If it's peaceful it's peaceful. When I check the dictionary under "peaceful" it doesn't say anything about business.

Or rather they've decided what areas they'll mess around for years while nothing gets done until this farce finally gets canned.

Nuclear power's already much more expensive than every other mainstream option, and the gap is widening every year. In twenty years time it's going to be so much more expensive it'll be ridiculous. No one's going to want to buy power for several times the cost of all the other options.

The idea's not only dumb - it's completely commercially unviable.

It just seems dumb at this point. Nuclear energy is so incredibly expensive compared to the alternatives. Most countries are moving away from it due to it being commercially unviable. And yet here we are with the NLP acting like it's the best thing since sliced bread.

I know they see it as their duty to push the opposite of whatever Labor's doing but they don't seem to care that it's just a bad idea.

Compulsory is such a good system. It doesn't take long. It's on a weekend so it's not inconvenient. You get a sausage at the sausage sizzle and you do your vote. There's a real holiday atmosphere. And it produces much more representative results. Brexit wouldn't have happened if they had compulsory voting so there's no denying it's valuable.

Aside from anything else, I've seen a couple of examples of downsizing up close and in neither case did it end up with them making very much money on the deal. They just ended up with smaller places.

In the first case they ended up with a small apartment which they actually ended up having to sell some of their retirement investments to be able to afford after selling a large family home in the outer suburbs and paying all the costs associated with selling.

In the other case she moved from a large family home in the outer suburbs into one of those "retirement communities". The whole thing's a massive scam. You "buy" the unit but you don't actually own it, you only own a leasehold on it - something they didn't make clear to her at all. You're not allowed to even improve or renovate it. They impose rules on you much like a rental. And when you move out you're not allowed to sell it - they contractually reserve the right to sell it themselves and pay you a massively discounted amount for it. Essentially they steal half the value of what you originally paid in a time when house prices are going up as well. It's straight up exploitation of people who are old and struggling to even do everyday tasks, let alone understand complex contracts.

I expect to hear in a few years that Carlson has been on the payroll of the Russians for years.

I never thought to see the day that a former News Limited CEO was installed as head of the ABC by Labor. Surely they'll regret this at the next election when the ABC becomes like another Fox News.

I'm curious about their definition of "lakes" here. Lake Eyre in Australia is an enormous salt pan. Once every few years when it rains in the desert it briefly becomes flooded. Does that make it a lake?

Contrary to what the other comments are saying, there's no compelling reason why goods transport by train can't be done here when it can be done elsewhere. It was done in the past but then we started spending billions to subsidise trucks and passed a variety of laws to benefit road transport. Plus allowing the taxpayer to cover the cost of road wear caused by trucks which totals more billions per year.

So in the end it was a pure policy decision - in the 1950s various lobby groups pushed for the introduction of laws to favor road transport over rail transport and in 1957 the first laws were passed. The rest is history.

Also there's literally a scene in the Bible where god turns water into wine for his disciples. Why would he do that if it was a bad thing?

Sure. But most Americans don't seem to regard Trump as the worst president ever which boggles my mind. This guy was openly trying to overthrow democracy in America and was engaging in organised criminal activities, and you think there were worse presidents? I mean he was literally trying to overthrow your entire constitution and system of government. Can it get worse than that?