Can someone explain to me 3 things please
1. Why are so many data centres needed all of a sudden?
2. Why are they so huge?
3. Why can't they use electricity & water more efficiently?
We use vast areas of land & huge quantities of power & water for these places but for what?
The closure of rail services in regional Queensland is just another sad indictment on the state of our nation.
While countries in Asia are building high speed rail and nuclear power plants, our governments can’t even keep existing services going with aging rolling stock.
There’s money for the Olympics of course, but nothing for the regions that generate our wealth.
The closure of the Westlander is particularly harsh because as the Chareville mayor quite rightly points out, regional towns like Chinchilla, Chareville and Cunnamulla were built on the back of rail.
It’s not like the government has put money into roads either, with the Bruce and Warrego highways being virtual death traps.
This debacle can be traced back to the privatisation of the Queensland rail coal trains back in the early 2000’s under the Bligh government. (Fun fact - Murray Watt was her chief of staff.)
These coal trains generated income that was used to fund passenger services.
The solution for this is to start funding the construction of infrastructure such as rail to generate income to pay for essential services.
https://t.co/PeAaJW2pjF is advocating for an Infrastructure bank to fund this construction through domestic bonds rather than foreign debt.
We are also advocating to start a military apprenticeship scheme to ensure that our children have the skills to build infrastructure rather than rely on foreign contractors that is being used for Snowy 2.
It’s not rocket science - If we want to get our country back on track we have to get back on the tools and start building. No ifs, no buts.
The Knepp Estate in West Sussex is the most famous rewilding project in Britain. It is on Springwatch, in the broadsheets, in a bestselling book. It is the place everyone points to when they want to show you what the land does the moment humans step back and stop farming it. Look at the nightingales, the purple emperors, the storks. Proof, apparently, that we should get the animals off the land and let it go wild.
There is one problem with using Knepp this way. You have to never look at what is standing in the fields.
Knepp is full of animals. Deliberately, by design, as the entire point.
When Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree gave up on intensive farming around 2000, on heavy Sussex clay that had run the estate £1.5 million into debt, they did the reverse. They brought more animals in, of more kinds, took down seventy miles of fencing, and let them roam. Old English longhorn cattle. Tamworth pigs. Exmoor ponies. Red, fallow and roe deer. Stand-ins for the wild aurochs, boar and horses we wiped out long ago. Their grazing, browsing, trampling, rootling and dung is the engine that builds the whole mosaic of scrub and wood pasture the rare birds need. Too few animals and it chokes into dense woodland. Too many and it flattens to bare grass. The cattle are the reason the nightingale is there at all.
And Knepp does not leave nature to it. There are no wolves in Sussex, so the herds would breed until they ate the place bare. So Knepp culls them every autumn. The deer are shot by a licensed stalker. The cattle and pigs go to a small organic abattoir. Knepp calls this, without flinching, stepping into the role of the missing apex predator.
A managed herd, grazing grass, culled before winter for meat. There is a word for that, and it is a very old one.
Then comes the part that should end the argument outright. They sell the meat. Knepp Wild Range: an online butchery and a restaurant, longhorn beef aged on the bone for weeks, Tamworth pork off pigs fattened on autumn acorns, venison, charcuterie cured in house. Heston Blumenthal calls the longhorn the best beef in the world. Knepp markets the lot as the most sustainable meat you can buy, and its own website argues, in words any carnivore would recognise, that pasture-fed meat is good for you and that grazing ruminants are one of the best carbon sinks on the planet.
So Britain's flagship rewilding project is a former arable farm, gone broke under the plough, rescued by swapping the crops for free-roaming cattle, pigs, ponies and deer, then counting them, culling them, and selling them as premium grass-fed steak.
This is the thing held up as the case for taking animals off the land.
Post a Knepp turtle dove with a caption about what nature does once we stop eating meat, and you have it exactly upside down. The turtle dove is sponsored by the longhorn. The green cathedral was built by a herd of cattle, and paid for, in part, by selling the surplus as steak.
None of which means we should turn all of Britain into Knepp. We shouldn't. It grows a fraction of the food the land could, and nobody lives on nightingales. But on the one principle it actually demonstrates, it is unanswerable, and it is the precise principle the people quoting it want dead. Put the grazing animals back and the wildlife pours in. Take them away and it drains out.
The poster child for the end of livestock is a working meat farm.
Go and read its menu.
India is the great natural experiment in plant-based eating, and almost nobody wants to run the numbers on it.
It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as a national experiment for thousands of years.
The result. Around a third of its children are stunted, the largest share of the world's stunted children of any nation. The Indian Dietetic Association reports 84% of the country's vegetarians are protein deficient, against 65% of its meat eaters. And the nation that eats the least meat is the diabetes capital of the world, with over 100 million diabetics.
Before anyone blames poverty, a Journal of Nutrition study found a vegetarian mother predicted stunting across every wealth bracket, rich families included. The diet was carrying its own weight.
Bioavailable iron, zinc, B12 and complete protein build a child's skeleton. Strip them out and it comes out smaller. The animal fat, meanwhile, got swapped for refined grain, sugar and seed oil. India is now the world's biggest vegetable oil importer, per-person intake tripled since 2001.
The diet sold to the West as optimal human nutrition has been run here, at the scale of a billion people, for longer than the West has existed. It did not produce optimal humans. It produced the largest population of stunted, diabetic, protein-starved people on earth.
People should not become wealthy from NDIS. .
“Key figures in the Gillard government, who founded the NDIS, have gone on to chair union-backed super funds that are the biggest financial winners from the disability scheme.
In the largest transaction in NDIS history, a firm co-owned by more than a dozen industry funds turned a $28m investment into a $360m payday in just four years.
The firm, IFM Investors, used its “private equity” division to buy over 80 per cent of the largest NDIS plan management company, Adelaide-based My Plan Manager, from founder Claire Wittwer-Smith in 2019.
Documents obtained by this masthead reveal IFM forked out $26.8m in cash to a former special ed teacher, who had started My Plan Manager (MPM) in 2014 after leaving a job at the National Disability Insurance Agency.
At the time of the buy, IFM Investors was chaired by ex federal Labor cabinet minister and one-time ACTU boss Greg Combet.
When IFM sold MPM in 2023, Mr Combet had left. But former Labor cabinet minister Lindsay Tanner had joined as a director.
IFM Investors is ultimately owned by industry super funds including Hesta – chaired by former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon – and Cbus, whose board is led by ex Labor treasurer Wayne Swan.
All four were ministers under Julia Gillard, who founded the NDIS.
••••••••••••••••••••••
Disabled people should not be treated like commodities.
The fact that NDIS companies can be sold for millions of dollars shows that the scheme has been set up in a way to benefit grifters and not disabled people.
It should as no surprise that superannuation funds are involved in this grifting as they have a long established track record in grifting fees from poor working Australians.
Nor should it come as no surprise that the Labor party are behind this grifting.
Hiding behind their faux bleeding hearts are multimillionaires deceiving taxpayers of hard earned tax dollars and disabled people the proper support they need.
And don’t forget the money Superannuation funds pour into foreign owned renewables.
https://t.co/PeAaJW2pjF is the only party prepared to stop these rorts. Sign up today.
“Australia's energy minister has accused the coalition of being unpatriotic, as he defended taxpayer-funded travel and staffing costs for a major climate conference.
Chris Bowen is due to spend more than $150 million on the United Nations' 31st Conference of the Parties meeting, known as COP31, in his role as president of negotiations.
In a Senate estimates hearing, environment department officials told Liberal senator Sarah Henderson the budget had allocated funding for 70 full-time equivalent staff ahead of the UN-run conference in November.”
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When you see the money spent by bureaucrats on the climate agenda you start to see why they will never admit they are wrong.
Destroying our economy is a lucrative business for the Canberra bureaucracy providing high salaries and free travel.
They fiddle in the halls of power while our country burns.
The rot needs to stop.
Alcohol and tobacco are available on every street corner.
Cigarettes proven to cause cancer. Alcohol proven to destroy the liver, the brain, the marriage, and the careful plans of an entire weekend.
Both legal. Both taxed. Both stocked at the petrol station.
Raw milk, on the other hand, sold by a farmer three miles down the road from a cow that has a name, must apparently be regulated as a public health threat.
The petrol station sells nicotine pouches, vodka, energy drinks containing seven grams of taurine and a kilogram of sugar, and an entire wall of ultra-processed snacks designed by chemists.
The farm gate down the lane sells a glass of milk. The same milk humans have been drinking for ten thousand years.
The petrol station is fine. The farm gate is the problem.
You can decide which of these your government is actually trying to protect you from.
Australia’s prime minister, @AlboMP, says he will not get involved in the “culture war” of amending the sex discrimination act to ensure women are accurately defined in it.
Fun fact: he didn’t dismiss it as a “culture war” in 2013 when he voted to remove women from the SDA.
We are so far through the looking glass that governments consider culling cows to ‘save the planet’ while they approve massive AI data centres that require gargantuan amounts of energy and water.
“Australia’s first female Prime Minister will dine out on her historic status, commanding her usual speaking fee to lecture the world on what it means to be a woman in public life. All while, back home, women and girls continue to clean up the mess her government created…”
What if I told you Australia has a political nuclear button built into the Constitution?
It’s called Section 57 ❤️
Most Australians have never even heard of it, but it gives the Senate the power to stop legislation and force the country back to an election through what’s called a double dissolution🤔
That means:
Every MP loses their seat,
Every Senator goes back to the people and Australians get another vote on the future direction of the country.
Today - we have…..
Your country being invaded.
Broken promises on power prices.
Broken promises on tax.
Broken promises on super.
Record migration (invasion) during a housing crisis.
Young Australians locked out of home ownership.
Small businesses drowning in costs while Canberra lectures everyone about “fairness.”
And now they want the Senate to just wave this budget through like none of that happened. I say “Treason”
The Senate is not supposed to be a rubber stamp. It exists to scrutinise governments when public trust starts collapsing. Millions of Australians feel like the social contract has been broken.
Work harder.
Pay more tax.
Own less.
And somehow be grateful for it?
A double dissolution is a constitutional reset button and I WANT the reset.
#AustraliaFirst 🇦🇺🫡
#MillionsMustGo 🇦🇺🫡