Give us what you stole from us’

 

Indigenous senator yells at King Charles as his Australia trip causes a stir

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'You are not my king,' Australian senator yells at King Charles

An Indigenous senator told King Charles III that Australia is not his land as the British royal visited Australia’s parliament, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the monarch is no longer needed as the country’s head of state.

Sen Lidia Thorpe was escorted out of a parliamentary reception for the royal couple yesterday after shouting that British colonisers have taken Indigenous land and bones.

“You committed genocide against our people,” she shouted.

“Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty.”

No treaty was ever struck between between British colonisers and Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

Charles spoke quietly with Albanese while security officials

stopped Thorpe from approaching.

“This is not your land. You are not my king,” Thorpe yelled as she was ushered from the hall. Thorpe

is renowned for high-profile protest action. When she was affirmed as a senator in 2022, she wasn’t allowed to describe the then-monarch as “the colonising Her Majesty

Queen Elizabeth II”. She briefly blocked a police float in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras last year by lying on the street in front of it. Last year, she was also banned for life from a Melbourne strip club after video emerged of her abusing male patrons.

Albanese, who wants the country to become a republic with an Australian head of state, also told the king it was time for his role to end. “You have shown great respect for Australians, even during times when we have debated the future of our own constitutional arrangements and the nature of our relationship with the Crown,” Albanese said. But, he said, “nothing stands still”.

Australia’s six state government leaders underscored the political divide on the country’s constitutional relationship with Britain by declining invitations to attend the reception. All six would prefer an Australian citizen was Australia’s head of state. They each said they had more pressing engagements yesterday, but monarchists agreed the royals had been snubbed.

Meanwhile, Charles joked about past encounters with Australia’s formidable wildlife – brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders and bull ants during his time at a rural grammar school called Timbertop when he was 17.

He did not mention being sneezed on by a nine-year-old suit-wearing alpaca named Hephner.

Greeting supporters at the Australian War Memorial, Charles stopped to admire a sartorially suave alpaca that was wearing a gold crown and suit. He reached out to “Hephner”, as the woolly camelid is known, and gave him a quick rub on the nose.

However, that caused Hephner to sneeze all over the king and his bodyguard who was also in the line of fire. — Agencies

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Web design WOES, function needs come before form, beautiful and fancylooking

 
In the era of ai-enhanced design, experts caution that businesses often prioritise beauty over functionality, resulting in stunning websites that don’t drive sales.

Why Your Pretty New Homepage Is Probably a Waste of ...

Why Your Pretty New Homepage Is Probably a Waste of Money 

A pair of web design experts with decades of experience between them explain why most homepage redesigns fail miserably, especially now. 

Say you’re searching the web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling? 

Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years. 

Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently. 

He and other experts insist that it’s the latest AI-fueled version of a problem as old as the web — business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.  :42 

Wasting money on fancy homepages is an internet tradition

Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like SurveyMonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.

Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups — it can crash them.” 

The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their mind about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle. 

But also, when companies redesign their website they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancy-looking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational,” and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase. 

Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says. 

Why the problem is worse now 

All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends. 

Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritizing good looks over results. 

“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”

The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favor of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth. 

“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz. 

He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. If you’re actively thinking about revamping your website, I’d recommend you take time to read his whole analysis. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning. 

Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive — it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment. 

But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. 

SAY you’re searching the Web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling?

Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years.

Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the Web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently.

He and other experts insist that it’s the latest Ai-fuelled version of a problem as old as the Web – business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.

The tradition of fancy homepages

Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like Surveymonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.

Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups – it can crash them.”

The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their minds about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle.

But also, when companies redesign their websites, they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancylooking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational”, and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase.

Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says.

Why the problem is worse now

All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends.

Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritising good looks over results.

“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”

The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favour of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth.

“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz.

He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning.

Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive – it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment.

But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. – Inc./tribune News Service

Have they, not just politicians, civil servants no shame?

 With billions being spent on Budget 2025, it is important that the money reaches the people, and is not siphoned off by the corrupt and kept in ‘safe houses’. Good must triumph.

Dorairaj Nadason

I HAVE always loved spy stories. You know, the type where the hero kicks some serious butt and takes out the bad guys before rescuing the pretty scientist they are holding hostage.

The pretty hostage and the spy make their way to a safe house where she is debriefed and secrets are revealed. Then the hero and scientist go to some island in the sun where the hero “de-briefs” the scientist in another way. But hold on, I am going off on a tangent.

What I am really on about is that I have always thought of a safe house as a place where hostages and intended victims of killers are taken to stay safe.

Or places where kids bullied and mistreated by some cult are taken to be kept safe from the bullies, or parents who handed them over to the culprits.

In Malaysia, we have more. Here, we have safe houses that are literally houses that double up as safes.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) people raided a few houses belonging to a politician recently. They were “safe houses” holding close to RM5.5mil, both in local and foreign currencies.

Why would a person stash so much money away in a house and not put it in a bank account? Was it some ill-gotten gain? Or was it money to be used on the sly for some other reason?

First things first, though. We have not been told who the politician is and he is obviously innocent until proven guilty, and we do not know if there is more to these raids and seizures than meets the eye.

But one thing is certain. Corruption among politicians has for long been a big thing in Malaysia. And almost none would accept their guilt.

Scores of them – from both sides of the divide – have been charged and most of us believe that it is only the tip of the iceberg.

It’s not just politicians. Civil servants have also been caught with houses serving as safes.

Just last month, nearly RM800,000 in cash was found in the bedrooms of two Immigration Department officers who were caught for “counter setting”.

One of them had close to RM250,000 hidden under a mattress. Apparently, people still do keep money under mattresses and pillows. My late mother used to do that, but a quarter of a million?

MACC folk have seized more than RM1.5mil in their raids against dirty Immigration officers, according to chief commissioner Tan Sri Azam Baki.

And who can forget the Sabah water scandal, where two senior officers in the state agency were arrested? Some RM52mil in cash was seized, RM3mil of which was in a safe deposit box in a suspect’s office with more in a “safe house”. There were also jewellery, luxury watches, cars and even land grants.

Here are some statistics, as given by MACC’s director of monitoring and coordination Mohamad Tarmize Abdul Manaf:

From 2019 to 2023, 2,163 public servants were arrested for corruption. This was 43.3% – almost half – of total arrests made by the commission. Of that number, 1,347 (62.2%) were arrested for soliciting and receiving bribes.

Oddly enough, 21 (1%) were arrested for offering and giving bribes.

Tarmize says there are many reasons why public servants should not take bribes. There’s the shame of being arrested, jail terms that can be as long as 20 years, and there are huge fines of up to five times the value of the bribe.

They can even be named and shamed in the MACC portal. Worse, civil servants will not only lose their jobs but also their pensions.

So why do they still do it?

Does the lure of extra money really overshadow the punishments they potentially face? Or are they paid so little that they need to find extra funds to survive? In just over a couple of months, civil servants will get a hefty pay hike. Will that bring down corruption?

I am not sure, but most would agree that corruption is a serious matter in Malaysia.

In 2023, we ranked 57th out of 180 countries in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index with a score of 50, up from 47. A year earlier, we were ranked 61st.

There has been an improvement, but obviously, we have a long way to go.

Take our southern neighbour. In the same index, Singapore was ranked the fifth least corrupt country and remains the only Asian country ranked in the top 10. Even its politicians would not dare to be dishonest.

Earlier this month, S. Iswaran, a senior Cabinet minister in the republic’s government, was sentenced to 12 months in jail.

His offence? He accepted gifts worth more than S$403,000 (RM1.32mil) while in public office. The gifts included tickets to the Formula 1 Grand Prix, a Brompton T-line bicycle, alcohol, and a ride on a private jet. There were no huge sums of cash hidden in his house.

It probably would not have been a big deal in Malaysia.

And Iswaran’s response to the verdict? The 62-year-old accepted that he was wrong to accept the gifts, declined to appeal, and went to jail.

There is a sense of shame there. Former Singaporean national development minister Teh Cheang Wan who was investigated in 1986 for accepting bribes even took his own life before he was charged.

Malaysia really needs honest politicians, or at least those who know the difference between right and wrong. Yesterday, a RM421bil Budget was unveiled. It must reach the people, not be siphoned off by corrupt officials.

We will also be celebrating Deepavali in 10 days, and it is a good time to reflect on the integrity of our leaders. After all, Deepavali is also about the punishment of thieves and the corrupt.

The evil demon Narakasura not only tormented the worlds, he kidnapped 16,000 women, and stole the earrings of Aditi, the heavenly mother goddess, and usurped her territories. That was the last straw, and Lord Krishna came to earth to slay him. That was the hero kicking some serious butt.

In some parts of India, they celebrate Deepavali as the day Lord Rama came home after rescuing his wife Sita from the evil Ravana. And that was the hero rescuing the pretty hostage.

Which is why I really like those stories too. Have a happy – and safe – Deepavali.

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