All round rugby nut. Wallaby and Western Force fan. I’m starting a crusade on climate change.
Perth, Western Australia
Joined June 2019
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Simon Clark retweeted
JD Vance: "Gas prices are too high ... they skyrocket every time some tinpot dictator decides to throw a tantrum."
Sir, show some respect. That dictator is your boss.
Simon Clark retweeted
If you or I hacked Medicare and stole - repeat stole - data we would be charged with a criminal offence. Open AI should be charged. smh.com.au/politics/federal/…
Simon Clark retweeted
A man who builds artificial intelligence for a living said this week that there's better than a one-in-ten chance it kills every human being on earth within ten years.
I read it before sunrise. Then the house woke up. Charlotte came downstairs looking for her shoes. Jack wanted to know what was for breakfast. I hugged them both and kissed them goodbye and Allison took them to school, like it was any other Wednesday morning in Greensboro.
The man is a safety researcher at Anthropic, one of the companies actually building this technology. Not a fringe voice. Someone whose entire job is to look for the danger. He said his company is trying. He said nobody has solved the problem, and nobody is on track to. He said it hours after a colleague resigned and wrote that the labs are “gambling with our lives.”
I have not stopped thinking about it since.
Last year I stood on a sidewalk and watched my daughter walk into kindergarten and I cried in the car afterward like a fool. You parents know the feeling. We spend their whole small life building a floor under them, because the world is large and they are not, and holding it back is the one job we actually have.
And then the engineers who build this technology tell you there's a one-in-ten chance none of it matters, and the people we elected say nothing and do nothing.
We already know how to handle this. We have done it before.
We do not let a private company build weapons and sell them on the open market. The Manhattan Project was not private industry acting alone. We do not let a drug company put a pill on a shelf because it feels good about the pill. We make them prove it, in public, with data, under penalty. We do not let an automaker sell a car until someone who doesn't work for them has driven it into a wall.
We made those rules because people died first. Every one of them is written in somebody's blood.
But a handful of technology companies are building something their own engineers say could end us, and we have asked them for nothing. No safety standard. No independent testing. No liability when it goes wrong. Nothing but the good intentions of an industry that spent twenty years showing us precisely what it is willing to trade for profit. Our children's attention. Our discourse. Our ability to agree on what is true.
The reason for the silence isn't complicated. It's money. This industry is spending more to lobby our government than it ever has, and too many people in office have quietly decided that their donors are their constituents.
My party has let people down. I'm not going to stand here and pretend otherwise, and I don't think you'd believe me if I did.
But look at what the other side has done with total control of the House, the Senate, the White House, and the courts.
Their One Big Beautiful Bill let data center developers write off an entire buildout in the first year, while families across North Carolina watch their power bills climb to keep those same buildings cold.
Three separate times they have tried to strip states like ours of the authority to regulate this technology at all. First a ten-year ban buried in that bill, pulled out 99 votes to 1 the moment it saw daylight. Then the defense bill. Then an executive order in December and a White House framework in March asking Congress to try again.
Understand what that means. They are trying to take the pen out of our hands. Raleigh is the closest thing we have to a government the people can reach, and they want it forbidden from protecting us.
Nothing on children and social media. Nothing on ratepayers. Nothing on workers. Nothing on AI safety.
That isn't a failure to act. That is a choice, made on purpose, for someone else's benefit at our family's expense.
Simon Clark retweeted
Says the politician who has banned the national broadcaster from her media events! Laughable!
Labor is copying the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship playbook.
China learned long ago that you don’t need to censor every citizen, you just need to create a culture of fear and make the platforms do it for you.
These tactics have been used by authoritarian regimes across the world to gag their political opponents time and time again.
The powers will make sure social media companies feel the only option is to over-censor.
The Minister and e-Safety Commissioner get open-ended power to classify anything as harmful.
Today that’s harm to children’s safety. But tomorrow these powers will be abused to censor complaints about immigration because they harm Labor’s version of “social cohesion”.
There are some issues on social media. But this can’t be an excuse to bring in a China-style censorship regime.
Social cohesion under Labor means sit down, shut up and don’t complain.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wakes up everyday dreading the next social media post he makes because he knows he’ll be smashed by thousands of comments calling out Labor Lies.
Minister Wells complains that Australians don’t believe her after Labor’s Lies.
Senior public servants being paid more than the Prime Minister are complaining about their embarrassing answers being shared on social media.
This is a government that hates transparency and hates being accountable to the Australian public.
Labor hates Australians having the ability to voice their disagreement on social media.
After losing a safe Labor seat in the Secret Harbour by-election, the government is desperately trying to censor the internet to keep their jobs and their grip on power.
Labor knows they can’t win the debate, so they’re changing the rules and making social media companies gag you.
One Nation says no to Labor’s censorship power-grab. Australians have the right to have their say.
Simon Clark retweeted
The irreplaceable #CathyWilcox
Simon Clark retweeted
“We must protect political debate by stopping any protesters and media who present things that make us look bad.”
Simon Clark retweeted
Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you reaching out to ask what you got wrong.
The clip we’re discussing is less than 90 seconds long. What I’m about to do demonstrates Brandolini's Law: where the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that required to produce it. Or, in this case, it takes around 600 words to correct 90 seconds of your economic fan fiction.
1⃣ Between 0 and 30 seconds
You begin by confusing government debt with the Future Fund and appear to suggest that the Future Fund can't exist along side Govt debt.
They’re different things. One can exist without the other, and in Australia they do.
Australia's Future Fund was established in 2006 with an initial govt investment of about $60B. Its first annual report, in 2008, showed assets of around $64 billion - not the $100B you suggested.
Then, at around 27 seconds, you talk about the Future Fund as though it ceased to exist (you used the word 'had' as in past tense).
It still very much exists Dave. In fact, it's grown every single year since it was created. Today it's worth around $270 billion, or over $330 billion once the other funds under management are included (eg Medical Research / Housing Australia / Drought).
So before we're even 30 seconds into the clip you've managed to confuse government debt, the Future Fund, its size, and whether it still exists.
That’s a lot of economic history to get wrong in under 30 seconds.
2⃣ Around 32 seconds
You then claim Kevin Rudd used the Future Fund to "flush money through the economy".
Again, that’s simply false. The Future Fund wasn't used to fund the stimulus. It wasn't used to build school halls. It wasn’t used for any of the things you’re describing. In your defence, you do briefly flirt with the possibility that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. Sadly, it was a very short-lived relationship.
The GFC stimulus was funded through government borrowing.
For context, construction approvals were collapsing, more than a million Australians worked in construction, and the objective was to stop unemployment exploding during the worst global financial crisis in generations.
You're welcome to argue that was the wrong policy (but you didn't). You’re not entitled to rewrite where the money came from.
3⃣ At about 44 seconds
You say, "I might be wrong".
I concede you were correct during this part of the video.
4⃣ From 44 seconds onwards
You make a series of broad claims about the GFC response.
Yes, government debt increased. That's true.
What you omit is that Australia's stimulus largely went directly to households rather than primarily rescuing financial institutions, as happened in many other countries.
The aim was simple: keep people spending, businesses operating and Australians employed while global demand collapsed. It's known as counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
Whether you agree with it politically is your business.
The specific outcome for Australia isn't contested though - Australia was one of only two economies in the OECD to avoid recession during the Global Financial Crisis. There's no reality where that wasn’t a comparatively impressive outcome.
The money didn’t need to "trickle down". The entire point was that it started at the bottom.
5⃣ Government debt
Throughout the clip (and in life generally) you repeatedly return to the theme Labor is responsible for Australia’s debt (which btw is comparatively low).
Here are the actual numbers of net debt added by each Govt since 2007.
> Rudd/Gillard: about $190 billion over six years.
> Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison: about $366 billion over nine years, around two-thirds of which pre-dated COVID.
> Albanese: about $75 billion over four years.
Those figures don’t support the story you've been telling people. And that’s really the issue.
This isn't about getting one date wrong or misremembering one statistic. Nearly every claim in your 90-second clip turns out to be either wrong or misleading.
If you're going to publicly lecture Australians about economic history, the bare minimum expectation is that you’ve first acquainted yourself with it.
Because once the errors have been pointed out, as they have been to you multiple times, every repetition stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a strategy.
Given your very public coffee with Angus Taylor last week, perhaps people are entitled to ask what that strategy might be.
Simon Clark retweeted
Albo shuts down Hanson’s monoculture “nonsense”
“ppl are proud of their ethnicity”
Says on first fleet arrival “Not everyone was at one. There were some in chains & some in charge of ppl in chains”💥
“It’s a nonsense argument to go back to something that was never there” #auspol
Simon Clark retweeted
Why should hard working Australians have to subsidies people with investment properties?
A bad policy by Liberal John Howard gone.
Labor continues to fix the LNP mess they leave behind.
Simon Clark retweeted
For most of us, we can’t even imagine what Nestory’s journey has been like.
As with all refugees.
Displaced, homeless, full of hope but in desperate need of safety. A chance. An opportunity at life.
With a dream and a ball, making a new life, in a country with a proud history of welcoming refugees, but facing its own forces of opposition today.
Nestory didn’t just shoot the ball into the Turkish net, he struck a lightning bolt to the conscience of millions of Australians.
How can we cheer one brilliant, skilled, explosive and confident young kid representing us, and we him, and simultaneously portray refugees or new arrivals as less worthy?
It also should raise the question of how refugees come to be? Everyone wants to live a safe life at home, with kin, generations of family, not having to ask for a chance..
But conflict, it’s funding, the breakdown in international law, the weapons industry needing to be fed, exploitation of resources, religious tribalism and extremism, all create the more than a hundred million people who have fled their home.
It is these drivers we must stop, and these causes we must never support nor participate in.
Football brings everyone together and shows us what we share.
Now, we share a love of a young Aussie kid who overcame every barrier put in his way, to reach the pinnacle of world sport.
And that is needed more than ever.
From being born in a refugee camp to scoring at a World Cup. A message to millions. ⭐️
Nestory Irankunda’s journey from displacement to becoming Australia’s youngest #FIFAWorldCup goalscorer shows what’s possible when hope, talent and opportunity come together. 🌍⚽
