Is this a crime?

It certainly sounds like criminal activity perpetrated against the Australian taxpayer. From The Australian: “Annastacia Palaszczuk says the federal and state governments knew taxpayers could be slugged up to $450m to compensate mining giant Rio Tinto when the national energy plan was rushed through parliament this month.

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Create your own fediverse instance (for free!)

Had enough of Twitter and Facebook and want to stake your claim on the fediverse, a social network of decentralised, autonomous servers running on open source software? Look no further! I’m going to show you how to get Soapbox (frontend) and Pleroma Rebased (backend) up and running on your own server, for free.

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Corporate welfare, AFL edition

Imagine for a moment that you run a successful business – in fact, the most successful business in your industry. You want to expand. You could issue equity or borrow the funds, but both of those options come with a hefty amount of risk.

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What a waste

In March 2020, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) created the $200 billion Term Funding Facility (TFF), essentially a slush fund for banks that locked-in three-years' worth of funding at rates well below what was available on global wholesale markets.

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Why nations fail

The Australian government’s energy market intervention bill will be rammed through both houses of Parliament today with the support of the Greens and independent David Pocock. Less than a week old, the whole process has been rushed to the extent that the competition watchdog, the ACCC, failed to define what it meant by “new gas field”, and Treasury officials struggled to answer questions.

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