The Guardian recently reported that in the eyes of the American conservatives the ‘pink haired liberals’ are killing the New York Pizza. Unsurprisingly, the conservatives have added 2 and 2 and got 5, helped by News Corp’s New York Post.
The real story is in 2016, New York City legislated that filters be installed on the kitchen exhaust chimneys belonging to commercial kitchens, including pizza restaurants. The requirement was to reduce potentially carcinogenic particulate matter (smoke and dust) being emitted from the chimneys and being trapped in the lungs in nearby residents. A lot of New York pizza restaurants use coal or wood as fuel in their pizza ovens, producing considerable smoke which is sent up chimneys.
Conservatives have pounced on the regulation claiming that it is carbon emissions reduction by stealth and the filters are affecting the taste of the pizza. According to The Guardian’s report
What’s being asked of traditional oven pizza restaurants is simple: install a type of air filter in their chimneys to keep their cancer-causing dust from blowing into their neighbors’ homes. The city originally asked kitchens to do this by 2020, then postponed the plan until this year due to the pandemic. But many restaurants had already made the changes, some of them years before the rule was even drafted.
The filters are installed in the chimney close to the exit point and use a water vapour to wash the soot and particles out of the exhaust, then it collects in a tank connected to the sewer system. It also has the added benefit of cooling the exhaust air before the leave the chimney.
However, conservatives with an axe to grind can’t let the truth or logic stand in the way of the ongoing quest to enforce their political and social philosophy. There is no logical reason why the pizza taste should be affected if the particulate matter generated by the cooking fuel is removed from the exhaust airflow half way up the chimney. It is a ridiculous argument. Almost as ridiculous as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s claims about ‘The Voice’ referendum.
Dutton claimed he spent some time ‘attempting to understand’ the proposition and then he has claimed that the referendum is going to divide the community. He is going out of his way to be divisive, create straw men and cherry-pick the facts to suit his needs. If you think it sounds like the playbook of the conservatives in the USA, you could have a valid point. As Nine Newspapers suggests, Dutton [is] saying no with an American accent.
Dutton talks of ‘the Canberra voice’. The Voice proponents have recommended that a number of people from across Australia will comprise ‘The Voice’. Assuming they might meet in Canberra, they would make their way to Canberra from the area they represent, similar to Dutton making his way to Canberra to represent his constituents who reside in his electorate in the northern outskirts of Brisbane. It really doesn’t matter where they meet. What does matter is that the Committee has to be referenced in the Constitution so that future governments can’t abolish ‘The Voice’ without going back to the population for approval.
Dutton talks about what will happen if at some point in the future ‘The Voice’ Committee provides advice to the Australian Government of the day to move Australia Day from 26 January. January 26 was not always the Australia Day public holiday. Regardless that the proposal for ‘The Voice’ is to ‘recommend’ rather than ‘legislate’ on matters affecting our indigenous peoples to the government of the day, Australia Day was not a National Holiday until 1988 and was the Monday after the last weekend in January (to create a long weekend), only becoming a fixed date in 1994. If it did change again, the governments of the day would be making the decision – as they can ‘legislate’, not a group that constitutionally can only ‘recommend’. Quasi religious fervour for ‘national imagery’ is ‘Trump style’ conservative Americanism.
Dutton is claiming that the drafters of the Australian Constitution had almost ‘godlike insight’ which makes changing the Constitution heresy, similar to the US conservative claims regarding the drafters of the US Constitution. Our Australian drafters were clever people but neglected a number of important provisions, including making 26 January a nationwide public holiday for Australia Day (as that is now apparently sacrosanct), and discussion how our indigenous peoples 65,000-year-old civilisation should be recognised and celebrated by all Australians. If either ours or the US constitution drafters envisioned no change ever – they would not have put a procedure in the respective documents to enact change when required.
As Nine Newspaper’s article suggests:
There were further American echoes when Dutton dramatised the dangers of the Voice. Here, he cited three scenarios: potential disputes over the expansion of defence bases; funding allocations in the federal budget; and, most tellingly, what is taught in schools. In arguing that the “Voice may make a representation seeking that a particular version of Australian history be taught in classrooms”, he seemed almost to be channelling Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and alluding to one of the American culture war’s angriest new fronts: critical race theory.
If the Indigenous Voice to parliament came into being, Dutton warned of “an Orwellian effect where all Australians are equal but some Australians are more equal than others”. Again, this has parallels with the argument heard especially vehemently during the Reagan era against affirmative action, a debate in which whites were portrayed as the true victims of discrimination.
While some apparently have genuine concerns about the forthcoming referendum not going far enough or the need for treaty with our indigenous peoples prior to a ‘Voice to Parliament’, Dutton is playing us all for fools. Dutton is using the US conservative playbook to create fear, uncertainty and division in our society for his own ends. What those ends are is anyone’s guess.
The question Dutton won’t answer is who is better placed to recommend effective action to improve the lives of indigenous communities than a group of people representing the communities? If he has a different answer to recognition, a ‘Voice to Parliament’ and treaty, perhaps he could tell the rest of us how it would work. Because the Coalition’s famed ‘interventions’ in recent history certainly haven’t.
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The stale illogical argument against making those less equal, equal to those more equal meaning the less will get more so the more will get less.
Yep! I think I can think like Dutts if I try really hard.
” Dutton talks of ‘the Canberra voice’. ” We know that Dutton was briefed by Langton and Calmer about their model of the Voice and by Ken Wyatt who twice presented the Model to Cabinet. The Model specifies two levels of the Voice: Local/Regional, and National. The National Voice can only do its job when provided with input from the Local/Regional bodies. Dutton knows this yet chooses contemptuously to misrepresent the intent of the Voice. Soon may he go up in smoke.
His”ends” are crystal clear..to inflict a ‘fail’ on Albanese, and thereby chalk up a’win’ for himself.Never mind the harm he carelessly flings about to all and sundry.He’s a very desperate individual,and also supremely unintelligent,going downhill at an ever increasing rate.He, like so many of the remaining chumps in his rotten party are incapable of absorbing any lessons from history,even from the rejection of the electorate in the most recent election.Still wallowing in the attitudes and thinking of the ‘White Australia” policy era. The sooner this droob is erased from public view, the better off the entire country will be.
Outside of small pockets of Bananaland, he is absolutely unelectable.Have a crack,Anus,you know you want to.
Why would they representatives of the Voice have to travelling to Canberra? Why would they not use ZOOM?
I see that the coalition have invited Pauline Hanson to contribute to the NO campaign pamphlet.
And here’s me thinking that Pauline was functionally illiterate !
Dutton’s LNP = the fascist right-wing US Republican Trump party.
The Dutton Porelein Handjob approach to the Voice Referendum has nothing to do with reasoned logic except that the reason the ”No” case exists is because Murdick & LIARBRAL$ want to inflict a ”gotcha moment” on the Albanese LABOR government as one step in a three year attempt to return the COALition to the government benches with the subsequent flow of dollars to foreign owned multinational corporations.
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Discrimination against Aborigines is already established in the Australian Constitution and racist policies by all state & feral governments deny a fair distribution of government services and public infrastructure.
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This discrimination extends to all about 35% of Australian voters living in regional Australia while state & feral governments pour BILLIONS of dollars into metropolitan projects while ignoring regional public transport, like the Great Northern Railway (GNR) north of Armidale NSW.
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It is all very well for Beetrooter & the NOtional$ to plan for New England to become a 19th century theme park, but that proposal WILL NOT provide jobs for the squattocracy off-spring and the Japanese stranglehold on wool prices has already meant that the region DOES NOT ride on the sheep’s back ….. because there are not enough sheep (except NOtional$ voters).
Peter Plod is irrelevant. He has nothing to offer, no ideas, no original thoughts, vacuous, nihilistic, hopeless. As others have pointed out, he really isn’t all that bright. He is not even yesterday’s man. He is a fart in a lift: annoying, passing… gone.
Too much spud is decidedly bad for good health. I used to quite like pineapple on pizza, but it appears that being too close to anything troppo, like pineapple and Dutts, unfiltered, will exacerbate hot air and carcinogens into the atmosphere. So I’m eliminating them from my intake in consideration of the wellbeing of both me and the community at large.
Comparing Peter Dutton to a pizza oven is not cool, Pizza Ovens are great and have relevence, Dutton is IRRELEVENT.
So, please don’t insult pizza ovens, they are useful, Dutton isn’t.
Dutton is theanchovy of the canberra pizza. Pervading smell and reviled by most Aussies,
ps
It seems to me that dutton’s campaign depends on the things that the Aboriginal naysayers say can’t happen with the voice, happening with the voice????