surreptitiouswalk

What's the difference between "respect their culture" and "Federation of tribes and culture". Either you take the view that "respect their culture" means allowing people to retain and freely exercise their culture in public, e.g. speaking their language and celebrating their cultural events publicly, in which case it's really indistinguishable to a federation of cultures. The alternative view is, people can only speak English and practice English cultural things in public, in which case is that really "respecting their culture"?

I suspect Howard is dog-whistling the latter, because Australia is doing the former, and it certainly doesn't sound like he's supportive of that, otherwise why would be have so much trouble with it?

The Romans after they defeated the Greeks.

There was a podcast episode, I think from Democracy Sausage, that talked about how historically referendum no campaigning parties actually do poorly in the subsequent general election since they lean in to absolutely insane arguments during the campaign, which gets them the referendum win, but the loss in the general election. I hope that happens here.

I thought voting no was supposed to end the division?

You only need to look at the West Bank for an example of how things would play out with a more cooperative Palestinian government. Same shit, no autonomy, no say in its future, no say in its foreign policy, with the added bonus of a slow ethnic cleansing as Israel slowly annexes it's land.

There are no good guys here.

Well looks like we know what Price has got for selling out her people. Now we just gotta find out what Warren Mundine's pay day is.

So you want to help people who are born into disadvantage but you don't want to hear from those very same people?

Oooooookay?

Literally pulled a Mark McGowen. But to be fair, probably the best way to go rather than have it drag on for ages.

I actually find state politics to be very different than federal or even local politics. Here in NSW, Labor have massively ramped up development, even more than the Coalition did (their head of the department of planning suggested some corruption is acceptable for accelerated development). However they put the brakes on public transport projects started by the Coalition.

Local council level Greens and Labor are all anti-development NIMBYs though.

Probably goes to show that "left" and "right" aren't really monolithic terms.

I don't think the left and right divide on this issue has ever been that clean. The left are generally anti-development (to maintain local characteristics and heritage) but pro high density developer (but always in someone else's suburb). The right have been pro-development but mostly in poor or outlining suburbs.

There's so much self interest at play it's hard to actually implement a good sensible centre policy.

It is, but unfortunately it's the smallest increase in representation that we could offer to our First Australians that could actually get up. I don't need to comment on how even that little increase in influence that I'd bring proposed is going down.

Completely agree. That property value grows over time in a fixed area is natural behaviour, as an area develops, density grows and demand increases. But that growth is not necessarily "productive". The only time that value is productive is if it incentivises redevelopment into higher density dwellings to meet the demand in that area. However this has been perverted into property owners who have paid off their property to just sit on the valuable land and reap the capital gains.

Capital gains from land value really needs to be taxed in a special way as you suggest. I would propose two approaches:

• Adding land tax (and abolishing stamp duty on property) that's not based on your property value but on the value of a property you're on (so high density apartments would end up with minimal land tax

• increasing capital gains from land tax by either having a progressive taxation rate on capital gains due to land value (which would ignore increase property value from renovations etc) or capping it entirely (so gains above that are taxed at 100%).