Tau

I expect they'll be back together in some form come next election, I can't see the Libs - let alone the Nationals - forming government in their own right.

I am curious as to what will happen in Queensland state level now the federal parties have split - will they split the LNP party there?

How do you actually come PM if you don’t have a party that can get a majority vote?

You convince a majority of the members of the House of Reps to agree to support you in passing bills required for operating the government (basically bills allowing them to spend money, also known as supply) and to support you if a motion of no confidence is put forward.

It'll be a bit fiddly cutting and joining but it sounds like a workable idea. To simplify things a little you could leave the original stormwater outlet configuration in place and just add a vertical pipe coming up from the lower link to a 90 degree bend and valve at the desired height for the bin outlet - the water for this will be feeding up from the bottom anyway so it doesn't have to be connected at the top.

If the top of the wheelie bin still opens and there's room to put it at that end of the tank you could even set up the lowered outlet to stick out like a tap so you can just put the bin under to fill up rather than hook up the hose.-

It seems odd that they're talking about phonics being a recent thing. At the risk of dating myself I remember a phonics based system being used when I was in primary school in the late 90s, though I couldn't tell you much more since that's a while ago now and I generally spent my time in those lessons reading rather than paying attention anyway. Did it drop out of use in the meantime or something?

Ms Saffioti said for most of the year the area would be closed to motor vehicles

That's annoying, Australia needs more tracks people can actually use. Instead we get this sort of thing and it's still not good enough for the anti vehicle crowd (who are more than happy to tell you to take it to a track but then turn around and do their best to block even use of existing tracks).

Parks does often give the impression that they'd rather the plebs didn't actually go into their parks, but I think them booking ghost camps might be a step too far given they could just reduce the nominal capacity further to get the same effect.

I would bet the vast majority of the problem is your second option of people booking out campgrounds to avoid others (with a side helping of those who aren't sure which day they want to go out so they book all options). Looking at who has a record of cancelling bookings would probably allow one to cut out a lot of this as I suspect you'd find a bunch of repeat offenders.

Closer to cities where demand is higher, the campsites are more desirable and therefore the ghost booking issue is worse. A higher fee discourages that. On the downside, you pay more for convenience of not having to drive far.

The tier system described appears to be more based on available facilities though rather than visitor numbers, while it does mention demand in passing this isn't quantified and the tier table shown works off facilities/servicing.

I would agree there does tend to be correlation between high demand campgrounds and highly serviced ones so you do have a point with high prices for higher tiers being necessary to some extent. I do think though that applying a state wide pricing system will end up with noticeably higher prices in a lot of places not near the major centres (or the major attractions).

The removal of fees and bookings for the unserviced and largely unmanaged tier of campgrounds is a welcome change, I did not like it when they introduced these.

Not getting 100% of the booking charge back sounds like it should cut down on people booking when they don't actually mean to turn up, so I'd say that's reasonable.

I have reservations about how expensive the higher tier charges are though, even the mid tiers are getting pricey for what's supposed to be a cheap activity.

It was always a shame watching the old timber bridges get replaced with the comparatively soulless concrete designs, nice to see that some are escaping that treatment.

Something that was touched upon in the article but I think worthwhile enough to mention specifically is we should have a greater ability to manufacture essential materials ourselves - this would not be strictly defence spending but is definitely adjacent to it. Things like fuel are an obvious one here but there's plenty of basics we don't make on shore. As an example I'm thinking of the shortage of saline solution that got into the news a while back - that's something very commonly used and literally just salt mixed with water, but we rely on importing it...

I looked into volunteering for the local SES once (when I was looking for stuff to do with my life after uni) and they turned me down, so actually accepting people who are interested is something that might help with their numbers.

Not only at Christmas, but delicious soft cheeses are a more occasional food normally (as I work on avoiding both draining the bank account and having to buy larger pants).