Royce Kurmelovs

@roycerk2.bsky.social

9347 Followers 1330 Following

Journalist. Author of The Death of Holden (2016) and Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (2024). For more me: https://www.roycekurmelovs.com/ Get me on Signal: RoyceK.11

Statement.
Screenshot from orders.
Under Xi Jinping, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has overseen a drive to use big data in the name of public safety to stamp out dissent and prevent potential terrorist attacks. Other countries employ similar kinds of surveillance systems, but in China, there is little protection against police overreach, according to Maya Wang, the deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “That kind of integration of data is really quite unprecedented and illustrates China’s lack of safeguards,” Ms. Wang said.
"63 The apparent conflation in places may lead to an inference that this application is part of Woodside's broader response to discourage protests against its Projects. 64 The possibility of such conflation suggests strongly to me that the Court need be particularly careful that any order made not go beyond the Incident itself and, in the words of the Chief Justice quoted above, not go beyond what is necessary to provide the plaintiffs an effective remedy."
Screenshot from the Twitter account of journalist Desiree Townsend, who has been pursuing a story about McConnell's health for some time, saying that the US Senator is brain dead. Townsend is quote-tweeting Laura Loomer, a notoriously unreliable commentator associated with Donald Trump and his administration. I have no other context for Townsend.
It's not very often decision makers "get it", but when they do, boy is it satisfying.
Needless to say, I was left stunned by the rhetorical force, clarity of purpose and forensic detail in response to what were a very simple list of questions in this particular media reply.
SA EPA: Why FOI when one could simply... put in a media request? Me: Ohhh, boy...
Oof. I mean, that's just got to sting.
More precisely, the agency here seems to have, in so many words, told the Ombudsman that this was a "fuck off" charge designed specifically to act as a deterrent and ensure a "more targeted and management" process that serves to "[minimise] the diversion of EPA resources".
"In my view, sorting and compiling 15 emails is not a time-consuming task." Call the police. There's been a murder.
The agency only provided this detail to the Ombudsman after a provisional determination was made. This is the first time I've seen any of this full accounting. But you get the message though: it was all very hard.
Fair's fair. If the independent referee takes a look and says it checks out, it checks out.
The first page of my submissions as part of the external review process. These are useful to anyone who might need to fight their own charges.
The cost breakdown supplied by the agency. Not the amounts, note the hours. They will become relevant.
The case information for Kurmelovs v EPA if anyone ever needs to find this again for some bizarre reason. For the record, when I use "Ombudsman" in this thread, I'm talking about the office, not the decision maker.
Media statement from GetUp!
Definition of Gish Gallop from Wikipedia.
Excerpt of headline and sub heading from an article published by The Advertiser concerning the tour down under. The headline and dek don't have much relationship with the body of the text and appears to be ragebait.
Copy of briefing for AMEC brief, with hand-written notes.
List of officials, including that R.W. Allen ("Bob") gave a presentation on climate change as part of the process.
First and only direct mention of climate change at this time. The issue was still new, but the lack of engagement with the implications is remarkable.
First paragraph of the report discussing the potential offered by renewable energy. It acknowledges the benefits of this up top, but...
Excerpt from a draft report produced by the Australian Minerals and Energy Council.
Screenshot of the marketing copy from the Sea Forest Farm Tour visit on the Beaker Street Festival website.
Excerpt from reporting outlining the analysts' read of the landscape.
Excerpt breaking out demographics of Australian property investors.
Excerpt from S&P report on Australian mortgage backed securities.
JOURNALIST: Some of the coalition are making a point of the cost of your commitments to the COP in your role as president. Do you have a response to that and can you guarantee every dollar is being well spent? BOWEN: Yes. Dan Tehan is the biggest hypocrite in the federal parliament. I mean, when he was a minister, he wore out the carpet in the first-class lounge at Melbourne airport. He went to the Maldives twice at taxpayer expense in his last year as minister, twice. He went all through Europe, United States, Japan. I don't criticise that travel, but I could travel all year, I wouldn't catch up with his travel costs as a minister. And yet I've been overseas once this year on official business to a ministerial meeting and he's criticised that. He's also been overseas once this year to Taiwan, which I don't criticise at taxpayer expense, but he's a hypocrite. I didn't seek a debate about federal ministers travelling, if he wants one, I'll give him one. He's the biggest hypocrite in the federal parliament.
The Joint Venture
Commissioner Brereton said: “The Commission was established to provide independent assurance to the Australian people that corrupt conduct in the Commonwealth public sector is appropriately addressed. “Over the last three years, much progress has been made in pursuit of our mission of enhancing integrity in the Commonwealth public sector. While our mere existence has influenced and shaped behaviour for the better, that has been powerfully reinforced by our extensive education and engagement program, which has enhanced the integrity culture across the sector. “We have completed assessment of more than 92% of the 7,624 referrals received over the last three years. “We have published 7 investigation reports.
ANAO Excerpt discussion charges.
Excerpt from ANAO report on the use of practical refusal provisions.
Excerpt from ANAO report saying the claim AI-forms are generating mass applications is false.
ANAO excerpt relating to FOI performance of Treasury.
A screenshot of paragraphs 11 and 12 of the ANAO report.
Excerpt from ANAO report.
"Had the Israeli plan to ignite war between us and Iran succeeded, the region would have been plunged into ruin and destruction. Thousands of our sons and daughters would have been lost in a battle in which we had no stake. Israel would have succeeded in imposing its will on the region and remained the only actor in our surroundings."
CHRIS BOWEN: So Tim, we’ve been calling for this situation in the Straits of Hormuz to be resolved for weeks. We’ve called for action to be taken to lift the restraints on the Straits of Hormuz and see free trade flow. Obviously, we’ve also called for an end to the conflict in the Middle East so that the Middle East can return to more normal arrangements, and the world can return to a more normal economy. That would be a good thing. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, all of us have engaged in those calls. Obviously, we recognise the complexity of the situation. But it would be good if this situation is resolved for the world, because as soon as it’s resolved the world economy can get back to more normal levels. It won’t happen overnight. Even if the Straits of Hormuz opened tonight, there would still be impacts on supply chains - not just for fuel, but for other things as well.
Rystad's analysis concludes that substantial government subsidies would be required to deliver the price signal needed to build a new gas plant. “We estimate that about 40 per cent of the project capex will require an upfront subsidy or equivalent support to reach financial close,” he says. “Another potential solution is to enable gas projects to compete in the federal Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) to support revenues and improve bankability,” he adds. Around two-thirds of gas capacity in the NEM is owned by SnowyHydro, and the gentailers EA, Origin Energy and AGL. When The Energy asked Origin Energy why it hadn’t invested in a new gas plant for 14 years, executive general manager for supply and operations, Greg Jarvis agreed that their changed role in the NEM had altered their project economics. “If the market doesn’t provide predictable investment signals, it becomes increasingly difficult to attract the investment needed,” he says. “This highlights the importance of policy settings, including capacity-style mechanisms such as those contemplated in the NEM Review, evolving to support timely investment in firming and dispatchable capacity.”
Excerpt 1.
BOWEN: Well, no, because what I’m talking about there is the immediate challenge. And then there are some who say the answer to this is to somehow become more reliant on fossil fuels. That’s not a view I share. It’s not a view that any ministerial counterpart around the world I’ve spoken to shares. We are dealing with a short-term issue, yes, of supply. There’s been a fossil fuel supply shock. This is a fossil fuel supply crisis internationally. The answer to that is sensible measures like the ones we’re undertaking, the Prime Minister’s undertaking. And in the longer term, if you can reduce to some degree, or a greater degree, our dependence on those fossil fuels, that’s a good thing. So, for example, our EV uptake in Australia, our number of EVs in the fleet is relatively low at the moment, high in sales terms but low as a percentage of the fleet. It takes a long time. Even with the relatively low EV uptake we have, that’s avoiding the use of 15 million litres a week of fuel. That’s a good thing. That’s 15 million litres we have available for others. That’s part of it. Now, if we have higher EV sales and higher EV penetration and higher EV percentages across the entire fleet, that figure will come down even more and provide more fuel options for those for whom an EV is not a viable option just right now. And again, I participated yesterday in the conversation on the Prime Minister’s behalf with the Prime Ministers of Japan, Singapore, East Timor or Bangladesh, India, a whole bunch of Asian and Asian-adjacent countries yesterday. It was a very common theme from the interventions by Prime Ministers and Presidents. One, we have to work together in the short term, that was the first theme. Two, this underlines and underpins one of the reasons why we’re electrifying and trying to get more sovereign sources of renewable energy, so we are less reliant on these fragile fossil fuel supply chains.
For some, the spiral began in November when their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits were put on hold due to the federal government shutdown. United Way’s Central West Virginia helpline saw more than a 1,300% increase during that time, and calls for help paying utilities were second only to housing last year. More than one in three West Virginia households is considered energy burdened, spending more than 6% of their income on electricity and other fuel costs. Of those, about 20% are low-income residents who shoulder some of the highest energy costs in the state. Last year, Trump fired the staff of a federal program that assists millions of low-income Americans with heating bills in the winter and proposed eliminating all of its funding in his budget — a move repeated this year. Congress allocated money for it, but billions of dollars were delayed due to the shutdown. However, many West Virginians falling behind on bills are not eligible to apply because they make just a little too much money.
Ashley Nicole Dixon of Danese works as a manager at a Dollar General store and has a teenage daughter at home and another in college. She flipped through bills on her phone totaling more than $5,000 charged last year for electricity in her house that’s just over 1,000 square feet, even though her air conditioner didn’t work last summer. She voted for Trump, but said she’s done with him because he and other Republican politicians in West Virginia’s Capitol aren’t looking out for her interests. “I love West Virginia because it’s beautiful. But anymore, it’s just a sham from the local government all the way up to Charleston,” she said, adding she believes the state’s Public Service Commission should be elected, and Trump should send her a check since he promised to cut electricity bills in half. “I have no choice. It has to be paid,” she said. “And that’s what makes me sick because now I’m going to have to go … take more money out of my savings account just to keep the lights on.”
“We just roll back regulations and we keep being promised that deregulating and privatizing our systems is gonna fix everything, and it never does,” said Caitlin Ware, a pastor who advocates for clean water in southern West Virginia — her thoughts briefly interrupted as the electricity abruptly went off in her Sandyville United Methodist Church. “It only makes the rich richer, and it only puts us in a worse situation.”
First paper titled "CO2 Hedging Strategies The Impact of Uncertainty Upon Analysis"
Excerpt from the start of the paper.
"Economist journalist making things up. This election should tell you who to trust in future. 🇭🇺🗳️"
"Philip Pilkington Philip Pilkington is a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute. He is a macroeconomist and former investment professional. He is the author of The Reformation in Economics and the forthcoming The Collapse of Global Liberalism. His writing has appeared in numerous outlets including The Telegraph, The New York Post, American Affairs, Post-Liberal Order, Moneyweek, The Spectator and Unherd. He is the co-host of the Multipolarity podcast"
Screenshot shot of Tony Abbott's biography on the Danube Institute's page.
"The third failure of this effort to keep the Strait open was military. The US was procuring approximately 90 Tomahawk cruise missiles per year at the outset of the conflict. More than 168 were expended in the first 100 hours – that is nearly three years of production in four days. An Iranian Shahed drone costs roughly $50,000. A Patriot intercept costs $3–4 million. Military advisers were explicit: at this rate of expenditure, strategic reserves would be insufficient for the Pacific theatre."
"For well over a century scholars have been aware that some Aboriginal languages contained loanwords from languages spoken in the islands to the north of Australia.1 Although early authors spoke of ‘Malay’ influence2 or, more accurately, of ‘Makassan’ contacts,3 they conceded that the influence need not necessarily have been from a single language group. Speakers of various Austronesian languages had made trips, primarily concerned with the trepang industry, to the north coast of Australia from before 18004 until 1906.5 Linguists currently use the cover term Austronesian, rather than Malayo-Polynesian, the term favoured earlier (but now applied to a subgroup of Austronesian), to classify the family of languages spoken from Formosa in the north to New Zealand (Maori) in the south, from Madagascar (Malagasy) in the west to Easter Island or Hawaii in the east. We are dealing here with members of the western branch of this family, particularly Makassarese and Buginese, who came into contact with speakers of Aboriginal languages on the Arnhem Land coast. Other possible contacts include speakers of Malay and Javanese, central and southern Philippine Bisayan slaves (used on trepang expeditions), southern Philippine Lanaw pirates (who apparently operated off the coast of northern Australia), and Bajau entrepreneurs. Numerous articles have been written on the topic of Macassan influence on Aboriginal languages,6 but no serious effort has been made to identify the precise donor languages on scientific linguistic grounds.7 As Macknight has observed: Enough is now known about the Macassans to set some limit to their usefulness as a general ragbag source of the unusual. This is not to say that there have been no other external cultural influences in northern Australia, but discussion of such other influences should also specify the presumed source of the influence"
Liam Bartlett Wikipedia entry.
Transcript, screenshot 001.
Albanese comments as reported in The Guardian.
Excerpt from transcript of interview betwee Chris Bowen and Sarah Ferguson on ABC's 7.30.
Excerpt from Al Jazeera English liveblog.
"USAC is notably well-connected to the senior ranks of the Australian government and foreign policy establishment. Australian industry minister, Madeleine King, who has fiercely defended Australia gas exports to Japan, served as USAC’s inaugural chief operating officer. The think tank’s website includes photos of King at its events, one under a section titled “our partners”, and in its annual reports. In a speech given in July 2024, King described Flake as her “good friend.” Notably, Flake also serves as a director on another well-connected think tank, the Sydney-based United States Studies Centre (USSC), a sister organization to USAC which lists its east-coast counterpart as a “major collaborative partner” on its website. USSC’s board is made up of other significant political figures. These include former Coalition senator Arthur Sinodinos, who serves as chair, and fellow directors Kim Beazley, former Labor leader, and Stephen Conroy, for Labor communications minister. Both Sindinos and Beazley previously served as U.S. ambassadors, and both sit on USAC’s board, alongside former Western Australian Liberal premier and Australian ambassador to Japan, Richard Court, and USSC CEO Michael J Green."
"The institution was among several think tanks subject to a recent government review in July 2024 that recommended structural changes to how the ASPI was funded and governed, including the end of a consistent government grant for its work. Since then the organization has been forced to make up the funding gap by seeking private donations. Alongside the independent review and growing criticism of the Japanese government, ASPI’s output appears to have undergone a shift in tone. The organization began to step up its attacks criticizing renewable energy as unreliable, promoting gas, and attacking critics of Australian fossil fuel production as “naive” and “ideological”. In one example from July 2025, Dr John Coyne, ASPI’s National Security Program director, defended the Japanese re-sale of Australian gas as “sovereignty-enhanicng economic diplomacy” in an editorial published by The Australian, a Murdoch-owned national newspaper. In the article, Coyne attacked critics from competing think tanks, The Australia Institute and Jubilee Australia, both organizations that have generally argued for taxes on Australian gas exports, the creation of a gas reservation policy, and the managed phaseout of oil, gas and coal in response to climate change."