Unfortunately the Treasurer has maintained his reputation as chained to the LNP tradition, with unhappy consequences for the upcoming Business & Skills Summit and Budget 2022. The main flagged issues are long-standing and should have been settled before the May election. Expectations have risen on many issues which are beyond the capacity of any system to investigate in 2 days and settle in time for the October Budget.
The PM’s flanks have been opened to a degree the latter would not appreciate; and what has he gained? He still has a budget process that has failed already, handicapping progress with climate change mitigation, rewarding corruption and refusing to start to reduce fire and flood risks as they are rising.
CRITICAL UPDATE ON 26 SEPTEMBER – As PM Albanese starts again after the prolonged Elizabeth Regina RIP funeral events: critical time for integrity (Fed ICAC & Budget off the rails), Climate Act problems, and imminent legal complications related to human and citizen’s property rights. The files were transmitted to ALP PM and parliamentarians differentially as to purpose, seen in the dates, and are offered as public evidence of goodwill on my part and culpability on theirs, in hope this can be settled professionally after refusal of four requests for mediation:
so far is being kept away from key priorities
Intervention: the Summit featured important topics that were pre-existing and should have been dealt with on 22 May BUT AS EXPECTED deceit, suppression & evasion + journalists’ deafness featured. A full posting is coming but this will serve as an interim update:
The problems are very serious but the path to “repair” through BUDGET RE-PLANNING can be holistic and highly cost-effective. This is an overview, every element has been documented on this and associated webpages while “The National COVID Commission” proposal will be posted soon:
Chapters are accessed through the table of contents and are moderately self-contained.
This is a temporary placement of the front end of the “National Council” proposal paper, awaiting a phone call (“destiny”). Reviews start with brief statement of what needs to be fixed: Treasury on Covid, climate, integrity etc
28 Aug Letter to Prime Minister
There is a critical need to start to reduce the almost/predictable increase in societal exposure to failed decision-making over climate. My bushfire risk reduction program proposal as submitted to the “reform” government is on this site, as also submitted to BCA. The risks and costs of natural events are rising and
- there is no national strategy to reduce those risks (see CityLab quotes at the foot of this document)
- except the one I have locked behind a copyright gate – freely available to PM gratis if you expiate the cruelty, malice, theft and deceit I have suffered –
- what is so hard about FAIRNESS? – and
- which Chalmers is deliberately extending. Here is a summary of what PM knows.
The whole of Australia is still suffering the effects of “Bairdijiklian Malenomics” which started in June 2012. Specific indicators include rejection of “Budget repair” and better advice, theft of cherry-picked ideas, and ~
- Political confusion and variability, no “plan”, excessive delays in adjustments, clumsy mechanisms
- Lack of “balance” between cities & regions, “imbalance” in infrastructure spending, high regional impacts
- Excessive reliance on debt, projects have extremely low “revenue cover” (less than 5% in the Metros) and low to negative benefit/cost ratios
- Engineering crises in WestConnex and Metro – Australia’s “biggest projects” and least sustainable, the Western Sydney City Plan is destructive on transit and freight systems
- Budgets prevent spending on sooner, cheaper and more effective “options” (cf Eddington in Melbourne and Greiner/Gibbons in Sydney)
- Projects are poorly planned: high levels of waste and cost overruns, they produce more congestion not less
How can the Summit justify the exclusion and suppression of, say, a national campaign to reduce the costs of bushfires and add any and all of these issues?
The PM has not considered any of this analyst’s work on all aspects of a successful replication of the Newcastle success and “repair” of dangerous past infrastructure corruptions. Stated foregone benefits to the nation amount to about $3 trillion, through specific projects and extrapolating regional revivals and climate cost savings.
Cost to Government would be a small profit to apply to priorities, the mechanism is available under the Charter of Budget Honesty, one of the benefits is genuine revival of iA, and the benefits include transit and governance ideas (including community resilience and stimulus under COVID) which you cannot get anywhere else.
The Business & Skills Summit has no meaningful agenda (NB Chalmers is snookered to the extent of material I gave him/advised him of on the following, as reflected here and on the Web, is available but only on negotiation), the Treasury heads follow with comments in italics:
- Maintaining full employment and growing productivity – no industry sectional focus, city and regional dynamics, critically no OECD- and Eddo-type “repair” and RG “scalable stimulus” (especially the critical state of Western Sydney transit and freight as currently being camouflaged by several ministers)
- Boosting job security – perennial and diffused, not specifically linked to recovery and repair
- Lift participation etc – perennial and diffused, not specifically linked to recovery and repair
- Delivering a high quality labour force etc – perennial and diffused, not specifically linked to recovery and repair
- Maximising opportunities in the industries of the future – almost insulting naivety, not specifically linked to recovery and repair.
My estimate is that “renewables” will be about one-third of replacement jobs – on the basis of my successful Newcastle experience which governments will not listen to. InQueensland continued:
Important parts of “reform” are statutory processes, project analyses and like professional matters affecting long-term financial capacities of “City States” as developed by ResPublica and others, as has been analysed in my books as previously advised. About a third of the mass of government in Australia is “local” and it is both the least understood and most critical.
Resumes
The treatment I have received from 2008 was brutal and that is reflected in the text: please skip direct to content if you so prefer.
Today Anthony Klan has been make a big deal out of discovering Morrison’s team of miscreants are continuing in central agencies. Has he been asleep for 5 years:
The report has not been updated yet in line with the following illustrations of barriers to Australia’s progress, based in continuing Morrison maladministration and personages, refusal to acknowledge breaches of integrity and of human rights, and poor understanding of best practices. Reputations will ride up and down with the nature of responses – none to date:
Been working on “Save Sydney” and onwards for such a long time, first (30 years) with nation-building greats, then frantically since 2009 against malevolent merde-heads.
Blomberg City Lab 26 Aug 2022
Since May this year, 116 US counties were under multiple types of alerts from the National Weather Service during the same week, according to his analysis — the first of such snapshot from the group to approximate the risk of colliding events during this season. Nearly three-quarters had concurrent fire weather and heat alerts, particularly along the West Coast and the Great Plains.
Eighteen counties were under flood and heat alerts within the same week, and 15 had fire weather and flood alerts. “It really stresses the systems that are normally designed to handle one disaster at a time,” says Claire Knox, an expert on emergency and crisis management at the University of Central Florida.
The last two years in particular have made apparent the challenges of compounding, or co-occurring, disasters: Floods, extreme heat and wildfires coincided with a global pandemic, hitting cities just as Covid infections surged, and further straining local resources and complicating efforts to shelter displaced residents. The US is having one of the hottest summers on record, according to at least one energy metric.
Hazardous weather events are also increasingly triggering subsequent ones thanks to human-driven climate change, creating a domino effect of worsening impacts that then snowball into a catastrophe — a type of compounding event known as cascading disasters.
The upcoming challenge is to turn science into policy, says AghaKouchak. “I think cities and states need to spend more resources on planning for future extreme scenarios, exploring potential grey swan events,” he said. That is, events with high impact, but which may be perceived as rare. “It’s good practice to explore events that have never happened before, that can theoretically happen together.”
In the US, a lot of these changes, Knox says, will depend on whether the funding for disaster changes: “We’re having to rethink how we are designing our plans, including the funding structures,” she says. “We can’t continue expecting local governments to front the bill for all of these disasters and yet expect them to be resilient in the same breath.”
Compound disasters can also hamper cities from completing the four stages of emergency management (mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery). “So you’re having to recover from the first event, as the second event starts. Now you’re back into response mode, while you’re trying to mitigate for the next one,” says Knox, adding that it could trigger staffing, technology and financial issues for the responding organizations.
Sydney's Betrayals 
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