“A university pathway is highly valued, ought to be available, ought to be accessible with minimal sense of struggle for rural children and indeed students everywhere but so should a high quality vocational pathway.”
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Rebates on ammo for demonstrated feral kills?
Could it be a Job Guarantee job to hunt and kill ferals for minimum wage, with potentially free ammo provided? At least if there is pay involved disposal of carcasses, hi-vis vests and high quality training provided could be part of the job description - “park ranger/pest controller”. That way you don’t just have hobby hunters coming in and taking a wage for something they’d otherwise do for free i.e. if you want to get paid by the hour for pest control you need to meet those requirements and do it by the book. Potential source of income for unemployed in rural/regional areas and farmers during hard times, better than eking out an existence off of Newstart/UBI.
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just sayin’
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Well, since it’s calving season and since I have a migraine right now, I’d give my left leg for the damned cows around here being a little quieter.
No, I haven’t turned into a farmer, but I am currently living on a dairy farm (400 acres, approx. 380 head of cattle, not counting the calves).
lol … wait until the calves are weaned. That’s when the cows get loud!
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That’s already begun. What do you think triggered the migraine? 
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It’s occurred to me that our gene-patents policy is a little incomplete; it doesn’t really consider non-human non-natural genes.
What is a non-natural gene?
Are you talking about the artificial nucleotides X,Y compared to the usual A,C,G,T?
I think of genes as the code that programs living things. By virtue of being living, it is in my mind ‘natural’ and should not be subject to IP law.
Artificial gene sequences, not new nucleotides.
I’m thinking more about the sort of ‘bit-twiddling’ equivalent that CRISPR enables rather than the cruder transgenic splicing.
There’s also an interesting comparison with the right to be able to understand and modify the software on your devices.
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We should definitely be clear on this and certainly permissive of the use of it on one’s self, while cautious of permitting unregulated commercial or political (ideological) exploitation of it.
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I mentioned the issue in my submission to the Copyright Regulations initiative :
I’ll point it out to the reporters
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I think this is a reasonable idea …
Farmers hope the new ‘ag visa’ would be flexible enough to allow workers to return year-on-year, for say three to five years, before renewal was needed.
This would address their concerns around having to train people every year — from scratch — during their busy harvest season.
I’ve never used seasonal workers.
I guess as long as it also improves the capacity of using seasonal work as a foreign aid employment opportunity then such improvements should be considered a good thing.
On the one hand I am a bit adverse to bringing in foreign workers from poor countries to “exploit” their cheap labour. However when we consider we live in a world without open boarders, providing the opportunity for people from developing countries to come and work at Australian minimum wages for Australian dollars, is a good thing for those countries. Remittances in Australian Dollars help their economies support their own currencies to buy needed imports, as well as creating demand for their labour and driving up their wages.
In theory we could drive up the costs of seasonal work by barring foreign imports of “exploited” seasonal workers to drive up wages until it either employed domestic workers or sent those types of agricultural businesses offshore. However given agriculture is limited by location there is no guarantee that driving these businesses offshore would result in them moving to those developing countries that need the work.
As for the backpackers, I don’t really give any hoots about them. If they can get seasonal work on farms great, but if they don’t it’s not some sort of dire consequence or great injustice that takes food off their plate and impoverishs them - I mean they’re on an overseas holiday so it’s not like they are doing it tough.