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John Quiggin 
@Ikonoclast
First time I drove a car on the road was well after becoming an adult, and while I did it in anticipation of needing to be able to drive (overseas), the second most important reason was that I was sick and tired of being asked for a drivers license as identification, and not having one. Drivers licenses aren’t meant to be used for ID, but they are, including by government agencies. Possessing one makes getting a new bank account easier, same with the passport.
Now you can get a standard ID card if you don’t drive, but that was rare, perhaps not even around, when I did the drivers test.
As far as I can tell, I also need to have a valid visa these days, carried on my person at all times I am wandering about the CBD of Melbourne. Sheesh.
@Ikonoclast
OK, “papers” is shorthand for ID.
If they “reasonably suspect” that you are a “non-citizen” they can ask you to present evidence of your identity and you have 5 minutes to do so.
There is a lot of leeway to the basis upon which they might reasonably suspect that, and anyway you don’t get to argue about it at the time. If you end up challenging something about the episode in court, then they might not be able to demonstrate that the suspicion was reasonable. But for most events that would not be of much use.
@Megan
Always worth turning on the mobile phone’s video function and record what they have to say. Pays to know how to do this quickly and relatively inconspicuously. “They” is a placeholder for whoever is next in line to hassle you walking down the street in Melbourne.
I’d love to know what constitutes reasonable suspicion.
@Donald Oats
Being brown seems to cover it.
First they came for the brown people, but I didn’t care because I wasn’t brown….
Am I to understand from the ABF fiasco that Australians no longer enjoy a “presumption of innocence?” This entitlement is a feature of truly free societies. Is it now an offence to “walk while non-white” through the Melbourne CBD? Although I live in the land of the indebted and the home of the well-armed, I worry about what is becoming of my homeland. I hope, however, that Ikon continues to prance around his neighborhood, unwashed and in his skivvies, without “papers,” and without interference from “the authorities.”
I wondered what people thought of the ALP just taking the (repealed) Clean Energy Legislation unchanged back to parliament?
Perhaps they would take the lessons of the shocking sell job and actually have a crack at explaining it to people. All the old LNP scare arguments can be proved false. We need a fixed carbon price period. JQ?
Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) condemns Australian participation in an illegal war in Syria
Following a meeting in Melbourne Australia of “Australians for Reconciliation in Syria” (AMRIS) today, 3 September 2015, spokesperson David Macilwain said that AMRIS unequivocally condemns atrocities committed by ‘Islamic State’ in Syria.
AMRIS deplores, however, the decision by the Australian Government to follow the lead of the United States in taking military action against IS within the borders of Syria, one of the founding members of the United Nations, without the consent of the Syrian Government.
Mr Macilwain said, “Such action will do little to ‘degrade and destroy’ the terrorist group, whose control over territory has only continued to increase despite a year of US Coalition airstrikes. Furthermore there have been significant civilian casualties and damage as a result of those airstrikes, leading to further refugee flows.”
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Video: Syrian villagers try to make the world understand that the ‘rebels’ are killing them, not the elected Syrian government
While European governments cry crocodile tears over the mass migration of people from this region, Syrians are trying to get them and the US to stop backing so-called ‘rebels’ who are the very ones forcing people out of the region. The video inside came from a source describing itself as ‘a group of Syrian journalists (living in Syria) who have created a new Middle East Channel’. The video shows Syrian civilians who have come from near Idlib protesting outside the Red Cross in Damascus about the silence of the international press on the predicament of two villages isolated behind enemy [‘rebel’] -held areas above Idlib, where two villagers have been kidnapped by Islamic extremists.
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All of the heading of my previous post should have been boldface and within the HTML link. My apologies.
@James
Why do you trust this source?
A copy of the following with more links can be found here on my web-site candobetter.net. That article includes other links which I am not able to include here.
J-D asked in response to my earlier two posts:
What source? To which of my two posts are you referring?
Had you read through the article linked to in the second of my above posts, you would have noticed in one of the footnotes, a link to a story of a press conference which occurred on 19th June 2014 at the United Nations headquarters in New York. That story includes a 53 minute embedded video of the press conference. At that press conference, five independent observers attested to the fairness of the Presidential election which had been conducted on 4 June 2014. At that election 88.7% of the 73.42% of eligible Syrian voters who voted, voted for President Bashar al-Assad.
Given the proxy war that was going on at the time, and which is continuing to this day, and the obstruction, by countries like Australia and France, of expatriate Syrians who wanted to vote, I would say that that was a most impressive result and one which totally refutes the lie from the mainstream newsmedia that President Bashar al-Assad is corrupt and brutal tyrant. Strikingly, not one of ‘reporters’ from Australia or elsewhere, who had been pushing that narrative before and since, bothered to show up to that press conference to challenge the testimony of the election observers.
The fact is since March 2011 Syria has faced invasion by sociopath killers from almost every corner of the globe. These sociopaths have been paid for and armed by the United States France, the UK and their regional allies including Israel, Turkey, Jordan and the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The cost borne by the people of Syria is terrible – over 220,000 dead by one estimate, but in spite of the terrible cost, the Army and the people of Syria have stood by their government against the invaders.
The people of Syria have seen what happened to neighbouring Iraq as a result of two illegal wars since 1990 and economic sanctions in which Australia shamefully participated, and are resolved not to let the same happen to them. According to Ramsey Clark, who was Attorney General of the United States under President Johnson in the 1960s, as many as 3,300,000 Iraqis may have died as a result. A 13 minute of a talk by Ramsey Clarke can be found here.
Fortunately, voices, which are demanding that the decision by Tony Abbott for Australia to participate in the war against the people of Syria be debated in Parliament, are starting to be heard. One of those people is retired Army General Gration.
The Canning by-election is supposed to be a bellewhether for government fortunes, but these are interesting times for psephologists. The volatility of the electorate makes political science an increasingly dodgy science. The big question is: why are the voters so antsy?
I predict that the L/NP will hold the seat of Canning mainly because the quality of the candidate (SAS captain). A month back I put $100 down on him at 1.85:
The Left-liberal attacks on his war record and parents religion will only rebound, as have the media-academia attacks on Abbot. Left-liberalism tends to rapidly over-reach at the first hints of success and the Canning by-election looks like another one of their Lucy-and-the-football air-kicks.
In 2014 I bet that the Abbot-led L/NP will lose the election (this was prior to Abbott’s leadership reset and policy back-flips). I am confident of winning my bets against the L/NP at the 2016 federal election. This is mainly due to inductive chartist reasons – it would be well nigh unprecedented for a party to make an electoral comeback after such a long string of adverse polling results.
The problem for me is that this prediction is still at odds with my Five-P model of psephological supply which makes a very BOTE prediction of a narrow victory for the L/NP in 2016.
he Canning by-election is supposed to be a bellewhether for government fortunes. I have my dobuts. I predict that the L/NP will hold the election mainly because the quality of the candidate, SAS captain, goes down well in the state that hosts Swan Barracks. A month back I made a modest wager on this sterling fellow.
The Left-liberal attacks on his war record and parents religion will only rebound to his favour, as have the media-academia attacks on Abbot. Left-liberalism tends to rapidly over-reach at the first hints of success and the Canning by-election looks like another one of their Lucy-and-the-football air-kicks.
However I would not take any heart from this if I was a member of the parliamentary L/NP. I am confident of winning my bets against the L/NP at the 2016 federal election. This is mainly due to inductive chartist reasons – it would be well nigh unprecedented for a party to make an electoral comeback after such a long string of adverse polling results.
The problem for me is that this punting prediction is still at odds with my psephology, the Five-P model of political supply, which makes a very BOTE prediction of a narrow victory for the L/NP in 2016:
The Five-P models worked well for me from the early noughties through early tennies. But it has broken down in the aftermath of the GFC.
In ordinary circumstances the L/NP would be a shoo-in for a second term, particularly after such a landslide victory and with an opposition which is uninspiring to say the least. The economy is not in recession, although much depends on which pecuniary variable you choose to stand in for the economy. Its only had one term, the average is two-and one-half terms. Its policy settings (apart from climate change denial) are fairly innocuous, although voters might ask how sincere are the L/NP policy back-flips. Abbott’s personality is not nearly as cringe-inducing as Rudd-Gillard. And the L/NP at least shows signs that it is not an ethnic-branch stacked corrupt hereditary oligarchy, as the NSW ALP evolved into.
But these are not ordinary times. In the EU there is a populist uprising against elite failures to manage the very basics of state politics: a usable currency and effective borders. In the US likewise the populist support for Trump and Sanders is showing the moribund political Establishment a clean pair of heels. The Clinton-Bush dynasties led the US into the GFC, Iraq War and a leaking sieve border yet they want to give the US more of the hair of the dog!
The liberal media-academia complex are all at sea about this populist reaction and unable to comprehend whats going on. Thats because their membership of the Establishment elite makes them part of the problem, not the solution.
The whole world has been shocked into realising the horrors we have inflicted on the innocent people of the middle east and the human consequences. Our politicians are totally out of touch with their citizens and still think they can treat refugees as garbage and get away with it politically.
Shorten is so out of touch that today he – twice – referred to the shocking images of the little drowned “girl”.
Heartless ALP.
Veterans Today: Responsibility for boy’s death rests entirely with the United States and its Allies
The death of a child and the blood on Washington’s hands
When you finance an army of crazed murderers and send them into a country to deliberately sow chaos and instability, people are naturally going to try and seek safety.
If the chaos persists over a period of years with no end in sight, you will inevitably have a flood of refugees pouring out of the country.
This is the problem Europe is confronting now – and they brought it all on themselves by supporting America’s regime-change policies in Syria and Libya. Both countries were prosperous and had stable governments prior to the US interference.
The boy in the photo above, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach Wednesday, has been identified as three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, from the Syrian town of Kobani. His mother as well as his five-year-old brother, Galip, also drowned. Kobani is located near the Turkish border. The family were able to make it over that border and into Turkey, along with many other Syrians, in a stream of refugees that began when ISIS launched its siege on Kobani.
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Good points James.
We should remember,
-ISIS is a US creation (just like A-Q etc…).
-The disaster in Syria (and everywhere else) is 100% the fault of the US empire and its bloodthirsty machinery.
-Their political enablers in our duopoly system and their boosters (not just in the establishment media but also all over the net, even here) are directly responsible for the misery the whole of the civilized world is currently calling for an end of.
Speaking of psychology and diagnosis, everybody is doing it even Senator David Leyonhjelm who tells us that there is a psychological condition for people who think guns are dangerous or something like that. He said this on an interview on RN this morning.
His stumbling mumbling interview on RN this morning when he tries to make some intelligent and relevant comments about the Syrian refugees is a real life illustration of the First Dog on the Moon cartoon that the The Pond has posted today.
I do think he needs to see to his own abnormality before diagnosing other people.
Leyonhjelm didn’t list any of the diagnostic criteria that are usually provided by those using diagnostic systems such as the DSM but we all know that because he is a Libertarian Leyonhjelm knows everything about people and human nature. No need for any formal study or any of that sort of knowledge; the libertarian man has all the knowledge and intelligence anyone ever needs; it all just comes hard wired in his genes.
It’s all projection of course. The only cognitive processes David – and conservatives and libertarians with the standard personality that is similar to his – understands are those that he uses himself. These people cannot and or will not ‘walk in another’s shoes’ because…….? That is the question.
They are not curious about ‘why’ and not comfortable with creative ‘imagine-ing’ and hence they lack the ability to understand the cognitive processes of other people so Leyonhjelm solves all his cognitive dissonance by putting people he doesn’t understand in a category of being ‘abnormal’ despite having no understanding of ‘abnormal’ and what it is to be abnormal and so subject to a ‘diagnosis’.
And that question is one of the unsolvable issues that some psychs worry about. But, Leyonhjelm apparently believes that any attitude he doesn’t like is abnormal and that he is qualified to diagnose people … on national radio no less.