• 392 Posts
  • 380 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
  • zero_gravitas@aussie.zonetoAustralia@aussie.zone•The 50 best Australian songs of the 90sEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    Madison Avenue - Don’t Call Me Baby

    I had no idea this was Australian! Now you’ve mentioned it, though, there’s a noticeable lack of hard ‘r’ in some lines (for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-mRcnF5tSc).

    Some classics in this list. Such a list can’t exist without people pointing out who was missed, though. This reads like a top 50 of what JJJ had on high rotation. It’s missing several acts that were bigger than most of the names on this list.

    Agreed - and thanks for making your list of things it omitted - but the list was compiled by a poll of Double J staff, so it was always going to be biased towards deep-cuts, and it’s a good thing to bring lesser-known and forgotten music to attention (so long as people don’t take the list to be authoritative).

  • zero_gravitas@aussie.zonetoAustralia@aussie.zone•Australians who think inequality is high have less faith in democratic institutions, study findsEnglish
    6·
    6 days ago

    “People who believe system is failing have less faith in system”

    I know it’s the headline writer, who I think isn’t usually the author of the article (I don’t know how The Conversation does it, though), and much less still is it reflective of worth of the study, but these kinds of headlines still annoy me. Maybe they’re written to annoy people, I don’t know.

    The headline isn’t even accurate. The question asked in the survey isn’t about whether respondents think inequality is high, but whether they think income distribution is fair (the exact wording is: “How fair do you think income distribution is in Australia?”).

    Department of Home Affairs Strengthening Democracy Taskforce

    This is a slightly terrifying phrase. I still associate Home Affairs so strongly with Dutton - as the mega-portfolio that was created to placate him - that it’s hard not to read ‘Strengthening Democracy Taskforce’ in the same way as American war-mongering rhetoric of ‘SPREADING FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY’.

    This impression is not helped by this bit of double-speak later in the article 😂:

    The Department of Home Affairs’ 2024 Strengthening Democracy report describes Australia’s democratic resilience as “strong, but vulnerable”.

    This suggests Australia’s satisfaction with democracy is at risk. It may erode further if voters think the major parties aren’t sufficiently responsive to the economic pressures they are under.

    Not to defend the state of our ‘democracy’, but I feel compelled to point out that thanks to preferential voting we can vote for parties other than the major parties. Unfortunately many of the minor parties are also in favour of policies that would increase inequality, but the Greens consistently campaign on reducing inequality. I suppose a lot of people who might be roughly characterised as ‘right-wing populists’ and against status-quo neoliberalism would find the Greens unpalatable, though. Do we need a party that’s like the Greens but with One Nation’s aesthetics or something?

  • zero_gravitas@aussie.zonetoAustralia@aussie.zone•No-fault evictions banned and break-lease fees capped under sweeping reforms in VictoriaEnglish
    4·
    15 days ago

    That’d rely on tenants reporting their evictions to the tentants’ union, and most people aren’t engaged with the tenants’ union, and even among those who are, relying on tenants reporting would probably be a bit spotty.

    If the government is serious about enforcement, I think the logical thing would be for the bond authority to track it. They could be required to log the reason when the bond is claimed, and then their system would flag it if another bond was lodged for the address within the specified period.

    If the government doesn’t implement a real system for enforcement, though, then yeah, some system through the tenants’ union would be better than nothing.