Local news for local people
General and miscellaneous articles - Page 1
There are miscellaneous stories in the archives.
Things that don't fit anywhere else.
 | How to stop fraudsters tricking disabled people out of their NDIS funding There is a temptation to blame welfare recipients for fraud and wastage in government programs. There are almost certainly people claiming benefits to which they are not entitled, but almost all the fraud in the NDIS is being conducted by those people pretending to be the ones doing the helping. This report from The Conversation provides some details of the fraud involved. |
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Could this be Australia's warmest winter ever? Hottest June day ever in the UK. Heat waves across Eastern Europe and
the USA. Hottest ever start to winter across most of Australia. But don't
mention climate change or someone will tell you that it was really cold
in Oberon last Friday so global warming is a HOAX (the word is always capitalised).
This article from The Conversation is written by a couple of academics
who probably know what they are talking about. |
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Action this day! There has been some good news about Victoria Pass. A decision has been made about who will be fixing the broken Mitchells Causeway. Transport for NSW had this to say: Contract awarded to reopen Great Western Highway, with further relief for impacted businesses
The Government is also announcing an expanded package of support for local businesses affected by the closure. The NSW Government knows the uncertainty of the past few months has been incredibly difficult for local communities. While this process has taken time, there could be no shortcuts when it came to understanding the cause of the failure and determining the safest long-term solution. Following an accelerated procurement process, Seymour Whyte has been selected to construct a new crossing that will restore the connection between the Blue Mountains and Central West while improving its long-term resilience. Extensive geotechnical investigations carried out over the past few months were critical to the procurement process, providing the evidence needed to develop the proposal for the safest and fastest reopening. You can read the complete media release here. Completion by April 2027 is a rather optimistic schedule so cynics can expect that the final date for reopening Victoria Pass will be "adjusted" as time goes on. No estimate of the cost has been announced, but it can be guessed as being $Lots. |  |
The NSW Government is today providing certainty for communities impacted by the closure of the Great Western Highway at Victoria Pass announcing the successful contractor to deliver a new, more durable crossing at Mitchells Causeway, with major construction to begin in July, and the road expected to reopen in the second quarter of next year.
 | Census paranoia This year's census will happen on August 11. Every time a census rolls around there are people whining about privacy and the government (or "gubmnt", if you prefer) wanting to know everything about us. This is an updated version of something I wrote a few years ago when Facebook seemed to be full of people expressing much concern. And yes, when I was distributing forms for the 2021 census I was threatened by someone who refused to allow me to put the forms in his letterbox. |
Pines Wind Farm - Quarterly update Every three months, representatives of the Pines Wind Farm give a presentation to Oberon Council about the status and progress of the project. The most recent meeting took place on June 9. See a recording of the meeting here |  |
 | Investing in regional jobs and RFS fleet management There are about 6,000 vehicles in the NSW Rural Fire Service fleet. These are currently owned and maintained by local councils. From next year, ownership and maintenance obligations will be transferred to the NSW Government. This can only be a good thing and will be a boost to the budgets of councils across the state. It will certainly be an advantage to smaller rural councils like Oberon that will have more money to spend on the things that councils are supposed to do. |
The more things change the more they don't remain the same Aaaaaarrrgghhh!! Microsoft in their great wisdom have changed how the Bing search engine handles search enquiries handed to it telling it to only search a particular web site. This means that if you entered a search term into the box on any page here you didn't get just the results from Oberon Matters, you got a search of the whole WWWeb. So, as much as I hate Google, that's where searches from this site go now. Of course, that could change at any moment as Google change things daily as well. |  |
 | What do those statistics mean? I'm a bit skeptical of the numbers of visitors that are supposed to be coming to this site each month. Could it really be true that about twice the number of people in the Oberon LGA have a look at the site every month? I have access to three ways of counting visitors:
What all three have in common is that they all show traffic increasing in line with the graph above. The numbers aren't all the same because they all use slightly different ways of gathering and processing the data but they roughly agree. A big number of visitors come here each month. There is always the possibility that the numbers are inflated by robots trying to hack the site. An example of this is the large number of attempts to access the administrator login page for WordPress (all "404 not found" because I don't use WordPress) but these are accounted for, and in any case the bots would have to use literally thousands of different IP addresses to make any significant difference. So, in summary, the visitor count might not be exact but it's what mathematicians would say is the right order of magnitude and what cliché writers would call "in the ballpark". |
Goodbye to Instagram
June 4, 2026 in General News
Oberon Matters has had an Instagram account for some time where the weekly site updates have been publicised. The idea was to attract visitors to the site, but it hasn't worked. As posting there just increased the workload without any benefit the account has been closed.
Three ways to avoid being fooled by AI slop Sorry to keep harping on about Artificial Intelligence and how it's taking over everything, but here's a handy set of suggestions from The Conversation about how to tell what's real from what's not. It's bad enough that it's becoming hard to work out whether the words you read come from a human or are just condensed plagiarism, but now you can't even trust the pictures that are supposed to be worth a thousand words. |  |
