The real problem in trying to interpret this is that most businesses have essentially the same strategic motive, especially ones that lend you money, and it can be summed up rather easily:”make money”.

There are plenty of backup batteries around – one very good one is the Trent – that should double the full life of your Mac on a plane.

I switched to Mac’s a year back and now find Windows hard.

When in fact the front edge of evolutionary biology long ago accepted Lynn Margulis’s argument that it is collaboration rather than competition that has led to the greatest advances in evolution.

The need to argue elaborate cases for ‘trust’ as some kind of artefact would diminish if it could be understood that at the core of life processes it is collaboration which has been important in getting us to this poin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/science/lynn-margulis-trailblazing-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-73.html
http://digitaljournal.com/article/321533
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_24

I suppose it’s much easier to put competition into modelling than is collaboration. Is it?

I am reasonably confident Thomson is not hanging on for grim death in defence of the highest principle, but his motives really do not matter. There are uncompleted police inquiries. There is a report from a public servant that cites not one witness statement and not one expert statement. For example the validity or otherwise of various signatures is determined by the public servant speculating about whether the signatures is authentic or not although he does not appear to have any quals as a handwriting analyst. The delegate in facts says nothing except that the signature is Thomson’s. A whole lot of the report is explicitly based on radio and TV interviews. The report would be thrown out by a court of petty sessions if it was tendered as evidence of shoplifting.

You cannot make up for the deficiencies of the process by asking the guy to take a walk outside the tent. That is just an invitation for deficient process in the future to be replaced by overheated parliamentary and media speculation.

It’s just extraordinary that the FWA report, which is designed under FWA’s own legislation to be referred to the DPP for prosecution, was not usable. Ditto the sections of the FWA report referred to the AEC. And all this after 3 years of effort.

I have not seen a lot of media comment that the delegate of the General Manager of Fair Work Australia. who some would make the final authority on Thomson’s case, seems not to understand the requirements for a criminal prosecution or the Electoral Act.

We will see what the nine inquiries produce.

He is not a convincing person. I did find it interesting the charges he made against Jackson were not denied by her. They were deliberately ignored in Sinclair Davidson fashion by her. No-one has picked this up at all.

It also appears the person who wrote the FWA report had no idea of what the DPP would want.

The ‘be in it mate’ syndrome is a part of the ALP’s central ethos. Thomson is one of many – most in the NSW Branch executive are worse. A bunch of self-serving deadheads who make a nominal commitment to Labor ideology to cloak their selfishness. Very limited people in an overall sense whose only feasible path to self-aggrandisement rests in crooked deals and hypocrisy.

Suspension was regularly misused for political advantage in Queensland before 1988. Even the famous Mahon expulsion in 1920 was not about numbers, it was about Billie Hughes trying to paint the ALP as a gang of dangerous Fenians disloyal to the British empire.

Open this door and I assure you that an Abbot majority will leap through it as fast as they can. They are already all but accusing the AEC of bias even though keeping the commission outside politics has been common ground for all parties since it was established as an independent body.

Once a government has a comfortable majority vote, there’s no particular reason to go suspending opposition members for the fun of it. It doesn’t change the outcome. The only time it would make a big deal is if you had a government hanging in there by only one vote, and if the suspension was for a long time, enough to put together a no-confidence (I don’t know the technicalities, but I’m sure that can’t be done in an hour).

Do you really want to give them the ability to expel or suspend MPs on an allegation?

I most certainly don’t… and that goes to the nub of my point. It is encumbent on the MP in this situation to do the “right thing”, not to wait on some (possible) legal process. There appears to be no process by which Thomson can be booted, and I am happy that is the case. If there were it would be used and abused by all and sundry.

This is not about some supposed guilt or innocence, no matter how some may say it is. It is about ethics.

I’m so going to learn how to embed links one of these days.

I’m using the situation as a koan – a zen term for something for which there is no rational solution. Because, there has to be somebody to blame here and I can’t work out who it is!

It would certainly be odd if a patient or their counsel weren’t informed of why they had been involuntary admitted, given regular updates on the progress of their treatment, and some kind of reasonable idea of what was expected to improve in their condition before they could be released.

conrad: “Morally, for example, I don’t think people should be held indefintely based on secret evidence, but obviously the law thinks otherwise.”

Terrorism is an *emergency*! The public are supposed to understand that all bets are off. In an emergency, we can suspend and rewrite the law however we wish. I merely have to conjure up the words ‘potential terrorist’, and I’ve already gone a long way toward justifying somebody’s indefinite detention. That’s the power of securitisation politics in full swing. It has very little to do with morals or the law thinking otherwise. Rather, the maintenance of belief that certain actions are *necessary* in spite of them.

MPs are elected by the people. If they can be removed on an unreviewed report by a single public servant then you are going to see a whole lot of MPs under allegation. Parliamentary immunities are part of what maintains democracy, Before parliament abolished the right to expel MPs that power had been used only once, in 1920, in a blatantly political exercise by Billie Hughes.

The next house of representatives is likely to have a large majority for an Abbot government. Do you really want to give them the ability to expel or suspend MPs on an allegation?

Clearly there are levels of control that are commensurate with the perceived risk and there are levels of control that are excessive.

As the matter stands, ASIO decides not only the requirement of a control order but also the methodology of control.

Clearly, a judicial process could be introduced to assess the level of future threat and to impose the appropriate level of control.

This precedure would help to mitigate the inordinate power of ASIO in these matters.

That is the problem with the situation of refugees and adverse ASIO assessments: the lack of safeguards and fairness. My point is that, provided a refugee has a fair chance to test and refute adverse evidence (e.g. through a security-cleared advocate before a tribunal that IS allowed to know the evidence even if the refugee isn’t), restrictions on liberty MAY be justified depending on the circumstances. In my view a refugee with a profile and background like Jihad Jack Thomas SHOULD be subject to significant restrictions for protection of the community.

Morally, for example, I don’t think people should be held indefintely based on secret evidence, but obviously the law thinks otherwise. Jack Thomas appears to have been lucky in the other direction.

I do not think that Thomas is “fine and dandy”, any more than I think that you are “fine and dandy”.

Such an assessment has no judicial function and is therefore irrelevant to the case.