ostricher obviously had a problem with.
You know, saw Boris Johnson coming and thought I don't like this.
I just love how Boris Johnson is just he just always embodies Boris.
He's so funny, like him or not.
That's it from US tonight Coming up nets to reader Paddy