Seems Morgan are having one of their occasional weeks off. Plenty of federal preselection action to report, as the parties prepare contingencies for a potential early election:
• The Australian’s Michael Owen reports South Australian Labor is finalising its federal preselections, which “senior factional figures” link to a potential early election. Mia Handshin is keen to run again, either in a second tilt at Sturt or where Nicole Cornes failed in Boothby. Cornes herself has found an interesting new line of work as an industrial officer for the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, but is “unlikely to win preselection”. A “senior ALP figure” nonetheless claims she is a genuine future prospect. Owen also reckons Labor Senator Dana Wortley faces electoral oblivion through “moves to relegate her to an unwinnable third spot”, although it was from that unwinnable position that she actually won her seat in 2004.
• Institute of Public Affairs director John Roskam has withdrawn from the contest to succeed Petrio Georgiou as Liberal candidate for Kooyong. He has thrown his support behind industrial relations lawyer John Pesutto, who looms as a threat to merchant banker Josh Frydenberg’s long-held designs on the seat. Rick Wallace of The Australian reports Pesutto also has the support of Ted Baillieu, who angered the Frydenberg camp by attending a function they “claim was to support Mr Pesutto”. Wallace also notes the June preselection will be “one of the first carried out under the Liberal Party’s new constitution, which empowers all eligible members within a seat to vote instead of only specially chosen delegates”. Andrew Landeryou at VexNews is told that “many of them … will be swinging votes with a history of supporting Baillieu/Petro or at least having a significant amount of affection for them or an in-built objection to the recruiting enthusiasms of Joshua”.
• Another interesting preselection for the Victorian Liberals looms in the eastern suburbs seat of Deakin, where two former members are hoping to make a comeback. One is Phil Barresi, who lost the seat to Labor’s Mike Symon in 2007. The other is Ken Aldred, whose eccentric reign extended from 1990 until his preselection defeat by Barresi in 1996. Aldred won a preselection ballot in Holt ahead of the 2007 election, but it was overturned by wiser heads in the party. Rounding out the field of known contenders is Deanna Ryall, a “local businesswoman”. Labor holds the seat with a margin of 1.4 per cent.
• New Queensland Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek foreshadows a more “flexible” approach than his predecessor in negotiating fixed four-year terms, improving the prospects for a referendum on the matter during the current term. Langbroek says it is not a priority, but Anna Bligh has apparently put the matter “on the agenda”. A referendum in 1991 for unfixed four-year terms was defeated with a 51.2 per cent no vote.
• Antony Green on the slow death of the election night tally room:
The next South Australian election will be the first conducted without a tallyroom. Both Victoria and NSW have also decided not to hold tallyroms at state elections due in November 2010 and March 2011. These state decisions may yet play a part in deciding whether free to air broadcasters attend the next Federal tallyroom. There were serious noise problems in the tallyroom in 2007, Sky News already bases its coverage from studio, and hosting from a studio would save the ABC and other free-to-air broadcasters considerable amounts of money and allow greater use of studio technology.
• I am maintaining elsewhere progressively updated posts on two looming electoral events: the May 16 Fremantle by-election and May 2 Tasmanian upper house elections.
759 Comments
Antony, you must be hoping for the DD so you guys can test this idea out sooner rather than later. Given that the next Fed. election is also due in 2010, we shall see that before we see VIC go to the polls I suspect …..
That new Liberal constitution is pretty interesting.
Don’t think I’ll be holding my breath waiting for a referendum on Queensland fixed four year terms from the LNP this term. Hansard reveals that this week the LNP have proven themselves to be unable to come to terms with the recent election result let alone come up with anything constructive.
Yesterday, during the regrowth clearing debate the LNP displayed their worst behaviour for years and they seem to be in no frame of mind to do anything other than whinge and moan in loud voices.
When are the state quarterly Newspolls out? January to March hasn’t been released for any of the states yet!
Hannity could earn $100,000 for charity but just imagine how much you could sell the role of waterboarder for…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/23/olbermann-calls-hannitys_n_190869.html
Re William’s post, the 3rd ALP spot in SA isn’t actually that unwinnable. Xenophon isn’t up for re-election, and the SA isn’t natural Green territory. SA could easily elect 3 ALP 3 Lib.
I know what I would like to do to with Sean Hannity Diogs he’ll think the waterboard torture was heaven
Antony’s site:
He’s technically correct I spose, but not really.
Here’s a sample from former Opposition Leader Seeney who was the first speaker in the debate for the LNP and they got progressively sillier as the day went on.
[Mr ROBERTSON: The member is misleading the House. I ask him to withdraw. This legislation was initiated by a pre-election commitment announced by the Premier prior to the election.
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Will the member withdraw?
Mr SEENEY: I never made a personal reference to the minister so I do not have anything to withdraw.
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Would the minister put his point of order again and be specific, please?
Mr ROBERTSON: I am happy to withdraw it, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Mr Johnson: Because he’s telling the truth, that’s why.
Mr ROBERTSON: I find that remark by the member for Gregory offensive and I ask him to withdraw.
Mr SEENEY: You are offensive, old mate. You will find out what offensive is when you go out into the bush.
Mr Robertson: Is this another personal threat you are making?
Mr SEENEY: I was merely drawing to your attention the reality.
Mr Robertson: That is the third personal threat you have made.
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Will the member be seated.
Mr ROBERTSON: I ask that the member be referred to the appropriate committee for making personal threats against another member of parliament.
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER: Will the minister put his point of order in writing.
Mr ROBERTSON: Once I review Hansard I will refer it to the Speaker’s Office, thank you.] Page 182 yesterday’s Queensland Parliament Hansard.
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/legislativeAssembly/hansard/documents/2009.pdf/2009_04_23_DAILY.pdf
No way bob.
Mr X will have a Mr X candidate at the next election who will win a SA Senate seat. High profile. Count on it.
lol, clowns.
Hmm, depends on who.
And remember, Xenophon ran as an independent, not “Independent No Pokies”. If Mr X has a candidate at the next election, they’ll also be running as a simple independent, with no attachment to Nick Xenophon or No Pokies…
Though in WA the ABC Studios ARE the Tallyroom
and in this case only the ABC, and on a much smaller level, Ch 7 did their election coverage from there – in 7’s case it was only involved live crosses of 5-10 min duration, Ch 9 & 10 didn’t even bother.
Here are some memories of a time when Ch 7 did a full coverage.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3558/3378550133_34d44ca5b7_o.jpg
Nick Xenophon’s No Pokies got 1.3 per cent when Xenophon wasn’t on the ballot paper in 2002. I’d need to be persuaded that the same pattern won’t repeat in the Senate.
bob
He/she will be heavily endorsed by Mr X.
And why the hell won’t the Labor Party put Mia up in my seat of Boothby? She’ll lose in Sturt again. If they run Mia in Boothby, I promise never to complain about the CPRS again. 5%-15% would be the best and most balanced target. Penny Wong knows exactly what she’s doing.
Mythbusters tried out water-boarding in one episode. The woman lasted two seconds and you could see she was about to freak out. They released her immediately.
Nothing more humorous than Greens arguing about who will win Senate seats. All the polls show that Rudd Labor will win a majority in most States at the next election and cut out the Kumbayaists.
Finger pointing and stern looks of admonition don’t cut it in the new Labor Nirvana reality.
Please be as disappointed as you like.
GG
You’re not saying Labor will have a Senate majority are you?
I don’t recall the running mate being high profile – this was before everyone realised his popularity in 2006. It was thought in 2006 that Xenophon would struggle to be re-elected.
Same.
Diogs,
I can say anything at this time of the night.
Labor is travelling extremely well and the minor party parasites are really going to struggle.
My guess is that the Nats and the Greens will hold the balance of power after the next election.
Like every election since 1996, the Green vote in Newspoll and others has increased since the election preceeding it.
But we’re well aware of your hatred of the Greens GG. Suck it up princess.
Bob,
I fart in your general direction.
GG
Mr X isn’t a minor party. He’s an independent.
The ALP are in competition with the Greens for the left vote.
I wouldnt think the ALP like the Greens much more than the Libs to be frank.
Dio that is crazy is there going to be a Mr X Party then?
He has more power as one man and he has no appeal outside SA.
Bob it is a shame the Greens have taken the rabid left vote whereas at least the Democrats didnt cause too much trouble, id far rather there be Democrats in the Senate than Watermellons!
Glen
He’ll only run a candidate in SA. It won’t be a Party. It will just be a heavily endorsed Independent who ha campaigns for.
The Greens have surprised everyone in showing that they will compromise on legislation rather than stand their ground.
Xenophon stands his ground more than the Greens, and Fielding even more so.
I think the Greens will do reasonably well but I doubt they’ll win another seat in SA. I think it will be either 3/3 or 3 ALP, 2 Lib and one Xenophontist if he can find a strong candidate
Bob good luck compromising on the ETS LOL!
Dio he/she wont win though unless their name starts with Y or Z.
Yeah… ticket will show.
Independent – Joe Blow.
There’ll be no ticket connection to Xenophon. It won’t be as easy to elect a Xenophon-media-endorsed candidate as you think. People vote for Xenophon, not people he endorses, because there’s no coherent underpinning of ideology. What will the running mate support? Will it be Xenophon’s? His own? Who knows.
Diogenes,
Labor 36, Liberal 31, Greens 5, Mr X, 1, Nats 3.
His best move would be to register “Nick Xenophon Independents” as a party name and his candidate would then be linked to his name on the ballot paper.
GG’s vitriol directed at The Greens always cracks me up.
Half the time he argues that their irrelevant ferals who will never hold any position of influence and the other half he spends attempting to bring down their arguments.
The latter seems pretty pointless if you actually believe the former.
bob1234
It’ll be someone better than Bressington.
Brian Deegan is one name that comes to mind.
Glen,
Sorry to disappoint you, but Labor has actually shed the left wing ratbags and has captured the moderate Liberal vote.
The reason the Libs are getting their arse kicked is that Labor has moved to the middle and pushed your side out to the outer extremities.
Sure you’ve got a moderate Leader, but everyone knows those right wing religous nut bags are controlling the party and the Libs have been taken over by anti family swine.
Why would he endorse a candidate?
It wouldn’t greatly increase his chance of holding the balance of power and if he didn’t then having another independent senator would be fairly pointless.
GG
Seeing that you are in a soothsayer mode care to predict Labor seats in lower house?
Oz
Mr X endorsed Brock who won that bizarre Frome by-election earlier in the year. It would help him to have twice the resources and staff. How he keeps up with the legislation by himself is beyond me. He’s meant to be a workaholic.
This is a bit tough on swine, who are well known to be both uxorious and philoprogenitive.
“anti family” is as ridiculous a term as “pro-family”.
GG the ALP has virtually given up on the rabid left, they moved to the right to win the election which squeezed the Libs into the shite corner.
or “working family” which is my personal favourite.
Adam IMHO the Liberals would have been better off not swtiching to McMahon.
After all Gorton has beaten Whitlam before when the swing was on. He was a much more colourful character to place against Whitlam too.
I’d have given Gorts a better chance of holding off Whitlam in 72 than McMahon.
McMahon was a disaster from start to finish the only thing good about him was his wife.
Oz,
I am underwhelmed by your criticisms.
On the one hand I am delighted you spend so much time defending Green positions especially about environmental issues. I ‘m happy that someone like you is off the streets and small furry animals are safe from molestation.
On the other hand, I worry that someone might press on through the impenetrable dogma and rubbish you serve up and actually believe that you’ve got something to say.
In the end, I believe that common sense will prevail.
The ALP gave up on the “rabid left” a long time ago, if they ever appealed directly to them at all.
The only relevant point is that prior to The Greens becoming a credible political option, what Glen would dub the “rabid left” had no one to vote for besides Labor.
I don’t recall any criticisms.
Paraphrasing Bishop (ew), you need to relax with the angst.
There’s nothing in the way the Greens have acted so far on Rudd legislation to suggest that in the end they won’t give in and say ‘be it on your head’.
Glen,
Are you doing one of those re-birthing processes?
If you are, it won’t be long till you are back to Menzies.
I don’t think X had much to do with Brock’s success.
I’ve pointed this out once before, but I don’t think you’re on safe ground extrapolating The Greens tactics on previous bills to how they’re going act on the ETS. The reason why is that the other policies have either been ones that the government has a clear mandate for and which The Greens don’t have a strong ideological or political argument against or ones like the stimulus package which aren’t traditional Green issues but they respect the government was elected to lead and has the advice of Treasury etc.
When it comes to climate change, The Greens have their own policy which they’ve been spruiking and refining for years. They also have a significant number of voters who they would not want to alienate – nor do they want to be viewed as Labor stooge.
I’m not suggesting that it’s guaranteed that The Greens will block it but I think that they will not approach it with the same level of acquiescence that they have given to past government legislation.
The Greens will vote for it eventually. It’s 5-15%, or 0%. The Greens can vote for 0% if they want, but won’t.
Witchhunting time!
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25382364-5006301,00.html
I actually think that at this stage, unless there are really significant changes with the government’s legislation, The Greens won’t vote for it.
I don’t really think this is a point worth arguing over as it’s pretty much just our own opinion but when I look at what the Greens are saying both publicly and privately, it doesn’t bode well for the passage of the legislation.
Garnaut , who’s no environmental radical, himself believes it’s too close to call. What do you reckon the feeling is of The Greens then…
That didn’t last long…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/24/2552375.htm?section=justin
Brown will be looking for a “Hail Mary” play on ETS. He’s spent years in the Senate and never achieved anything much depsite his reputation. At 65 and looking down the barrell of political and personal demise he will want to go out with something he can call his own.
Who can help him achieve this?
Discuss.
I don’t get it, the Greens and their advocates insist the 5% – 15% is CLEARLY insufficient. How come Garnaut says it’s line ball then? How come there is that room for doubt?
If it is line ball surely it is better to do something rather than nothing.
I reckon there is zero chance the government will modify their ETS.
I think there’s a high chance the Greens will oppose the CPRS bill if Labor won’t budge on 5-15%/2020, which I doubt we will. In which case it will go down, and we will have to wait until 2011 to do anything, while the climate clock will go on ticking. With a new Senate in 2011 it may then be possible to get a bill with higher targets up, but the carbon lobby will be just as powerful then as they are now, so re-selling a bill with higher targets won’t be easy and will entail yet more delay. The more we faff around now the bigger the mountain we have to climb later.
I apologetically (due to thread crossover) refer to pedant from the previous thread:
Get thee to the nearest purveyor of fil-um and aquaint yourself thoroughly with the most accurate surviving documentary of that election: Don’s Party!
Because Garnaut is not The Greens?
And I don’t think Garnaut is talking specifically about targets but the broader parts of the ETS which he argued against in his report. Specifically, limiting free permits and splitting the money raised between compensating households and investing in renewable. And of course there’s the other points regarding it’s structure – ignoring individual efforts, overcompensating increases in petrol etc.
I find it depressing that you’re openly admitting that the ETS is designed to make it attractive to polluting industries rather than what’s good for the environment or what the people of Australia actually want.
Implementing strong targets is not something that needs to be “sold” to the voters, the ones that elect the government, so the government should tell the short-sighted business groups to get stuffed.
Oz,
Dose yourself up with some reality.
Then rejoin the debate with something other than invective for your fellow Australians.
Adam:
Do you think the ALP should absorb the four pillars
Not my point. If it is clearly an inadequate ETS then someone like Garnaut should be saying that also. He isn’t.
We don’t know? So the targets maybe ok? He may not be objecting to the targets set?
TPW,
There are more than four pillocks who post here for the Greens.
Bob, wonder if they did a survey of Adelaide journalists would they came up with similar results? The Advertiser is getting weird following that line.
Easy for you to say, pal.
Only the Greens can ignore the political consequences and go in boots and all.
Whig Party
Ecological wisdom
Social justice
Grassroots democracy
Nonviolence
1. Could mean anything. I’m in favour of sound and sustainable environmental policies – see ALP platform
2. I’m in favour of social justice – see ALP platform.
3. No, I’m in favour of parliamentary democracy. Most people have better things to do with their time than go to endless meetings, and are happy to have politicians be bored on their behalf.
4. No, I’m in favour of world peace through armed deterrance and the use of force against evil-doers as required.
As it’s Eric Bogle season with the arival of Anzac day, here’s his classic. Tears are optional.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG48Ftsr3OI
GG, my hanky’s all wet
Tears ptui. Both my grandfathers served in both world wars, and both my parents served in WW2. (My maternal grandfather is the second image in that YouTube clip, purloined from my website without permission.) All would have regarded such maudlin defeatist sentimentality as Eric Bogle’s dirges with utter contempt.
I thought Labor were going to discontinue the first home owners grant. I just heard on the newsflash after the footy that they may extend it. So where does that leave Turnbull and Bishop? First they supported it, then they were against it, then they supported it. I suppose now they may have to be against it again?
Btw I saw both League games and Vera if you are there? The Broncos will make mince meat and rabbit stew out of your bunnies when they play!
Adam,
But at least you are thinking about them today.
Hey! settle down Centre, don’t make me have to come over there and give you a good smack
I think Finns, your fellow Amigo is into smacking
If you are on Facebook I think you can see my Gallipoli photos, but maybe you have to be my friend, I’m not sure.
vera,
Amigos don’t smack.
They reduce opponents to floundering masses of jelly with just the appropriate look.
I’ll need to practice to perfect the look then GG
On that FHOG a couple of days ago they were saying it would end but in the budget there might be something leaning more towards new building.
Vera,
Practice makes perfect.
I perform it on my kids and they now do exactly what they want on my command.
The polls must have it all wrong then.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/people-uncertain-about-value-of-handouts-20090424-ai47.html
Speaking of the budget, the Liberals are going to be so ROYALLY WEDGED over Labor taxing the rich to fund pension increases. How are they going to justify blocking that one – hilarious!
Particularly after all their carry-on about pensioners last year: “Could you live on the old age pension at its current level, Mr Turnbull?”
GB, It was OK for Howard to splash handouts when unnecessary but it isn’t for Rudd when it is necessary. If Howard hadn’t wasted the money in the first place, we probably could have avoided going so much into deficit.
Finally, the Libs are starting to walk away from the Howard ascendancy. Expect more of this, “I pushed hard, but Howard drove over me”.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/fiscal-feud-20090424-ai6z.html?page=3
Your kids have got you right where they want you GG
vera,
No, I’ve got them right where they want me.
There’s only seven of them.
I guess that’s one advantage of being a dog – they come in litters.
GG, you catholics have the big families. I went to school with a couple of Catholic girls, one had 11 kids in her family the other had 14
Just got through reading that article you posted before I hit the hay.
This is unbeleivable!
Adam,
One at a time. No batching possible. You’ll be pleased to know I get lots of affection and tousled hair, but absolutely no respect.
However, the Head bitch has organised a legalised gelding.
Apparently, she’s worked out where the brood came from.
Remember folks 25th April is Althing election day.
ZM
Go Labor!
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir looks like winning. Well in coalition with the Left/Greens. Lesbian Lefties are taking over the world. Oh and her name is pronounced “Raymond Luxury Yacht”
That’s a good one for a trivia contest.
The Left will probably win because they had the good luck not to be in government when the economy completely collapsed. They won’t be able to do very much since the country is bankrupt. They will join the EU as fast as possible (abandoning a 50-year policy of rugged independence) so they can get on the EU fiscal tit and live as pensioners of the German and British taxpayers. All rather sad really, but it’s obviously kharmic revenge for inflicting Byerk on the world.
Good night.
OOOOOOH
It’s raining, it’s raining, it’s raining…
Adam:
I agree with you about Eric Bogle – you also once gave the best smack down ever about Green-related pacifists – “If we’d listened to such people during WWII, we would never have stood up to Hitler, because ‘innocent German civilians’ were being killed by Allied bombing”
TWP,
So how do you celebrate Anzac Day? I’m pretty sure that Australian leftists and rightists were slain in equal opportunity batches.
I’m equally sure that people can celebrate any way they like. If you don’t like Bogle, fine. But, there is no need to bring a bad hair day down on everybody.
Maybe it is a day for reflection and review for all and not an excuse to propogate an ideological agenda.
I would partly agree with some of the above.
All wars are not equal and arguing from one war to all wars is a risky business. I believe I was write to actively oppose the Iraq War and the Vietnam War. Between them they killed about 2 million people. Not a light matter.
Of the other wars Australia has engaged in:
1. The Boer War – very silly for Australians to go over and killed for some greedy british goldbugs and mad imperialists.
2. World War 1. Australia should have avoided getting pointlessly slaughtered in this war.
3. World War 2. Stopping Hitler was a worthwhile objective but not at the cost of us being what was it? Seventh or Eighth on the list of British War Priorities. I would, on balance, have supported our entry into that war. But the ‘freedom’ thing is greatly overdone. The heavy lifting in that war was done by ally Stalin who was even more blood-drenched than Hitler. Japan would probably, but not certainly, have forced us into that war later.
4. Korean War. Should not have joined it.
5. Vietnam War. Should not have joined it.
6. Iraq War. should not have joined it.
7. Afghanistan War. I have changed my views on this as it has gone along. My main point now would be that we should not have joined it unless there was a reasonable prospect that our allies would allocate sufficienct resources to do the job properly. No point in fighting a loosing war.
So, out of the 7, maybe the Second World War would have been an on-balance Join. The Afghanistan War was an on balance Join but the balance is looking not too good with the resources currently applied.
Aren’t the Left-Green Party the most rabidly anti-European of all Iceland’s parties?
[As it’s Eric Bogle season with the arival of Anzac day, here’s his classic. Tears are optional.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG48Ftsr3OI
Canadians Waltz Matilda?
Boerwar@100,
I agree with you on all those 7points.
This fro Costello.
After some criticism of the Howard Government accounting practices.
The above is from a link provided by GG @ 86
Boerwar@100
Both?
Re 100,
Agree totally on all of those but wanted to share a light hearted story loosely involving this one
.
My kids (still at home) are 8 & 11. In the most recent foray to our public library amongst the books I checked out were 2 compilations of political cartoons, one each from 2003 and 2005. My kids are following in the well worn tradition of most families in that the children follow mom and dad’s politics so they feel “Rudd good, Howard bad” before this lot of books turned up in the house for a few days.
The beginning of the Iraq involvement from Australia’s point of view in 2003 was before my kids were old enough to understand what it was and what was going on too. So a few days ago, they open up the 2003 book and see a political cartoon that went something like this. The Grim Reaper is sidling up to a restaurant table as if he was the maitre’d and asks Howard “How would you like to pay for this war?” Howard with the help of the cartoonist puts on his best cheeky grin and holds up his Medicare card. My kids thought this was hilarious (on the basis that “Howard is stupid and the medicare card is for the doctor and not paying at a rest.”) and they have done nothing but giggle and make fun of it for days now. They don’t yet at 8 and 11 probably (although the 11yo might be starting to) understand what a war is but they fully understand Howard’s awkwardness at getting himself into a situation that he should not have.
My grandfather – who was a bona fide saint and therefore impossible to live with, causing his family endless social embarassment – was a pacifist Minister of Religion in World War II (as a result he was shuffled from parish to parish because noone wanted him and ended up spending the war in a remote county town whose population was of 90% German descent).
People used to ask him what would have happened if the Japanese had invaded and he would point out that they were higher on the standard of living charts than we were.
With such complete ignorance and self-aggrandisement, does herr doktor prove yet again that he and the amoeba’s share both the same intelligence and morality.
Your bumfluffery doth offend and degrade
Gus, yes we got up at the crack of dawn, then we went to the flemington markets and bought a truck full of fruits and veges then we had a big bowl of the Vietnamese Pho noodle soup at Homebush with raw beef.
While sipping the Pho soup, i remember my great great grand father who fought in the Opium War, not too sure which side though. Nobody knew, they were all stoned.
Give me Eric Bogle anytime.
Today’s Amoeba News
The Americans hanged Japanese for waterboarding.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/yes-inational-reviewi-we_b_191153.html
The Opium War: Finns, I recommend to you the career of Commissioner Lin, a great Chinese patriot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Zexu
centre, the home owners grant issue is sloppy journalism at its best. its the INCREASE to the grant that is under review, not the base grant
Boerwar@110,
As you are undoubtedly aware, the perspective of if a war is worth fighting or not changes with time. Additionally, the outcome of the war should not form a large part of the consideration on the worthiness of the war. While I agree with the pointlessness of the second Iraq war, and knowing nothing about the Boer War, I think Australian involvement of other wars you listed can be justified. For example, North Korea technically “invaded” South Korea in the Korean War. Australia was actually fighting against an invader, which ought to be considered morally justified. Unfortunately, the US, I believe, bit off more than it could chew by doing everything it could to get China involved (Bombing of cities on the chinese-korean border, blockade of the Taiwan Strait). This combined with the Communism-Captialism conflict that was a big, big deal then, to perpetuate the Chinese involvement. Once this occured, the purpose of the war became somewhat muddy. I should add that I personally believe that the Chinese involvement in the Korean War, although coming with a casualty of hundreds of thousand, was actually worth it. It probably wiped out any future attempt to militarily confront China directly, which would otherwise have been plausible given the hostile anti-communism atmosphere in the 1950s and 1960s.
If Boerwar had his way, 48 million South Koreans would now be starving under Kim Jong-il rather than living in one of the most prosperous countries in Asia.
Did the British and French war involvement from September 1939 make Europe a better or worse place?
Better
Germany-USSR war shorter
Mussolini gone
decolonisation
Fascism discredited
Economic stimulus ending depression
War with France may have happened anyway because of the war in the pacific
Fish stocks in the North Atlantic given time to build up again due to lack of fishing
Worse
Many more civilians dead and injured.
Harder for refugees to escape Germany
Food shortages in Western Europe
May have caused the war to involve Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece
May have caused partition of India
I’m really enjoying watching the Republican Party tying itself into knots in defending the indefensible about how the US has joined the group of countries that torture. The topic isn’t going away for a loooooong time. They’d be best to give up a few scalps and move on. Bybee should cut his losses and resign but hopefully he’ll have to be impeached.
Maybe, but they’re not politically stupid.
They support a referendum on the issue.
Adam,
To be fair, Australian’s involvement in the Korean war (in fact, any war) was minor. Even if Australia did not participate, the outcome would not have been any different. US lost badly in Vietnam, but the Vietnamese living there today are not having nearly as bad a life as the North Koreans.
Apart from WWII, Australia was not directly invaded in any war it engaged in. I guess the spirit of ANZAC is that we celebrate the sacrifice the ANZACs made for their countries, regardless of the outcome or the rightfulness of the campaign.
Any result in this one yet? Will she be the first openly gay leader of a country?
http://www.smh.com.au/world/iceland-tipped-to-elect-first-openly-gay-pm-20090424-ai2k.html
On Boerwar’s logic, the US shouldn’t have gone into Korea either. Australia as a UN member had an obligation to accept the Security Council’s request for assistance. It would have been immoral to leave the US to do all the work.
On World War I: You do need to recall what kind of country Australia was then. Apart from a minority of the Irish, nearly all Australians identified as British and saw Britain as the mother country. They did not see this as a “foreign” war at all. It was a war in defence of the motherland. That’s certainly how my grandfathers saw it.
Further, the immediate cause of British entry into the war was Germany’s unprovoked invasion of Belgium, in violation of a treaty which Germany had signed guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. You may argue that Belgian neutraility wasn’t worth millions of lives, but that’s not how most people at the time saw it.
The polls haven’t even opened yet…
It’s 3AM in Iceland.
But it’s not going to be particularly exciting.
The SDA/L-G coalition will win and Dame Helen Mirren will become PM.
For a little while it looked like it might be possible that the Left-Greens would outpoll the SDA and be the major coalition partner but this most likely isn’t going to happen.
It’s 3.21am on election day in Iceland. Results tomorrow morning.
What about the second question about her being the first openly gay leader of a country?
Are we counting Roman Emperors?
First elected openly gay leader, no doubt.
As far as I know the highest-level openly gay elected figures so far have been the mayors of Paris and Berlin, Bertrand Delanoe and Klaus Wowereit. I can’t think of any others at a higher level.
If we must…
I can’t find a PM or President of any other country who was openly gay. James Buchanan probably was gay but certainly wasn’t openly gay. Funnily enough, the probable next Icelandic PM used to be an air hostess so the Ruddster will be able to put her in her place quick smart.
The concept of “openly gay” only goes back to about 70. Before that you were admitting to practising an illegal sexual perversion.
There was of course Bert Edwards, who was elected to Adelaide City Council after having served a prison term for homosexual offences.
http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A080440b.htm
Was that true for every country?
No, the law wasn’t the same everywhere. There are no homosexual offences in the Code Napoleon, for example. But that didn’t nake public acknowledgement of homosexuality any more acceptable, except to some extent in the artistic milieu.
What made homosexuality acceptable after so long?
Evidently Poland is one of the few countries in the world where homosexuality has never been a crime. Almost every European country only made it legal in the last 60 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_law
Just watching the Villers-Bretonneux service, I reckon Veterans’ Affairs Minister Alan Griffin is a bit of allright
and he speaks French, oh-la-la! I think it’s only fair he get’s to sit in the Member for Bass’s seat behind Kev in QT with his top button undone 
To answer that you’d need to know why it became unacceptable in the first place. That’s way beyond my pay grade.
It was a subset of the general push for sexual liberalisation of the 1960s. The modern gay rights movement is usually taken to date from the Stonewall riot in New York in 1969 (40th anniversary this June), although there were gay activist groups in the US such as the Mattachines and the Daughters of Bilitis from the late 1940s.
I haven’t heard that about Poland. It sounds improbable about the high Stalinist period.
According to Wikipedia, Poland decriminalised male homosexuality in 1932. A very surprising thing for an authoritarian regime in a Catholic country to do. I’d be pretty certain that during the high Stalinist period (1947-55) it was de facto illegal whatever the law said.
Details for all countries here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory
I was interested to see what Vera saw in Alan Griffin and went to his Wiki page. No picture so followed the link to the ALP.
Ended up at the ALP Wiki page which has a history and pictures of Labor PMs. Was very surprised to see the one of P. Keeting. It doesn’t quite fit with the others (even Hawkies) and am interested to know who would have been responsible for adding them to Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party
It’s a consequence of Wikipedia’s copyright rules. Photos must be absolutely free of copyright, and in Australia most photos less then 50 years are copyright, including newspaper photos and official photos from the Parliamentary Handbook etc. That makes copyright-free photos of recent public figures hard to find.
Scorpio, that was a bit weird. PK must be the man of bronze. (Howie was steel)
here’s Griffin (he’s got a lovely soft voice too
http://www.dva.gov.au/media/media_images/images/080425MinisterGriffin_WFcommems.jpg
Vera, that’s a better picture than the one on the ALP web site which is small and no where near as good.
Is this “unofficially officially” what’s in the Budget?
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25379663-5006301,00.html
Bad luck, Diogenes.
I think the way that article is defining “middle-class welfare” and if it’s accurate, how the government is defining “middle-class welfare” is a bit weird.
The first step should be limiting FTB B to at MOST $100,000 and scrapping the baby bonus. Increasing taxes on people earning above $150,000 is not a “crackdown” on middle-class welfare.
Welfare needs to be refocused and redirected in the areas of most importance which include (in my opinion), youth allowance, disabilities, pensioners and the unemployed. Whilst a lot of middle-class people are doing it tough we aren’t struggling anywhere near as much as those guys and it’s a bit embarrassing that there’s so many perks directed that way when there’s a greater need for them elsewhere.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with doing both, but when you’re facing a revenue shortfall and have a limited number of options, you won’t be able to do everything.
Alan Griffin homepage
http://www.griffinmp.com/
Advantages of Firefox browser with Advanced Dork add-on. Even easier than googling.
I’m not sure discouraging people on $150,000 plus from putting money into superannuation is a great idea. Plenty of stock market investment is super funds and shares will have to go down if that happened which will make it harder for companies to raise cash to expand and employ more staff.
On Wars:
1. Not the first Iraq war either.
2. In relation to various comments: yes, it is always easier after the event than before the event to make a judgement on wars. It is one of the reasons why I am very toey about going to war – wars hardly ever turn out the way people think they will.
3. I might be willing to tip Korea into the maybe line on the basis of Adam’s arguments – however in the absence of a south korea, (as in the absence of a South Vietnam for North Vietnam), things might have gone very differently. It is essentially arguing a case by alternative history.
4. Using the UN said ‘Go’ to the Korean War is neither here nor there as far as I am concerned. I would certainly not be committing Australia to every war that the UN approved. Not with the sort of Human Rights Committees they run.
5. For those interested in learning more about the Boer War, there is an excellent narrative history called ‘The Boer War’ by Thomas Pakenham. [If you are an Anglophile, be prepared to have some of your childhood heroes, including Baden-Powell) exposed for what they were]. I do hope that the Rudd Government is not silly enough to put up a monument to the Boer War in Canberra. That war was a shoddy exercise in Imperial bullying against two tiny democratic nations to get hold of the Jo’burg gold. The whole thing was based on racism by both sides of the most deplorable kind. The British distinguished themselves by appalling treatment of Boer civilians in concentration camps. Australia’s most noted contributor to the war was Breaker Morant, who was a horse thief in Australia and a cold-blooded murderer in South Africa. Perhaps we could have a statue of the Breaker as our memorial? It would be a fitting memorial to a particularly senseless war.
6. As for the Britisher-type people who ran Australia prior to World War 1, silly them – they had not realized that their national interests and Britain’s national interests had already diverged. This same mob, lead by Menzies, had still not got the message by the time the Second World War came around. ‘Britain is at war therefore we are at war.’
7. As far as using the invasion of one country by another as a reason for Australia to go to war, how many wars to we want? In the past hundred years: US has invaded I don’t know how many countries in Latin and Central America, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Pakistan invaded India, China invaded Tibet and Vietnam, Great Britain invaded Afghanistan, the Boer Republics, Abyssinia, China, parts of India, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera; India invaded Goa, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Iran, Israel has invaded Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and vice versa, vice versa…et cetera, et cetera. Clearly invasions are selectively used as triggers by countries when they want to go to war and are avoided as pretexts when they do not go to war.
To make it clear: I believe that entry into war by Australia may be justified depending on the circumstances. I believe that in Australia we have historically set the entry threshold far too low.
Neither, but I think the government’s logic is that they’ll invest anyway.
Oz
One of the Howard/Costello Government’s economic legacies was a hopelessly distorted superannuation system that gave a whole lot of free money to people who did not really need it to enjoy their retirement years. It was the reverse Robin Hood, as is all middle class welfare. If there is that sort of free money around it should be spread more evenly, but of course, that sort of money isn’t around any more.
I hope the Rudd Government trashes middle class welfare comprehensively.
As for the ‘baby bonus’ – what a travesty in a country that is already so overpopulated that it has to build desalination plants powered by C02 emitters to get enough water to drink. Clearly, a very, very stupid policy.
What we really need is baby demerits and tax breaks for people who do not have children.
Not a real fan of the aerial ping pong, but that was a great game between essendon and collingwood.
Hah! Collingwood scum lose on the siren. Very satisfying.
149,
Finnigans, what a game indeed
……. I was sweating that one out as now that means I’m batting 100% on my tips 
Now I know what type of character you are Adam. It aint anything to write home about.
Neither Collingwood or Essendon will be in the GF, so no loss.
I agree with Boerwar on the Boer War.
I agree that not all invasions are the same. I didn’t argue that outside powers should or can intervene every time one state attacks another. What happened in 1914, however, was that a major European power invaded a small, neutral, democratic European state without provocation and in violation of its treaty obligations. Given the centrality of Europe in world politics at that time, given the imperial ambitions of the German ruling class, and given the importance of treaty relations among the European powers for the maintenance of peace and international law as it was understood at that time, it was absolutely right and necessary that Britain entered the war (quite contrary to its own imperial interests, by the way, which were to avoid land wars in Europe). Australia was not at that time a sovereign state and was in fact legally as well as morally bound to support Britain (although Britain couldn’t have done much about it had we declined). Sneering at the Australians of 1914 because they were loyal to Britain is ahistorical as well as cheap.
Adam the First World War was a pointless exercise and the British should have stayed out.
The only reason Britain wanted in was because Germany was overtaking her in industrial might and she feared a rival.
It should have been left as a European War, France and Russian would have lost within a years time and the world would have been a better place.
more information?
Adam
I was hoping to avoid a discussion of the causes of World War 1 and whether or not Britain’s self interests were served by their entering that war. I agree that the proximate cause of the war was that the German and and Austro-Hungarian Empires started the killing.
With the German fleet a-building, Britain needed to commit in order to support France and Russia. Balance of power on the continent sort of thing, not for the first time, not for the last. As for the British moral outrage about the invasion of neutral Belgium we have agreed that a scant 15 years before that Britain had itself invaded two small democracies for no good reason.
I was surprised to learn that Australia did not actually have a choice about World War 1 because it was not a sovereign country. I thought the Australia Government went to war because it wanted to.
It was sort of sneering at people who did not realize their own self interest, particularly in World War 2, and I withdraw it to the extent it was a sneer. Not sure what you mean by ‘ahistorical’.
I refer you to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for some idea of what the world would have been like if that had happened, Glen. There is a notion that the great powers were all as bad as each other in WW1 is common, but quite wrong. German racial imperialism wasn’t invented by Hitler, the Kaiserreich was nearly as bad.
Had Britain not got involved the Germans would have won and won quickly hence no World War just a repeat of 1871.
If the War ended in 1915, you’d most likely have
No Hitler
No Communist Revolution
No World War 2
No Cold War
Basically you’d have Germany leading a European Union type organisation which could coexist with the British.
Of course it did – I was making a point about how ahistorical it is to expect the Australians of 1914 to think or act like the Australians of 2009.
Britain didn’t intervene in 1914 mainly because of moral outrage, althougth that was genuine enough. It intervened because German imperialism was a threat to world peace and because the invasion of Belgium was a challenge to the international rule of law as it was understood to operate among European states at that time.
The Boer republics were not democracies – they were ruled by tiny white minorities. To agree that the Boer War was a bad idea is not to have any great affection for the Boers.
It’s not very good politically to get rid of people’s bonus and tax breaks, especially when these people make up a large chunk (if not most?) of the electorate.
It is a far better move to say you’re “cracking down” on middle-class welfare, when you’re not, but are actually removing tax breaks for the wealthy.
Broad brush there Glen.
I think the certainties you imply
ie germany beating france AND russia may well have drawn Britain in anyway.
the idea of an pan-germanic EU is intriguing I admit
No, you would have had Prussian militarist dictatorship over Europe.
And how was British racial imperialism?
Britain was quick to jump to the defence of Belgium when it was being attacked by Germany, but where was it when Belgium was impressing its own imperialism and racism in its African colonies?
Britain did not declare war on Germany because of an 80 year old treaty. They went to war because the rise of Germany and its imperial ambitions threatened their own.
Ah Adam the Germans did have an elected Parliament.
Adding to that -
Both claims, “Because of Treaty” and “Curtailing imperial ambitions” are somewhat shallow and ignore the build up (balance of power etc.) but if talking about a trigger for Britain’s involvement in the conflict at that time then they have some point.
Not in the same league.
Nowhere, but that is not to the point.
That was certainly obvious to all, but it was the violation of Belgian neutrality that was the decider. The Asquith government was anti-militarist and entered the war reluctantly.
Bismarck wrote the 1871 constitution to keep all power over the army and foreign affairs in the hands of the Kaiser, who had an obsessive hatred of Britain.
Of course it’s the point.
It demonstrates hypocrisy in both claims that Britain went to war against Germany because they “racial imperialists” and because they attacked Belgium. Thus, while given as excuses, they can hardly be called reasons for involvement.
The European treaty system and the “balance of power” actually worked quite well at keeping the peace in Europe – as also was the case during the Cold War. It was Wilhelm’s jealousy of Britain that destabilised the ystem and made war an increasing likelihood.
Britain didn’t go to war against Germany because they racial imperialists. That was my description. They went to war because Germany invaded Belgium.
Germany asked Belgium to allow its troops passage through their country and they refused, they had it coming really. Plus you really think standing up for Belgium’s neutrality was worth Communist Revolutions, World War 2 a holocaust and a Cold War???
Every time my opinion of you starts to improve, Glen, you say something really, really stupid.
I don’t know if this is a coincidence but the documentary “Guns of August” based on Barbara Tuchman’s great book about what started WWI is on ABC2 tonight. Another book of hers, The Proud Tower, describes the setting of Europe pre-WWI. The German Kaiser was probably the most meddlesome pain-in-the-arse in history.
Germany had to violate Belgium neutrality according to the Schlieffen Plan their goal wasnt to absorb all of the country they merely needed to go through it to envelop the French armies fighting east of Paris.
It is often said that farce is tragedy plus time. Certainly the attempts at historical revisionism here seem to demonstrate that historical interpretatioin and farce are also interconnected.
Adam has laid out the circumstances of the early 20th Century War quite clearly and the motivations of the various players in their correct context.
However, others seem to want to view the past through the prism of how things are today and what we know today.
Nicolas II of Russia probably should not have declared war on Germany.
Bismarck’s decision to leave the army and foreign policy in the hands of the Kaiser was one of the most fateful mistakes in modern history. It worked OK while Wilhelm I and Bismarck were running the show. But Wilhelm II was, as Diogenes says, an appallingly bad ruler. He had a deformed arm which he blamed on his English mother, plus he was jealous of his English relatives – hence his obsessive Anglophobia. He was deeply reactionary and stupid as well. He sacked Bismarck and replaced him with sycophants and non-entities. The decision to build a navy to challenge Britain was all his own doing, as was the breakdown in the alliance with Russia and the decision to support Austria in its conflict with Serbia.
Oh, well, that’s OK then. Glen, I need to drive my car through your livingroom so I can get to an important meeting. If you don’t let me, I will shoot you, and it’ll be all your fault for being so stubborn.
Well no, because it’s Anzac Day. =P
Possibly not, but Austria knew that Russia would support Serbia against its bullying. Austria only chose to force a war with Serbia, and thus also Russia, because Germany assured Austria it would support them whatever they did.
Hard to say. You would have to balance that against the Great Purge of London; the Pan-Africa genocides; the three Euro-American wars; the Great Sino Dynasty that swollowed all of Asia; the loss of Moscow, Washington and Melbourne to German/European nuclear weapons; etc. etc.
Adam you will note that the British seriously considered staying out of the War.
Also Belgium is basically French anyway.
Russia shouldnt have mobilized because then Germany did so and then France until then it had looked like a purely AH v Serbia affair.
Glen, have you ever heard the saying that it is better to say nothing and be thought stupid than to open your mouth and prove it?
That’s enough Modern History 101 for now. Back later.
Glen
These countries all had treaties that obliged them to act once AH started the ball rolling with the OK of the Germans. The Germans knew that when they told AH to go ahead. It was a train wreck in slow motion.
An early version of mutually assured destruction (MAD)?
It was like a nuclear chain reaction that just needed the detonator, in this case a cretinous Kaiser with serious personality issues.
Adam
The small Boer democracies were just the same as the British Imperial democracy – small white elites ruling non-whites many times their number.
It was why I used the notion that the Boer War was based on racism on both sides.
I agree that the Prussian militarism had global ambitions.
So did a few other empires at the time. It is also probably right to say that the Germans were the worst of a bad lot.
The German treatment of Indigenous people in South-west Africa was frightful. Whether it was much worse than the small neutral Belgian democracy’s treatment of the Indigenous people in the Congo is debatable but not very debatable. Those in the Belgian Congo who had their hands cut off for not meeting rubber quotas would probably have felt that they were better off than the Namibs who were driven into the desert to die by the Germans, and better off than the Rhodesian blacks who were hung for daring to defy the British Empire. (There is a picture of Rhode’s chaps enjoying their tiffin in the shade of the same tree in Thomas Pakenham’s book on the colonial history of Africa, forgotten the title, sorry). In amongst it all the Boers with their racism, their murders and their whippings, and their de facto treatment of bantus as slaves were not a very attractive lot either.
I will have a hard think about the way I have been ‘ahistorical’ in making what amounts to retro-judgements.
Glen:
Would you care to elaborate?
My understanding is that the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north has around 60% of the population, and the french speaking region of Wallonia has around 30% of the population.
There are German and Flemish speakers as well.
ETA:
Brussels region is mostly French speaking, and accounts for the other 10%, all figures rounded.
I really doubt anyone expected Britain the honour an almost 100 year old treaty – especially when it involved declaring war on the second biggest power in Europe.
Diog, you better take some Bex and have a good lie down beneath the Knowledge Tree as our Gal Hillary took the Capital Hill and Iraq by storm:
http://wcbstv.com/national/hillary.clinton.secretary.2.991639.html
and as she stuck into Cheney:
And there is no ducking of bullets here. It’s only the suicide bombers:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2009/04/25/BL2009042500760.html
Finns
President Lincoln’s 3IC is doing a “pretty good” job as she said.
I wonder how different things would be if she was POTUS. My guess is she would have done pretty much the same things Obama has done.
Hopefully not with mrs obama
Only better, and quicker.
They couldn’t get rid of Joel with all their Chinese whispers and now he’s gone where his Lib predecessors feared to tread. Him and Hillary would get on well
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25385899-5005961,00.html
Gus, she would be better with HER:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2009/04/65926889/1
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517802,00.html
Apparently, even the doggie Bo has higher approval rating than Obi. As Obi is on the slide 62 to 65. Too much jivin’ and bowin’ and canin’
Am I allowed to mention the pile-on at PB that several of my interlocutors engaged in at Michelle Obama’s expense during the election?
Diog, it’s a bounce-off Bo, he got 100%.
She has avoided saying anything dumb since the election, and has made a good impression. The public’s love affair with Obama and all associated with him will last a while yet. But the “beltway” view is that his lack of executive experience is showing in his decision-making and his appointments.
Oh dear, the Swannie is crumbling
Finns
the sleeping dragon sharpens it’s claws
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/25/content_11252438.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/25/content_11255500.htm
ANC does not achieve a 2/3 majority in South African election:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g4HLQJqDUFPnhfvH__ffQYq2m9lQD97PETIG2
I think this is good. I think their country will be better off when they have two racially integrated major parties.
ShowsOn the opposition to the ANC needs to be united.
The DA and COPE should merge into a single opposition party for the next election if they have got any brains whatsoever!
What the opposition needs above all else is a black leader.
Obamas popularity must really gall all those at Fox and in particular Hannity. Has anyone been watching his anti-Obama crusades lately. Some of his comments and that of his guests in his Tea Parties must be running close to insurrection. Whatever happened to loyalty to the President? Obviously disloyalty to the POTUS only applies if criticism is made about a Republican incumbent.
Ben Raue at the The Tally Room reckons a 2/3 majority is symbolic anyway.
“The Mbeki administration held a larger two-thirds majority since the 2004 election, without any dramatic changes to the constitution. When you consider the ongoing divisions within the ANC, you would have to say that Zuma won’t have sufficient control over the National Assembly to be able to dictate constitutional change, even if he wanted to.”
The ANC still won a very comprehensive victory, amidst complete party turmoil. You can’t really say that there’s any significant shift.
Zuma expected to take a much harder line against Mugabe:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25381524-2703,00.html
The ANC will go on polling more than 60% of the vote, no matter how corrupt or incompetent they are, until there is a credible black opposition leader.
If Zuma is serious about getting rid of Mugabe I will forgive him his various other sins. All he has to do is turn off the power.
So the Democratic Alliance should try to either merge or form a coalition with COPE, the ANC breakaway faction that won nearly 7.5% of the vote in their first election.
They could offer the current COPE leader the opposition leadership position as ‘payment’ (so long as the current D.A. leader can have by the deputy opposition leadership). That would give them about 25% of the seats, which would be a solid place to start for the next presidential election. It would also raise the profile of the COPE leader so that they are a credible Presidential candidate next election.
The problem with that is that COPE left the ANC because they were supporters of Mbeki, which doesn’t say much for their judgement. Maybe there is a potential leader among them, but I don’t know who it is. They only polled 7%, a lot less than initially expected.
The trouble is COPE didnt put a big name in for President that cost them IMHO.
Mbeki also hasnt come out and supported COPE either Adam.
The best thing to hope for is for COPE and the DA to merge into a new political party with Mosiuoa Lekota as its head.
If you say so, Glen. I hope your judgement about South African politics is better than your judgement about Australian politics.
Richmond and Freo both won today, so if we lose tomorrow, we will be bottom.
Hmmm well we have some good ins but Green is a bad loss for us and up to 6 weeks too
.
Still the boys did well last week so id say we’re in with a 50/50 chance tomorrow after all it is at the G and the Skipper is back in the side also good news that Russell Robertson is an emergency.
I do not really follow South African politcs at all. But the thing about COPE is that as Mbeki supporters they could be seen just as much if not more of incumbents as Zuma. So Maybe in time as that memory fades COPE may do better. Any thoughts?
I was told when I moved to Canberra last year that “winter arrives on ANZAC Day.” And so it has proved to be.
*gone*
Zille has already said that her party will be looking to form a coalition. That’s most likely going to be COPE.
A wonderful bit of creative invective from PJ O’Rourke in The Canberra Times:
‘When charming leftists stick their nose into things they don’t understand they become ratchet-jawed purveyors of monkey-doodle and baked wind. They are piddlers upon merit, beggars at the door of accomplishment, thieves of livelihood, envy coddling tax lice applauding themselves for giving away other people’s money. They are the lap dogs of the poly sci-class, returning to the vomit of collectivism. They are pig herders tending that sow-who-eats-her-young, the welfare state. They are muck-dwelling bottom-feeders growing fat on the worries and disappointments of the electorate. They are the ditch carp of democracy.’
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/the-ditch-carp-of-democracy/1492879.aspx
If your argument lacks substance, use insults.
The Flemish are the aforementioned 60% Dutch. According to the CIA handbook, the other 40% are French and the German speakers are only a tiny minority.
As I said earlier, torturing didn’t provide the US with any useful information. All it did was tell us what kind of people were running America.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66895.html
Weird stories in todays paper.
!st headline
Which would worry most pensioners but it is really an increase.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/pension-cut-for-tough-budget-20090425-aiq9.html
and
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/libs-await-rise-of-a-new-caesar-20090425-aio9.html?page=-1
Yes, everywhere I go people are debating this.
And on the possible demise of the tallyroom, would hate to see it happen. Be like a footy match without the crowd. If the commentators find it a problem they should wear headphones.
The size and passion of the crowd at the last tally room show that it should be kept.
I think the poor violets are scared that,shock horror, some of the riff-raff may get close to their exalted persons and spoil their overwise immaculate visage.
I think getting rid of the TR would be akin to abolishing trial by jury
Well no surprises in Iceland.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/04/200942522631653849.html
But what’s with this weird headline from News Ltd?
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25388163-23109,00.html
Oz 224, you beat me to it! What a laugh! News Ltd always ever hopeful of another Conservative victory.
In ‘Adelaide Now’ as well ofcourse.http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25388163-5005962,00.html
The Age has got the headline correct at least.
Iceland’s left wins resounding election victory
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/icelands-left-wins-resounding-election-victory-20090426-aj4s.html
Glen will be pleased to hear that the Liberals lost all their seats in Iceland.
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/i/iceland/
What is happening in Fiji is truly tragic with Military imposing its dictatorship rule in every aspects.
ABC1 Asian Pacific Focus reported this morning a truly bizarre story. It’s concerning the 2IC to Bainimarama, a pro-Christian crusade police commissioner Esala Teleni. He is using the Church to fight crime and he ordered everyone, Christians, Hindus, Islam, Buddhish, etc, to attend his sermons or more accurately rants.
What is even more bizarre is that:
So a church infighting is tangled up in crime and political out fighting.
Full story is here. A very good read. Oh Yes, on Sunday, God made him do it.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/02/20/fiji-bloggers-react-to-police-commissionerss-crusade/
Gotta love Albo having a dig at Turnbull
http://www.smh.com.au/national/states-signed-up-to-biggest-federal-road-and-rail-investment-20090426-aj2n.html
I tried to get a screenshot of that Australian headline, since presumably they’ll get around to fixing it at some point, but it came out with the formatting all over the place. Still, I guess enough of us have seen it now that they won’t try to deny its existence…
Except that this is The Australia. They’ll deny the existence of anything they don’t like.
Andrew Robb on Insiders this morning was moaning about Labor’s $200 billion debt that our grand children will be condemned to paying back. This line of “reckless spending” comes from the Party that “Treasury reported that from the 2004-05 budget to the 2007 election, the China boom and a robust economy had added $334 billion in windfall gains to the budget surplus.
Of this, the Howard government spent, or gave away in tax cuts, $314 billion, or 94 per cent. Again, for perspective, this is the size of the entire annual economic output of South Africa or Denmark.”
http://www.smh.com.au/national/fiscal-feud-20090424-ai6z.html?page=-1
Labor is taking corrective action in combating the GFC. No wonder it is ahead in the polls even in the area of economic management. The Howard Years were the Wasted Years. Apart from the Alice Springs to Darwin railway line, what major infrastructure project was undertaken?
These clowns are not & cannot be a credible Opposition. The next Liberal Prime Minister isn’t even sitting in Parliament yet.
The problem for Robb is that no-one pends the time listening to him.
Robb always has that disheveled look of someone who has just spent the night on a park bench.
Bolt confirmed his lack of economic credentials by letting slip that his wife pays his credit card bill. Clearly, he’s in charge of all the important issues in his household like immigration policy and the Iraq war while the missus does the unimportant things like washing, ironing and balancing the family budget.
Even the Alice to Darwin line was mostly paid for by the private sector. The NT and SA Govts put in just as much money as Howard anyway.
http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/transport/programs/rail/alice.aspx
The new Citizen’s Movement did very well in Iceland.
Amigos, it’s time we lay low for awhile.
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN25480301
News Ltd’s parallel universe, where conservatives win even when they lose, saved for posterity
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/iceland.JPG
Does anyone know where you can find more details about the projects announced in the $26 billion infrastructure plan?
That’s ok Adam id have voted for the Independence Party anyway
Adam, that is GOLD! Amazing the hacks here didnt do the same for Howard. We lost but we’ll win next time- LOVE IT. Should be turnbull’s slogan…
Glen still supports the party that took one of the wealthiest countries in the world and reduced it to bankruptcy.
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2008/10/iceland_goes_ba.html
Still better than voting for Socialists or Extreme Left wingers
My second favourite team is playing Melbourne. Who is it by the way and don’t say the winners, although likely.
Just like Obama and Rudd, the Icelandic left now has to clean up the mess left behind by the deregulationist neo-liberal ideologues of the previous government. This seems to be becoming a pattern.
Some more anti – Rudd BS from the DT.
“Handwriting shows the writing’s on the wall for Rudd”
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25386459-5005941,00.html
That’s a bit rich considering Hawke/Keating. They deregulated more than Howard ever did.
And go the Icelandic Greens forming a coalition government! *sticks middle finger up at GG*
Icelandic left got a total of 52.7% of the vote… now why does that number sound familiar?
2007 ALP 2PP vote haha
Also their vote in 1972.
In between the base partisan nature of this article, Milne manages to highlight the hilarious state the Federal Opposition are in.
They oppose the stimulus package, but only is their leader trumpeting the benefits it brings, many Liberal MP’s are writing to Albanese and asking him to spend some of the money in their electorate!
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25385299-5001030,00.html
Well they did only hold 4 of 63 seats prior to the election…
My current calculation is that the ANC will fall two seats short of a 2/3 majority.
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/s/southafrica/southafrica2009.txt
[Well they did only hold 4 of 63 seats prior to the election…
Yes, yes, but teasing Glen is half the fun.
Jacob Zuma has face and look that would make Andrew Robb looks an angel.
These things normally burn themselves out if contained, but it’s worth watching. The worst flu pandemic killed more than 20M in 1918. Of course, Australia is totally unprepared as our State Government have only pretended to have it covered.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25388220-5005962,00.html
From GB’s link at 245
ROFLMAO
They actually pay people to write this stuff?
I recommend this look for Australian politicians
http://icetwice.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/zuma.jpg
Herr Doktor, that was when Jacob was in a good mood.
I’d hate to see him angry then.
Love his shoes. Feet too soft to dance bare feet.
Imagine QT, Govt would be ROTF in hysterics with Joe opposite them in that get up.
and I’d need a mute button for my eyes.
This is when Jacob Zuma was in a bad mood:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4713172.stm
Now the Icelanders are in really deep doo-doo. They have Ditch Carp running the country.
I think you’ll have to explain that comment.
The Ruddster has got a friend:
Really, do they have any choice, as their own currency has collapsed. Iceland has 300,000 people and took US$10B from IMF. That is about AUD$47,000.00 per head. I thought I heard Andrew Bolt complained this morning that for the projected $200B deficit, that would be about AUD$10K per head.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8017927.stm
Adam see post 218
I see. I thought it might be a Boer term meaning “tough Nordic lesbian.”
lol
For some reason I thought exactly the same thing.
You would have been mistaking it for:
KarperDijkdottir
Only vision he had was of Pru in tights.
Adam we have scored just 2 points in a half so far!
We’re doing almost as badly as COPE!
Melbourne has kicked three points in two quarters. *Mutters darkly*
Wooden spoon here we come.
I imagine the coach will be kicking more than three behinds in the sheds right now.
In spite of what I said earlier it is sad to see Melbourne, once a great poweful club, like no other actually, struggling so much. I’m not against the team but some of their supporters leave a lot to be desired. I’m an optimist. They’re only 27 points behind. They can still win.
Them’s fighting words.
“Melbourne, once a powerful club” I ranked Melbourne last of ten of most popular Vic teams in Sydney.
What’s the story with Pru and Howard. Could any human being actually find Howard appealing? No doubt Labor people are better looking than Liberal. Think of the mugs on Turnbull, Cossie, Hockey. And the further to the right the uglier they get, Downer, Ruddock, Andrews, Tuckey LOL
This is shaping up to be Melbourne’s worst performance ever.
Has a team not scored a goal in a match of VFL/AFL??
I’m think we’re about to find out.
No, we’re not
Wikipedia doesn’t even have a page for the Citizens Movement. What sort of party are they?
P.S. Go Crows.
This is a politics blog not a sport blog!
Quick. Keep the Kiwis out. It’s bad enough giving the Brumbies a thrashing now this.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/2364487/Ten-influenza-results-confirmed
SBS News was like the Robb show tonight (using clips from Insiders) Main Australian story was us being swamped by refugee boats and Robb saying Rudd is responsible for the recent deaths, then they had him again with a couple of rants in the next story ‘pension pain” where they stated the increase would only be $20
As opposed to the generous increase in the pension under the Liberals in the 2007 budget of $0.
I thonk the Saints in the 50/60’s? scored only 1 behind in a game.
OK, we have bird flu and swine flu and they both have pandemic possibilities.
Is there anything like ovine flu?
They are trying to spin the pension increase into a negative. The govt has never said what the increase would be, it was Brenda who came up with $30 for single pensioners and all other pensioners would get nothing.
I think there are flu viruses in all mammalian species, just as there are immunodeficiency viruses analogous to HIV (equine, feline etc). They all have the capacity to mutate into forms which will infect humans, just as a simian virus mutated into HIV.
Lets hope that the swine flu and the ovine flu don’t get together. Some nations would be at greater risk than others.
Methinks the pressure applied by Albo has got to Turnbull.
What is this? Praising the Ruddster and attacking himself.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25382899-5014047,00.html
Avian flu is still the scariest, because (a) birds can fly, and (b) everyone eats chickens.
Ah, wrong Turnbull there, Finns.
Adam, just for a moment at least
The article is quoting someone called Noel Turnbull, not Malcolm. Not even Malcolm would describe himself on the record as “one of the smartest leaders the Liberals have had.”
In any case Noel is wrong – Malcolm may be intelligent in a general sense, but his political intelligence so far has been very poor.
A LOT of coaches kicking a bunch of behinds this weekend …… Amongst PB regulars that I’m aware of who have pinned their AFL colours to the mast, we’ve almost all lost this weekend: Vera and a few others with Sydney, several of you with Melbourne and myself with North. Vera reckons Malcolm is the kiss of death as he tipped both her team and mine this weekend. Bird of Paridise, don’t see you on a regular basis, but Freo got home for you in the end. The West regularly has an 8 to 10 page supplement in Friday’s edition that includes the tipsters; sports wise and celebrity.
Vera et. al, I will post Malcolm’s tips so you can all beware on Friday as soon as I’ve had a chance to get the paper. We’re a couple of hours behind so probably round about lunch time to early afternoon east coast time.
Tom,
Yes, and it is open to all colours of the political spectrum as well. As we tolerate the Libs who post, so shall you who are of non sports persuasions tolerate the intrusion of sports into this blog when it is a weekend or when the cricket is on. William has banned only blow by blow reporting of cricket action from the blog as you can get that by loading cric info and that is fair enough.
Melbourne actually redeemed themselves a bit in the last quarter. It became just a very poor performance rather than one of the worst ever. Still, we are now no 16 and I expect we’ll stay there. Round 5 and we are looking foward to 2010 draft picks.
La Grattan agrees:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/next-chapter-for-gillard-is-yet-to-be-written-20090425-aioa.html?page=-1
The Ruddster used by date, March 2015. If not, we all should be marching down to Canberra and shout “Remember Howard”.
Stats here:
http://afl.allthestats.com/records/records.php?ty=1
So flu development depends on inter-species interactions, as with, say, swine and swineherds, chickens and diners, ovines and shepherds?
Who is doing a better job at the moment?
A. Melbourne
B. Malcolm Turnbull
Discuss
I see Smorgan has come out in fulsome praise of Pratt.
I do hope that none of my *special price* cardboard carton money went to paying Dorotich’s wages.
Adam – Got over my disappointment with the beloved Swannies last night so watched Melb. v Crows.
Awful weather but Aaron Davey is beautiful to watch and Melb. have a bunch of kids who could be good before long. They have gone from being woeful last year to being a bit behind this year.
That stuff about Kev’s handwriting is pure junk but, eh, anything to bring the bloke down I suppose.
Hardly a fair comparison.
It should read:
A. Liberal Party
B. Melbourne FC
or:
A. Malcom Turnbull
B. Ronald Deeman
Viruses mutate quickly and easily and are always ready to expand into any environmental niche they are offered. HIV crossed the species barrier some time in the early 20th century in Africa, but remained confined there until about 1980, when demographic changes opened up new environmental niches for it. Flu viruses jump the species barrier all the time. Obviously viruses in domestic animals do this more frequently because humans have more and closer contact with them.
Since 1945 the Liberal Party has won 16 federal elections and lost 9.
Since 1945 Melbourne has won seven premierships in 63 years, the last in 1964.
Just watching SBS’s “Secret Files of the Inquisition – The Tears of Spain”. The program claims that Queen Isabella I of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand II of Aragon, were Jewish. And the Crown Prince, Juan, was secretly circumcised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_I_of_Castile
No mention of her being Jewish in the Wiki entry. Weird.
Since the retirement of Menzies, however, federal elections have gone 8 Liberal, 8 Labor. Since the sacking of Norm Smith, Melbourne has won 0 premierships.
Thus Menzies = Norm Smith, and vice versa.
Thanks for that figure Adam – I hadn’t realised that Lab/Lib elections had equalised since Menzies.
Vividly remember my grandfather listening to the radio on budget night and then lambasting Menzies for the hike in beer & ciggies. The funny thing was that my grandfather neither smoked nor drank beer. The ancestors were all winemakers.
Hmm, which is the more unreliable source – Wikipedia or a TV doco? Tough call.
How would each Vic team rank according to the results of the 07 fed election from safe ALP to safe LNP?
I think you would know Adam.
Um, you’ll have to explain the question a bit more…
The divisions of Adelaide, Port Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Fremantle all have healthy Labor margins.
Oops. Except there’s no team called Perth of course.
So really nothing has changed since 1478. According to the SBS Program: “torture was sanctioned and made legal by the Spanish Inquisition Authority for the purpose extracting information”. Hmmm, the more they change the more they stay the same.
OK. Each team would have certain boundaries. If you added the results of the polling booths in each boundary, which team would have the highest ALP margin to the highest LNP margin.
I will have a wild guess and say in the boundary of Collingwood there are more ALP voters – all the way – to the boundary of Hawthorn where there are more LNP voters.
Juliem
I can’t live with the secrecy anymore. I just have to out myself.
I am a Hawthorn supporter.
Both were crusades against the unbelievers, kill them all, god will know his own.
It’s alright Boerwar, I am a Manly supporter (don’t tell anyone).
Well, you’ve had your premiership Boerwar so no sympathy here for your mob this year.
How are you going to work all this team boundary thingy in the Rugby League areas versus the Rugby Union ones.
Ah I see now. All the teams which are linked to defined geographical areas are Labor except Hawthorn. Melbourne, North Melbourne, Collingwood, Carlton, Footscray, Richmond, Fremantle and Port Adelaide have always been Labor. Essendon, St Kilda and Geelong have become Labor over recent decades. The names Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney are too broad to be useful, and there is no such place as West Coast.
I believe Essendon is Labor’s weakest area in the seat of Marybyrnong. And probably votes Liberal in bad years.
I see Melbourne has not yet earned bottom spot.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sport/afl/story/0,26576,25388796-19742,00.html
BH
I think that we sort of stole one last year due to some very good coaching by Clarkson, a good squad and a bit of good luck.
This year the injury gods have been unkind to Hawthorn. Good for the comp to see it level out a bit, so I am not complaining.
Hmmm. I still can’t decide which Victorian team to support?
Maybe I will stick to hoping for a no Vic teams in the Grand Final!
Go Swans of course
“This year the injury gods have been unkind to Hawthorn.”
How can you have injuries in AFL? It’s a nonbody contact sport LOL
*ducks for cover*
Boerwar – I’m all for sharing it around. Makes for a much better comp as you say.
I waited 34 years for my SA team to win a Grand Final and then yonks for the Swannies to win. Great jubiliation in our house when they came to Syd in 1982 and we went to the SCG, etc, from that time. Huge fun even when you could shoot peas and not hit anyone in the outer.
You have to hand it to Turnbull for turning up to Albo’s do today – even tho he looked silly. He must have a pretty thick hide.
Nah, just remembered he’s a lawyer and a merchant banker – what a combination.
“keating” the musical is on (again) at 9:55 on abc1
David, Essendon used to be a middle-class Catholic area, and did vote Liberal in bad Labor years. It had a big DLP vote (the McManuses lived there), and DLP preferences kept Maribyrnong in Liberal hands from 1955 to 1969, when Moss Cass won it. Likewise the Libs held the state seat of Essendon on DLP prefs from 1955 to 1979 (Sir Kenneth Wheeler, who was Speaker), but Labor have held it since 1979, except for the Kennett years of 1992-99.
St Kilda has a had a striking conversion from safe Liberal to safe Labor since the 1960s. The old federal seat of Isaacs, which existed 1949-69 and which Labor never came close to winning, would today be a Labor stronghold. The state seat of St Kilda was Labor 1952-55, but thereafter was safe Liberal until 1982, when Andrew McCutcheon beat Brian Dixon.
OK, its over for Rudd. Yes, he overcame brian burke and scores and air hostess tears but, wait for it….he shops as a gourmet deli during the recession
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25387957-662,00.html
Can Milne go any lower???
The first paragraph is a blatant strawman:
Rudd’s just doled out $900 to the vast majority of the Australian populace. He’s not giving any lectures about austerity.
It’s pretty obvious who cut the cheese this time!
Though it is the firstr time on ABC Analogue – the previous broadcast was on ABC@ in digital only.
And Turnbull is living on tinned soup and dry crackers.
No, I don’t think Milne can go any lower.
I have a confession to make. I became a Crows fan when they joined the comp but I’ve been a Demons fan for much longer.
Diogs,
You being equivical. What a surprise!
Laurie Oakes gives a more measured assessment of the luxuries our pollies have to endure in our service.
“You don’t have to agree with Swan’s policies and approach to acknowledge the huge difficulties of the job and the strain it must impose on him.
His staff say that, if he gets to spend one night a week with his family lately, it’s a good week. More often, it’s one night a fortnight”.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,25380535-5001030,00.html
GG
I’ve got a multiple choice question for you.
Who made the following very prescient comment in early 2007?
“Labor is going to wait for clean-coal technology to come along before doing anything to the coal industry.”
(a) Bob Brown
(b) Tim Flannery
(c) Greg Hunt
(d) Martin Ferguson
Dear me, now I have to be nice to Diogenes as well as Glen. It’s all too much. I do hope GP doesn’t support the Demons too.
I think GP is from New South Wales…
I thought Prussia
Diogs,
Rather than play your silly quiz, I’ll add to your sum total of knowledge.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=coalition&st=cse
GG
The equivalent group in Australia is the Lavoisier Group. Martin Ferguson, the Minister for Energy and Resources, attended a launch of their propaganda “Nine Facts About Climate Change” and provided that very reassuring quote
They were very appreciative.
And people wonder why I’m cynical about Labor’s commitment to Climate Change policy.
Interesting you should bring that up, as it was mentioned in the same article where I believe Diogenes got his question from, that the current parliamentary secretary to the minister for transport and infrastructure was a former Woodside lobbyist.
Woodside is infamous for being a key member of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network. A powerful lobbying group that urges the Australian government to do nothing on climate change. The former general secretary of the Labor Party is a Woodside lobbyist as well.
But of course this is evidence of a balanced approach to the issue of climate change.
David Walsh @ 325,
You know who is (or used to be) Essendon’s #1 ticket holder?
……
anyone other than David who knows the answer to this question, sssshhhhh ……
If David doesn’t have the correct answer or any guess before I go to bed, I’ll post it for him, want to see if he knows it
Oz
The president of the Lavoisier Group is Peter Walsh, the former Labor Finance Minister. Evidently they are very pleased with the access “Walshy” can he can get to Labor’s ministers including the PM (although the Left won’t take his calls which I hope includes Penny Wong).
Indeed, when Adam mentions that Australia is “coal-addicted” he neglects to mention the links Labor has to the major polluting industries through the unions, through senior Labor party figures and former ministers taking up jobs in the carbon lobby and through former lobbyists becoming part of the government.
Diogs,
I always thought it was because you are cynical about everything.
Oz,
The climate change debate is a little more sophisticated than a melodrama. Picking goodies and baddies might stimulate your booing and cheering impulses, but doesn’t advance your case if you want to be taken seriously.
Funnily enough, I predicted your response almost word for word.
Oz,
You’re clearly psychotic.
Any VIC PB’rs high enough in altitude to get today’s snow?
Was 28 in Perth today when my boy played his junior footy (U/11) game
GG
I would be curious to know what your views are on the science of CC.
Labor good, liberal bad.
I believe that global warming is real and that man is playing a significant role in it occurring.
GG
Thanks
I have to confess to being disappointed.
In the context of an earlier post on swine flu reaching New Zealand I led with an innocent query a bout ovine flu, followed it up with some oblique references to ovine flu/human interactions and did not elicit a single bite about N Zedders. Sigh.
You know, you really should copyright that phrase.
Baaaaa
Baaaaaaaaaaa
BAD Boer
Anyone watching Keating the musical on ABC
Dolly’s on in his suspenders at the moment
juliem – the low altitude flying bomber?
I’m perfectly well aware of all this. Of course Labor has links to the carbon lobby. In an economy as carbon-dependant as ours, everyone has links to the carbon lobby – it wouldn’t be much of a lobby if they didn’t. That’s why I said, several times, that it would be extremely difficult to get any kind of CPRS up in this parliament, which is, of course, why are going for one with relatively modest targets. Then we will see what comes out of Copenhagen, we will see what the next Senate looks like, we will see how the economy is going, and we will see how public opinion is trending, and we will decide what to do next. This is called *strategy* – it’s how grown-ups do politics, as opposed to shouting slogans and banging our heads against walls.
Wow, interesting!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lavoisier_Group
You mean the parliament with Labor and Liberal in it…? Don’t get that.
I’m not suggesting that you don’t know what’s going on, only that your attempts to paint Labor as some poor little band of lefty enviro-freaks who are being pushed against a wall by unnamed sources is hilarious.
The only things that factor into the equation are the science of climate change, public opinion and the economy. All of which line up for taking strong action on climate change.
Also this idea of “We’ll wait for happens at Copenhagen” is stupid. I know people who’ve gone to the Bali and Poznan conferences. Australia doesn’t go there and wait outside while everyone discusses. We bring our own position to the table and argue it. We should be arguing from a strong position, not the sad one we are at now.
364,
David, not familiar with that particular one but since you’ve guessed, I’ll tell you.
Tim Costello’s brother
…… and while I am not surprised to find out that this is Labor territory (it isn’t that far away from Broadmeadows), I will forever associate Essendon, whether the footy club or the suburb, with the Liberal party.
Were we talking about the same person or not? I suspect not as I’m not familiar with Cossie going by that name
Howard on “Keating”……..hahahahahahaha
Um, I don’t recall saying anything remotely like that. Labor is a coalition, which includes unions like the AWU who represent many people working in carbon-intensive industries. This issue has to be fought out in the labour movement as everywhere else.
I didn’t use the word “wait.” I said we will see. Of course we will work at Copenhagen for the best possible outcome. That will then feed back into the domestic debate. It’s a dialectical process, comrade.
Here you go juliem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rnwn4q_ZE9c
From inside North Korea ….
371 David,
There you go …. I didn’t have the priveledge of being able to watch QT when Keating was PM …. thanks for that
That guy playing Keating in the Musical has ears like Tony Abbott. I had a bit of trouble working out what was what!
HAH, Keating. What a legend. Good dancing.
5-15% is not the best possible outcome. Unless of course the Australian government is going to be arguing for stronger targets than it is willing to publicly announce.
juliem @ 372,
Interesting to see American t-shirts being made by Nth Koreans … globalisations long arm reaches everywhere …
The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog put up a collection of photos of Nth Korea, taken from the Chinese border, just the other day as well :
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/peering_into_north_korea.html
btw, I’m a Geelong supporter
Juliem, that’s really interesting.
I’ve often wondered whether North Korea is what it’s described as in the media.
Unfortunately that photo gallery doesn’t really inform that much. “I didn’t see anyone smile” is not particularly comprehensive.
It does look gloomy though, but so is Melbourne. =P
I wouldn’t have missed the Tallyroom 2007 for quids! The videos are online for all to enjoy or squirm as the case may be.
What a shame we got Howard instead of Keating. $390bn pissed up against the wall buying votes and sucking the life out of the country, pumping in his vileness.
I like that Rennie name.
Would that be the Kilsyth Rennies, the East Lothian connection, the bridge building Rennies, the Charles MacIntosh Rennies, the New Zealand Rennies, the Canadian Rennies or some other band of Rennies?
I can handle pieces such as tyhe two linked here as they show some thought and analysis applied to them.
What I have most difficulty understanding is how the same two authors can also come up with partisan dribble on most other occasions similar in intent and content as that which has been served up by Milne this weekend and the usual bottom of the pond scum offerings by other News Ltd scribes which we all know and whom I needn’t need mentioning here.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25382899-5014047,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25380641-5014047,00.html
http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2009/04/26/iceland-elections-conclusion/
The Icelandic election had 0.3% invalid votes and a whopping 3.2% of ballots that were left blank! That so many people were willing to rock up to a polling booth and still not vote shows how P!ssed off the Icelandic people are with their pollies.
http://www.grapevine.is/home/electionfever
This site has the policy positions of the parties. The ‘Democracy Movement’ that got no seats seams to have some anarchist tendencies. Anarchism is big in Iceland at the moment. The NEW ‘Citizens Movement’ got 7% with next to no budget and has its origins in the revolution. I read a blogger somewhere discribe it as like the Social Democratic Alliance but for people who don’t want to support the old order authorities.
A brilliant 21% for the Green-Left Movement! Is that a record for an ecology based party at national elections?
Wiki tells me that another important election today, one i’m sure we’ve all been keenly awaiting, is that of the Andorran national parliamentary elections.
We should get the results tomorrow.
And I am totally confused now. I was reading this piece credited to Tim Colebatch, titled “How do we get through tough times? Spend, spend, spend” in WA today, and thought, this is different to his normal stuff where he generally attacks most of the Government economic policy.
I get to the end and find it has a credit to a more reasoned analysist.
“Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist.” I don’t know what to think any more. What the devil is going on? Maybe “good cop-bad cop” treatment.
http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/how-do-we-get-through-tough-times-spend-spend-spend-20090423-agv0.html?page=-1
An insufficient CPRS is worse than nothing because it will not stop run-away climate change yet it will cause a few economic problems. We have two options:
* Pull together, knuckel down and experience some pain but prevent Global Warming getting out of hand OR
* Say “to HECK with the planet or future generations, lets just focus on supporting the economy in the short to mid term in the hight of the GFC”
I seriously hope we don’t choose the second option, though I fear support for it will grow even stronger the later we wait. If the science (and the $) says there’s no hope, we’ll go that way.
The problem with the ALP’s ETS is that it achieves neither aim. It will cause some minor short term economic problems yet (if adopted globally) would still bring about IRREVERSABLE Global Warming which will mess up the economy in the long term. As Calvin from ‘Calvin & Hobbs” says “A good comprimise leaves everyone unhappy”. This isn’t like the old politics with comprimise made between Fat Cat and Union Thug. Science doesn’t comrimise, weather patterns don’t comrimise, mother earth won’t compromise, if we try to comprimise with her we shall fail. Therefore I hope the opposition and Greens vote it down or make a deal to significantly increase the target. If its blocked we can try for a better one in 6 months time.
Another thing: I don’t know why people think another election will make passing this possible. If the Opposition and Greens still oppose it, then it will still be blocked in a new senate. The governments only hope is (if constitutionally possible???) to use the CPRS as a DD triger and get it passed in the ensuing Joint Sitting. (i’m assuming the government will win comfortably enough in the HofR to get a majority in a Joint Sitting. Trivia Nuts: After which previous DD has the government obtained an absolute majority of seats when HofR seats and Senate seats are combined?)
Good Wars, or “Just Wars” if you believe in that sort of thing:
* Spanish Civil War (For The Left that is)
* WWII. Imperialist Fascists need to be stopped.
* I know this will make me unpopular in some circles, and i’m not entirely confident of this myself but i do see merit in the UK going to war after the Falkland invasion. (Ug, I hate to take Thatcher’s side on anything!) The Junta were thugs and Argentina’s claim was past its used by date.
*The Vietnames were right to demand soverignty and kick out the US/French/Japanese and their stooges. Even if I disagree with the National Liberation Front on most economic policies, they were Vietnamese fighting for Vietnemese control of Vietnam.
*The secular Palistinian groups fighting the Zionists (not Hamas), if their tactics are acceptable (ditto all groups of course).
Bad Wars (no goodies to barack for)
* WWI (imperialist bollacks)
*Gulf War I (conspiracy theories aside)
* Gulf War II
*Afgan invasions – both USSR and NATO
You’ll notice I haven’t taken the side of the kiddies that “started it” once. War is over used. Our “Offence Force” should be converted to a proper “Defence Force” for defending us from ummm… Fiji, USA, PRC. It would need a much smaller budget if it wasn’t designed for running all over the world like the running dogs we are.
Love it! Laaaaaaarrrrve it!
Broadband Losers Could vote Labor out
… meows Glenn Milne this morning… something about folk in the country being pi$$ed off that they won’t get the full monte, speedwize, in the coming broadband rollout and they’ll therefore, in their dribs and drabs and their marginal rural seats will march off to the polls come whenever and grimly oust the government.
They’ll be egged on by the country newspapers:
Yes, a virtual monopoly. That wouldn’t be a Murdoch monopoly, would it, Glenn?
Dear, oh Dear. What this guy dreams up on weekend is truly the stuff of legend. Milne’s collection of little pieces of paper – each with a new curse of doom for Rudd written on it in a hasty hand – must be rivalling Shanahan’s by now.
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/why_cant_some_on_the_left_lighten_up/
Seems we have all lost our sense of humour!
I thought Work Choices hilarious.
Milne conveniently ignores that most of the 1000 and lower towns are in safe Lib/National seats.
A good local ALP campaigner will point out that, if they want someone to advocate for them effectively on issues like this, they’d better vote Labor.
Queensland redistribution update:
Both major parties place the new seat on Ipswich and its hinterland. The LNP wants to call it Killen. The ALP wants it called Theodore.
I thought PJ would be funnier. I’ve read a couple of his books which were very good, albeit very superficial. He sounded tired and just trotted out old lines that had worked in the past. He was a pompous, self-important blowhard.
The funniest thing about him IS his philosophy.
This looks a bit concerning. So far two are being tested in NSW and two more today from Qld, who were holidaying in Mexico. NO confirmed cases yet.
I think Finns trip to the Knowledge Trees in Peru needs to be scrutinised. He could be our own Typhoid Mary.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25391350-5005962,00.html
The LNP completely reorganises Katter’s seat of Kennedy. Cunning. But there’s logic to this as making Leichhardt a smaller Cairns based seat makes a lot of sense.
But Maranoa then becomes a mega seat covering perhaps half the state. Maybe more. From Mount Isa to Crows Nest. (Which just goes to show that when the Nationals complain about large rural districts, they’re not doing so on the basis of principle.)
They also move Gladstone into Capricornia, making it a relatively compact seat. Flynn then becomes a north-south oriented central Queensland hinterland seat.
While you are sipping your Vienna latte spiked with Napoleon brandy, banking your St. Kevin flavoured $900 cheque, crying over your sagging Super, driving on the new Albo’s 6 lanes freeway or debating the Climate Change in Penny’s Lane, in this GFC/TGR. Just spare a thought for the poors of the devleoping world:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gh2FfqNPT_MJt5nCsGIyMWlpTMDwD97QE7M80
Yeah, look what have they done to my song, Ma.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-bbSSaNFE
According to PJK last night, they have always been here, in the Senate.
I think Milne’s argument is that half a million people that usually vote Liberal / National are going to to vote Liberal or National at the next election, and this will result in a swing that will make the government lose.
The fact these people under the government’s scheme going to have guaranteed access to a 12 Mbps broadband connection, instead of their current guarantee of a 19.2 Kbps connection, isn’t mentioned.
HM 385
I don’t know why people still talk of an insufficient CPRS.
The CPRS system and the targets are two separate things.
There has been some criticism of the CPRS but that has largeley now been debunked.
The targets are different but they are not so important. The government of the day sets caps 5 years ahead so we shouldn’t care too much what Rudd and Wong say about 2020 now. Let us save up our energy to put pressure on the minister in 2015 to set good caps for 2020.
Of far more importance is getting international agreement now and that means getting China and USA to agree on something sensible soon.
I wonder whether Glen Milne is a laughing stock amongst other journalists. He is just so blantantly desparate and partisan and transparent. So country voters will turn against Labor for giving them a BETTER broadband service (when the Lib govt did nothing) HUH??? Makes Shanahan look fair and balanced. Should this stuff REALLY be called journalism??
Oz 367
I don’t know why you can’t acknowledge that the composition of the senate at the moment is also important in limiting what kind of attack Australia can make on carbon pollution.
I don’t know why the parties bother with these submissions. They commissioners never take the least bit of notice, in fact they seem to go out of their way not to do what either of the parties want them to do.
Plus the ALP’s maps are incomprehensible.
Perhaps that’s why they put in the submissions? A bit of reverse psychology?
Killen is only recently dead – there’s no chance of a seat being named after him
Janet lost hers over the Latham remark.
Similar happened after the Asian economic crisis in the 90’s, Mahatmir saw it as a western plot to bankrupt the emerging Asian economies. The currenciy crashes hit them hard, landing companies with massive unservicable debts simply through currency speculation.
This time the effect is global instead of regional, but will hit just as hard.
No, that doesn’t follow. Sometimes divisions are named after people very soon after their death (Gorton), or even while they’re still alive (Watson, Bruce, Casey, Rankin). I think Theodore has the better case, however. He was Premier of Qld, deputy ALP leader and Treasurer.
Why don’t the LNP suggest naming either a federal or state seat after Bjelke-Petersen, I wonder?
Bonner was created less than 5 years after Neville Bonner died (well, the seat was created for the 2004 election, but the name must’ve been chosen perhaps a year earlier). Killen died in 2007, so it wouldn’t be out of the question for a seat of Killen be created in time for the next election.
I’d actually call a Qld seat Fitzgerald – he did more for good government in Qld than anyone else in recent times.
The ALP submission gives the LNP the new seat of Theodore, which takes on most of the rural areas around Brisbane. This seems to have the effect of making Forde and Blair better for Labor.
Hinkler is also made better for Labor, particularly if Neville retires (he’ll be 70 next year), and remembering what a dreadful candidate Labor had there in 2007.
Do you think the old Libs will ever retire or just fade away? There must be ten or more older than 65.
The LNP proposes making Leichhardt a Cairns-area seat and transferring Cape York to Kennedy. This will have to happen sooner or latern as Cairns is growing very fast. It wouldn’t make much difference to Labor’s position in Leichhardt, but it would make Kennedy more winnable for Labor when Katter retires. I’m not sure what’s in it for the LNP.
The tiny bits that haven’t been debunked include;
1. Taxpayers subsidising 80% of industry’s carbon costs.
2. Billions of dollars of money handed out to industries as compensation for continuing to build smelters and coal power stations when they knew carbon emissions were going to have an ETS on them.
3. No incentive for households or businesses to cut their own emissions.
4. The ability of Carbon industry to make no change whatsoever if they just send a cheque to developing countries to reduce deforestation.
Coalition MPs over 65
Bronwyn Bishop 67
Peter Lindsay 65
Judi Moylan 65
Paul Neville 69
Phil Ruddock 66
Alby Schultz 70
Bruce Scott 66
Wilson Tuckey 74
Danna Vale 65
Mal Washer 65 next year
Senators
Judith Adams 66
Ron Boswell 68
Alan Eggleston 67
Alan Ferguson 65
Bill Heffernan 66
Judith Troeth 69
So do you prefer the Liberal’s scheme of having 100% of carbon credits subsidised?
If house holds cut their emissions, it will slow the rate that the cost of energy sources increase. So they either cut emissions voluntarily, or are forced to do so through higher energy prices.
Are you suggesting that trees don’t consume carbon dioxide?
1. I don’t recall saying that. I just said Labor’s was crap. Why bring up the Liberals? Their position doesn’t affect the merit of Labor’s argument.
3. Of course, your argument doesn’t actually say that cutting household emissions will lead to a reduction in our emissions as the ETS guarantees that it doesn’t.
4. Eventually, trees die and release their CO2. Setting that aside, as energy use increases across the planet and more countries get an ETS, we will run out of reforestation permits and having successfully avoided making any long-term structural changes to our economy, we will that many of us perish due to our short-sightedness as a species.
I know that NOT having an ETS means we have NO method of EVER reducing emissions.
So isn’t that good, it means 1) reforestation permits will be worth a fortune 2) companies that don’t possess them will need to invest in clean energy instead.
Here’s what Iran thinks about free speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCXHiQDbslY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.unwatch.org%2F&feature=player_embedded
Confirmed that the ANC has not won a 2/3 majority: they won 264/400.
The Social Democrats have won the Andorra election – it’s a global trend!
If our big emitters can rush off to PNG and Indonesia and buy all their carbon credits with reforestation contracts, they can easily meet the 5% reduction by 2020 by making absolutely no change to efficiency, RE or even CCS.
In 2020 when they are forced to cut emissions by 60% (which Rudd has signed up to), they will all turn around and say they can’t because the infrastructure needs a 15 year lead in and they haven’t started yet.
The simple answer would be for there to be a limit to how much we can export our carbon reduction but our ETS didn’t put in one.
Diogenes
It is now clear that it is easier for individual action to cut national emissions under an ETS (including the CPRS) than at the moment or under a Carbon Tax system.
Eg, I can spend just $100 in a year to buy 4 tonnes worth of permits and sit on them until they expire. This will remove as much actual emissions from the national total as if I installed a solar panel on my roof.
Furthermore, I can keep on doing that as much as I can afford. Eg, by spending $1000 per year on wasting permits I can be a nett negative contributor.
There is no easy way to do that at the moment (apart from paying for trees) and there is no way to do that under a tax system.
Speaking of the Qld redistribution, what to make of the suggestion that a seat be named after Australian Idol singer Ricki-Lee Coulter?
I’m assuming it’s a piss-take but it’s hard to say for sure.
If you’d like a good laugh, read that suggestion (it’s number #15)
Dio 419
If reforestation (or reduced deforestation) is accepted under the international ETS which ours will fit into then you could assume that the audits and checks will be adequate. Thus our industries making long term decisions by incorporating some such offsets will actually mean so many tonnes of carbon taken out of the atmosphere.
The industry will have to be regulated well enough that its long term capabilities will be clear. There will not be any sympathy for a polluter in 2030 who says that it did not plan well enough to make the 2035 caps.
Dr Good
Why not cap the amount that can be credited through reforestation to ensure that industry does make long-term changes?
But they would’ve massively increased the cost of such permits, which will make them uneconomic for other companies / countries. Your answers demonstrate that you haven’t grasped how trading systems work, particularly that if you increase demand for a particular remedy it becomes more expensive, thus making companies seek solutions elsewhere.
Why should anyone do anything now? The cost of carbon simply isn’t a factor businesses need to consider. It seems that Diogenes wants us to stay with the current system.
I would have thought naming the new seat “Gibbs” would be the most appropriate option.
He was one of Queensland’s very few Chief Justices of the High Court, he was well respected by both sides of politics and he’s recently dead. All of which seems to make him an ideal candidate for a seat named after him.
After all, we already have the seats of Griffith, Dixon and Isaac…
In reality, reforestation permits are worthless, because there is no way to work out the actual amount of emissions that are being reduced. They were included in the EU ETS, but have only contributed to the collapse of the carbon price.
Secondly, whilst we wait for market forces to compel companies to invest in green energy, everyone is still using oil/coal as the source of energy. No attempt will have been made to change the infrastructure surround energy supply (the real impediment to green energy) and we’ve wasted 30 years waiting.
Dio
The other so-called criticism you make is that tax payers will subsidize 80% of carbon costs for industry.
Of course, you are being a bit misleading here. This is a initial fixed term and short term transition period for a few industries.
What is proposed as an alternative. Well, some more flaky souls on in green groups suggest that we should just abandon the ETS until another “better” one can be set up. Unfortunately, I can’t see how that could be less than a 4 year delay in getting a system going. And that means at least 4 years of industry having its carbon pollution totally absorbed by the community at no cost to the polluter. Since tax payers are going to pick up the bill for the damage caused here, and mitigating damage by carbon pollution is accepted to be much worse than the price/cost signals in an ETS,
I think that us taxpayers are going to far worse off because of a delay.
Woops – just remembered that the seat of Dickson is spelt Dickson and not Dixon (and obviously not related to Sir Owen Dixon). My mistake…
I don’t recall saying that. A properly drafted ETS would be fine. But Wong hasn’t come up with one. And everyone except a few Labor diehards knows it grossly flawed. And even some of them are resorting to suggesting that we trust them because Labor will do the right thing once an ETS is in.
Because a trading scheme is a market solution, and generally if you want markets to work efficiently, you don’t place arbitrary restrictions on them.
If a heap of businesses decide to fund reforestation projects, then that will drive up the price of such permits, a point will be reached where it will be cheaper for businesses to just invest in renewable energy instead. See, rather than the Government picking winners and forcing businesses to do ONE THING, it is left up to businesses to work out what is best for them.
But you don’t seem to understand how the government’s proposed one works, why would yours be any better? It seems that you would force businesses to invest in particular remedies, instead of allowing businesses compete to lower the cost of reaching targets.
Dio 423
I am not sure of any proposed regulatory caps on the amount of permits allowed for reforestation.
However, I am not too bothered.
1) there are natural and economic caps: as we run out space on which to regrow forests (wouldn’t that be great)
2) until then, I think that I am more relaxed than you about whether a tonne taken out of the atmosphere is as good as a tonne not put in. After all, nature does a massive effort of putting CO2 in to the air each year and taken it out. The amounts that are causing problems are only a tiny growing surplus due to human activity. (I haven’t got figures in front of me but I mean tiny). If humans can arrange to take out as much as they put in or more by growing more trees then that will not only slow global warming but start to reverse it. So ,in other words, why put caps on this when there is no need.
3) If we can contribute to the build up the PNG economy to be one based on reforestation for decades to come, then surely that is great!
Speak for yourself. He was a Liberal stooge. (His brother was a Liberal MHR.)
The next new seat in NSW ought to be called Evatt, although I suppose McMahon has first call as a dead PM.
Hillen Zille was at the IPL cricket. It is being replayed on One now.
Because a short-term fix like buying up PNG and Indonesian forest rights will not address a medium to long term problem.
No Dio, “everyone … knows it is flawed” is a bit like everyone knows John Howard actually said that the Tampa refugees will never ever set foot on Australia. (Except that in this case the Government is not coniving in the mistake, but is being pathetic in selling correcting it).
I am very happy to keep explaining to you how a lot of the so called flaws that were paraded from right and left and media straight after the announcements have since been debunked.
This doesn’t make any sense. Read the explanatory memorandum to the legislation; it is the best way to understand how the Government’s proposed system will work.
Paying to reforest other countries can only be integrated into the CPRS if the other countries have carbon trading schemes, so this whole line of argument is irrelevant.
Dio 435
Do you really think that the ETS caps will get less strong or less well enforced as time goes on?
Don’t you realise that we are already seeing obvious signs of climate change and it is going to get worse?
Despite the efforts of the ABC plugging bizarre climate skeptic books lately, these “contributors” to the argument and political debate are going to be not long with us and it is only going to be easier for governments to impose stricter limits on pollution.
Adam is a much more fun Labor hack than Dr Good.
The only way this could possibly occur is if a government LOWERED future targets. (I mean to effectively allow INCREASES in emissions).
If a government did that it would effectively be an admission that they didn’t believe in climate change, and thus they would be promptly voted out at a subsequent election.
The senate would probably try to over turn any decision of this sort, but not allowing the government to alter the cap.
Evatt?
That arguably incompetent ateriosclerotic fool who helped split the Labor Party and ensure Twenty Three Years in the Wilderness?
Oz, I try to give value for (no) money
I’m sorry to bring vulgar politics into this debate again, but we need to realise that Greens for obvious political reasons will not vote for *any* ETS bill unless they are seen to have some political victories first. I therefore imagine (I have no direct knowledge of this) that this bill has been designed so that there will be some room for “bargaining upwards” during the Senate bill. Bob Brown will get up and demand changes A to Z, expecting to get perhaps A to G accepted. After much argy-bargy Wong will give him A to D, which she was always willing to accept anyway. There will be bone for Xenophon and a bone for Fielding, and everyone will be happy (except the Coalition of course). That I imagine is the plan.
Evatt was a brilliant judge and an excellent External Affairs minister, one of the founders of the UN and an important widwife of Israel. If he had retired in 1949 his reputation now would be stellar. Sadly his career after 1949 was marked by increasingly poor judgement, but that should not obscure his earlier achievements. If a complete non-entity like Matt Charlton deserves a seat named after him, so does Evatt.
Adam,
That number of coalition “Pensioner” Members is quite a high proportion. Are there any similar precedents?
1. It’s little wonder the Libs can’t move on from their Howard veneration when so many of their members are his contempories.
2. We will never find out if the next generation of Libs is any good because they will never be given a chance.
3. How likely is the electorate going to be supportive of candidates/local members who probably can’t spell FTTN?
And of course he led the campaign against Menzies’s 1951 anti-democratic referendum on communism, despite the damage it did to his own position in the ALP, which is greatly to his credit.
Glass half full there.
The general consensus amongst the “pundits” (and not saying this is right) is that the government has positioned itself to negotiate with the Coalition rather than The Greens.
We won’t really know until the Senate ruckus starts.
Paul Neville is actually a very thoughtful MP, probably the best brain the Nats have (admittedly not a great achievement). They might well give him another run if Hinkler is weakened by the redistribution. The others on that list should all retire.
Oz, three points against that
* The Coalition have already said they will oppose the bill, so as with the StimPacs they have dealt themselves out of the game.
* Rudd has no incentive to give Turnbull any victories.
* If the bill is weakened further the Greens won’t vote for it, so Rudd would be dependent on Coalition support. There would also be serious trouble in Caucus and with Labor supporters generally.
The politically safest, as well as correct in principle, strategy is to isolate the Coalition and negotiate with the Greens. That will certainly result in a stronger bill.
I think there is more chance that the Greens will vote to pass (a modified version of) the CPRS than the coalition. I think that the Greens current occasional spoutings of no ETS being better than this one, is just a bargaining ploy and also a way of playing to a the more feral part of their support base.
And Garnaut’s “spouting” of the same thing is obviously an appeal to his feral support base.
Rudd has already been to PNG and Indonesia to make sure they will agree to have the reforestation permits for his ETS. I think it’s a good thing that a small amount goes to these countries for several reasons, esp humanitarian, but it allows the carbon lobby to avoid making long-term plans.
Dr Good
I hope that a lot of your arguments (and Adam’s) are right and that the greenhouse mafia will lose their stranglehold and we’ll effectively address AGW. But that is just “hope”. And “hope” often turns out to be “wishful thinking”. And “wishful thinking” often turns out to be “faith”.
And in the words of the great man “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
Diogs,
Depends if you are a patient or a doctor. Reality is what you perceive it to be.
Oz
Garnaut is doing a good job. It will help if more people say that specific things need to be beefed up (eg, targets and conditions on exporter assistance). This will go in to the debate in the senate. If enough influential people say such things then Fielding (or the Coalition) might be able to agree to more.
However, I think that the current proposal is much better than nothing and I think the Greens really do too.
Dio
I am fairly confident in Australian democracy eventually getting us in line.
I am less sure about the international situation.
The point is that it would be very naive to write off The Greens rhetoric as a simple appeal to their “feral” base especially when there’s people who don’t have any base too appeal to, feral or not, are saying the same thing.
Adam
What “bone” could Rudd give Fielding on an ETS?
Mr X has already said he won’t vote for the ETS in it’s current form.
Dr Good
That’s the most depressing thing. Oz has a good PM with a decent Government and we still are going to struggle to do the right thing. I shudder to think what everyone else will come up with.
Diogenes,
Fielding: I have no idea. Maybe something not connected with ETS at all. I don’t know if Fielding believes in AGW.
Xenophon: is effectively a Green on this. He will want more money to save the Murray no doubt.
Nuclear. Are we the only major developed economy that totally precludes it as part of a possible CC solution?
I read an article that said the Liberals official policy is for no nuclear power plants in Oz. I thought they were leaving the door open.
I think we must be almost the only major developed economy which doesn’t have nuclear power already, let alone precluding it from a CC solution.
That is the very reason for Australia taking smaller steps first surely. No good us going the whole hog while watching those around us doing far less. It would make our “whole hog” approach futile and we’d be economically at a disadvantage.
Of course the argument that if we go all in the whole world will follow has been used here but we know this is wishful thinking really don’t we?
We’re not doing anything first. Half the freaking developed world already has an ETS. So our policy amounts to ‘catch up’ with smaller targets. Kudos to us. Really pulling our weight.
Your argument only makes sense if Australia was in fact taking the first step.
Europe already has stronger targets than us and so does Canada. Pending US legislation is stronger than ours.
Article in today’s Crikey restates the point that developing countries (in this case South Africa) have already pointed to our weak targets as showing a lack of “moral leadership”.
You’re refusing to accept the obvious if you honestly believe that developing countries won’t point to an extremely wealthy country with high emissions, laugh and say “Why should we when they can’t!”.
I think so too, and the reason obviously is that our abundance of cheap carbon has made it uneconomic, regardless of other arguments. If we now have to stop burning carbon, it suddenly becomes economic. If the need to stop burning carbon becomes imperative, then all the (good) arguments against nuclear cease to be determinative, yes? The only real problem is that it would probably take us 20 years to do it, unless we cut all the corners and risk Chernobyl-on-Jervis-Bay.
Have they changed their policy since the election? Howard certainly wanted it.
Not to argue, but my impression was that everyone else was moving away from nuclear because it is too costly to maintain.
I’ve read other stuff that points out that in combination with the start-up costs, nuclear is the least cost effective source of energy (inc. renewables).
Not necessarily.
If, hypothetically, you have a situation where you say “Ok coal phase out starts now!”, the best option would not automatically be nuclear.
In fact, a CBA of what power options would deliver the lowest emissions at the lowest costs results in renewable energy being more cost effective than nuclear. And that’s simply the economic argument. You’ve already mentioned the time lag and then on top of that you have further environmental concerns.
So if you were talking about future energy options and you said is it the cheapest? If so, then is it the quickest? If so then is environmentally sound? The answer is no on all three.
458,
they can put it in your back yard, mate, NIMBY ……..
I’m not sure about countries moving away from nuclear power but the fact that they already have existing nuclear facilities and technologies and still are putting a lot of money in renewables suggests that it’s not as worthy a solution as some would have us believe.
I know i’ve posted this before, but
http://www.jape.org/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,26/func,fileinfo/id,71/
This is the paper I was referring to.
And another CBA results in fire-breathing dragons from Mars (FBDM) being even more cost effective than nuclear. The only slight problem is that FBDM don’t exist.
Analogy doesn’t hold as the renewable options canvassed in every report of the kind I’ve seen actually exist and are producing energy as we speak.
How many windmills will generate as much power as the La Trobe Valley?
464
The current Libs have no backbone Adam they are a bunch of cowards frightened by the low road arguments that the Left would use against the Right if they ever advocated Nuclear Power.
If the Jervis Bay Project had succeeded as it should have we’d have had nuclear power around in Australia for decades and would further expand its use, but we are a bunch of cowards who are hooked to coal.
Glen, the problem wasn’t so much cowardice as that the economics didn’t add up, because carbon was so cheap. If the price of carbon is going to be forced up by the ETS, then the economics will make sense.
I don’t know how much power comes out of the La Trobe Valley.
I do know that a private consortium is currently building a 1000MW wind farm near Broken Hill in NSW, as big as the biggest fossil fuel plants.
Not necessarily. Nuclear power generation is still a carbon intensive process. The costs of mining, transporting, refining and building nuclear power plants will all rise with an ETS.
We can’t have windmills in Victoria because parrots might fly into them, isn’t that right Glen?
The point I was trying to make in #475 is that our lack of renewable energy sources has nothing to do with technological barriers and everything to do with a lack of investment.
Italy is the only G8 country without nuclear power. Of the others, this is how much of their electricity is nuclear.
Canada 15%
France 77%
EU 29%
Germany 26% (who let them have nukes!!)
Japan 28% (and them too!!)
Russia 16%
UK 15%
US 20%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country
I don’t think it has yet been shown that renewables can generate anything like the same amount of power as burning carbon. I’m not opposed to developing renewables, of course, but I don’t think the argument that we don’t need nuclear because we have renewables can yet be sustained.
Has France ever had a nuclear accident? How do they dispose of their waste?
Iceland currently generates 89% of it’s power from renewable sources and Norway gets 99%. You could argue that this is due to their unique geographic location.
Spain gets 35% of its power from renewable energy. Some provinces get more than 70% of their energy from renewable energy. You can’t write this off to geography as you might with Iceland’s geothermal power sources.
Australia is even better positioned than Spain in terms of getting renewable energy so with adequate investment we can get way more than what they’re getting. This includes wind, solar, hydro and biomass as well as potential technologies for large scale deployment like geothermal and wave.
This flies in the face of every real world renewable energy experience.
Italy is going Nuclear again this time under Berlusconi.
Adam the economics of nuclear energy back then didnt add up hence Boof McMahon’s objections but nuclear energy becomes economical once you build enough power stations.
The fact that we are one of the few western developed countries without nuclear in the mix is a disgrace IMHO.
I’m gonna take a break before I get too shirty.
It gets a bit tiresome for me considering that this is my field and you see people building the very same things that others on blogs and forums claim “Don’t exist” or will “Never work”.
Iceland…. *sigh* Iceland has 300,000 people and is sitting on top of a volcano.
But you don’t know much power the La Trobe Valley generates…
Wow you completely ignored 3/4 of the post. I already explained Iceland can be written off due to their geography.
The only relevant statistic is 85% of Australia’s power currently comes from coal (whether that comes from Latrobe in Victoria or the Hunter in NSW is not very important).
You might have convinced yourself that there’s no way this could be replaced by anything other than nuclear but that doesn’t mean it’s the case.
I didn’t say I was convinced, still less that I had convinced myself. I said I was sceptical. Of course it doesn’t have to be either/or, carbon v nuclear v renewables. but the question remains, can that 85% of our total power needs really be replaced by renewables in a shorter time than it would take to get nuclear on-stream? (And of course I accept the view that we ought to be reducing our power consumption as well.)
We are currently running at about 4% renewables. To take up the remaining 96% we would have to build 24 times the current capacity.
There are definately capacity contraint issues around doing this, but the nuclear option faces similar (and worse) problems.
Oz
where the coal comes from is VERY important.
Brown coal is wetter than black coal and produces far more emissions.
That’s why Victorians have the dubious honour of being the world’s biggest (per head) emitters. It’s not because we inherently use more energy than other States/nations; it’s that our source of electricity is so nasty (greenhouse gas wise).
Charges against Richard Pratt dropped:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/charges-against-pratt-dropped-20090427-akec.html
GP,
“The criminal case against gravely ill billionaire Richard Pratt has been dropped by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission because of his terminal illness”.
Pratt wanted the evidence thrown out and would not be satisfied with this development.
GG
Looks like the ACCC dropped the ball and Pratt would have gotten off. I think that was the real reason they dropped the case.
I’m glad that the charges were dropped. Graeme Samuel is a rogue regulator.
Diog,
Thanks. I missed that!
But, if the judge did not dismiss the case outright, then he must have felt there was still an arguable case.
GP,
Nice smear.
Pratt will be dead soon so it doesn’t matter much one way or the other. He will go down in history as a man who squandered his life’s work and his reputation to make himself even richer by swindling the public.
Adam, this is what France does with the waste.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04.htm
In terms of CO2/kW it is important but in terms of the total number of kW of energy generated by coal, it’s not that pertinent to delve into coal sources and different types of coal plants.
Stevce, do I understand that to mean that nuclear power plant waste is recyclable? I’ve never heard that before. What about all this toxic waste that has to be buried for millions of years?
No 501
Last I read, the French reactors could reuse spent rods, obviously with a lower energy yield.
Here’s one for you GG.
People in “Catholic” countries have the highest % belief in AGW (65%) followed by Buddhist countries (63%).
Tribal countries are the lowest (45%) along with Protestant and Islamic countries on 47%.
Does that mean that Protestant countries have on a similar level of scientific intelligence as people living in tribal and Muslim countries?
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/pope-and-planet.html
The spent rods don’t then disappear into oblivion.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31466
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12837958
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4891
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/French_Nuclear_Watchdog_Gives_Thumbs_Up_To_Deep_Waste_Burial.html
And of course -
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/contamination-fears-after-leak-from-french-nuclear-waste-plant-863928.html
My last post is in moderation (probably to do with a number of links) but it gives examples of what France does with its waste.
Primarily, bury it or send it overseas to Russia – who then bury it.
France does a fair amount of reprocessing but reprocessing doesn’t magically make all the waste disappear.
Adam I think you’ll find the nuclear rods used by Steritech at Narangba just north of Brisbane to sterilize food, medical supplies etc, comes from spent rods in Canada.
Diogs,
One of the commenters probably nailed it with:
“A lot of this comes down to the fact that in spite of some infamous episodes (e.g. Galileo), the Catholic Church has regularly been a strong sponsor of scientific inquiry, even if it does limit the scope of its support as a result of overriding moral and ethical considerations”.
Some reactors can make energy from their waste.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor
20% of the fuel used in U.S. nuclear reactors comes from dismantling Soviet era nuclear weapons. So to me that counts as making energy from nuclear waste too.
Thanks for all that interesting info.
If the US dismantled all its own nuclear weapons, how much power could it generate?
Of course fast breeder reactors don’t exist outside of experimentation. Plenty of countries have tried them in the past and them shut them down because they didn’t work.
I think India and China are the only countries seriously pursuing FBR technology. Even then, China’s new prototype which is costing billions to produce will only generate as much energy as about 4 big wind turbines.
No, it should be “…limit the scope of its support as a result of overriding dogma that completely contradicts the scientific method, e.g. proposing that evolution was initiated by non-naturalistic means.”
The fuel in nuclear weapons is highly enriched (80 – 90%), most nuclear reactors use very low enriched Uranium, e.g. 2 – 3%, some newer ones use 5 – 6%. So the nuclear weapon fuel needs to be diluted with un-enriched Uranium to be usable in reactors.
Obama and Medvedev announced that the U.S. and Russia are each going to dismantle more nuclear warheads, which promptly caused the price of Uranium to drop (which isn’t good for Australia’s mining companies, but is probably better for peace and security).
Is that a bit like a dog going back to its vomit?
Tell Giordano Bruno that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
No.
I can see that many here are in favour of nuke power plants. So if all countries adopt nuclear power as the major source of energy in the world, what are we eventually going to do with all the toxic waste? Wouldn’t we be polluting the planet in a more detrimental way than at present?
I am no CC expert, but it’s freezing the balls off in Sydney at the moment, and it’s only Apr 27.
That must’ve been one of those “infamous episodes” – like Galileo – that we must conveniently ignore in order to pretend that Catholic dogma doesn’t conflict with scientific enquiry.
Most Catholics who are scientists – like Ken Miller – simply compartmentalise their lives, and don’t let religious dogma interfere with their scientific research. Of course ultimately this means they don’t actually believe in the religious dogma itself, but rather just seem to believe in belief.
If that works for them, then that’s cool. But to somehow argue that their scientific skill is a product of their Catholicism is ridiculous.
We’ve been generating nuclear waste for 50 years now. What harm has it done? We know exactly the harm we are doing by burning coal, and we know what will happen if we don’t stop.
Nicely put
Louis Pasteur said: “I have the faith of a Breton peasant, and before I die I hope to have the faith of a Breton peasant’s wife.” What he meant was that his faith was completely unreflective, and he hoped to make it more so. Of course as an intellectual it was impossible for him to think like a Breton peasant. But this affectation meant that he never had to think about the obvious incompatibility of his scientific mind and his religion.
If most countries use nuclear power, there will be far more investment in technologies to deal with the waste, or into new reactors that don’t produce as much waste. In the mean time the benefit will be a dramatic shift away from using fossil fuels.
The amount of nuclear power used in the world has enabled the equivalent amount of reductions as what was required under the Kyoto protocol. In other words, if there wasn’t nuclear power, the Kyoto targets would’ve had to be DOUBLE to achieve the same result.
No, because climate change is caused by green house gases, not nuclear waste. Using nuclear power would be a substitution of one form of waste for another, one form of waste we KNOW will lead to catastrophic climate change, compared to one we know won’t.
South Australia is currently experiencing its wettest April for 50 years thanks to the rains of the last 4 days. Last year S.A. experienced its longest hot streak for 60 something years, the weather and the times are a changin’…..
He was too busy making revolutionary scientific discoveries!
Centre, i got a Maple tree in my garden. Usually by now, late April, it has started to shed its leaves big time and looking grey. It is still looking very green on 27/4 and all the leaves are still hanging up there.
CC?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25393115-601,00.html
Shouldn’t they also screen people coming from New Zealand, since we KNOW that there are people there who have the flu?
lol.
Yes, let’s deal with climate change and leave ourselves with another environmental issue.
It is a fair assumption that a pandemic is a sure fire bet to destroy humanity, the amount of virus material there is out there and the chances of them mutating in the same way swine flu has. It really makes you feel small and insignificant.
Spanish Influenza killed more people than WW1.
Think of what Spanish Influenza could have done had we had modern air travel back in 1918???
“Lol” is not an answer.
GP @ 495.
Graeme Samuel was doing his job. Where there is price fixing or collusion, consumers are RIPPED OFF. It’s our money that is being stolen. Pity you can’t take it with you hey!
Do you have an answer to that question?
Oh OK, let’s use magic instead. No environmental concerns there.
Oh magic isn’t real… damn, we will have to think of actual solutions instead.
Oz
you forgot to add ROTFLOL
The charges were dropped because he is DYING, not because the judge didn’t think the ACCC had a case.
That wouldn’t be an answer either.
SO
The charges were dropped using the excuse that he was dying but the judge had ruled earlier in the day that a crucial piece of evidence was inadmissable.
The question,being moronic, deserved a moronic response
Now, now, just because you don’t have a reasoned answer for the question doesn’t make it “moronic”. Quite to the contrary, your inability to engage with the topic in a reasonable way makes your position seem moronic.
If the question is moronic, Gusface, you should have no difficulty answering it. Where and when, specifically, has waste generated by nuclear power plants caused harm to anybody? If you can cite instances, fine, I will accept that.
Diogs, Pratt had already made a settlement in the many millions for collusion. The current charges, which have been dropped were additional.
The problem you’ll have here is that people who are rabidly anti-nuclear think that ANY increase, however insignificant, in radiation remotely near a nuclear power plant is a massive catastrophe. They associate a tiny increase in radiation levels in, for example, cooling water as the same as a complete meltdown of a reactor core akin to Chernobyl.
Of course the only reason we learn of tiny radiation leaks near nuclear power stations is because nuclear power stations must feature constant rigorous monitoring of radiation levels, something that is COMPLETELY IGNORED for coal fired power stations.
Interestingly, these people seem to have no problem getting a chest x-ray, or ingesting radioactive dye during medical procedures, or flying in a plane, or living in a state with low level radiation emitting fossil fuel power stations, or living near hills that emit a constant level of background radiation due to the radioactive content of some rocks.
I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been a documented death due to the disposal of nuclear waste.
In fact, apart from Chernobyl, bugger all people have died in any way from nuclear power. About 4000 died (as a result of cancer mainly) from Chernobyl. Lets compare that to the smoking which has killed about 500 million people.
The closest even I can remember reading about is that a few years ago a homeless person in the UK was run over by a train carrying nuclear waste away from power station. The person was sleeping on the tracks. This was somewhat controversial at the time, because it seemed to suggest that security aboard the special trains was insufficient (if more people were watching the person would’ve been seen).
Or thousands of people who suffer respiratory problems such as asthma at least partly because of fossil fuel power stations.
Chernobyl wasnt caused by nuclear waste, or even by nuclear power generation per se. It was caused by the incomptence and corruption of the Soviet state.
Yes, especially when you consider that the plant manager was an expert on the operation of COAL fired power stations!
Glen #526:
Think of what might have happened if we had modern medical science back in 1918, too. And disease control. And communications. And Education. And Tamiflu. Even infra red cameras that can detect passengers with a temperature at arrivals gates.You can’t isolate one part of the package. You have to take it all, or nothing at all.
But I – funnily enough – I do concede your point: we are small and insignificant in the face of even smaller, but far mopre significant viruses that can (and may have in the past) wipe out an entire civilization, if not species (cf. Tasmanian Devils).
But all this is a mere bagatelle compared to population growth.
Mathematically, today there are more people alive than have ever lived, in all of history. The Earth’s population is doubling approximately every 50 years (assuming a very conservative growth rate of 1.5% per annum). That means in 50 years there will be more people alive, once again, than have ever lived, in all of history. In 100 years the Earth’s population will be 4 times that of today. In 200 years, 16 times that of today. 50 years later, in 2259, 32 times that of today: over 160 billion. That’s if we keep winning the Big Battles.
Clearly the Earth cannot sustain such a population. Something will come along to really screw up Humanity’s idea of itself as the dominant species. It’ll probably be disease… a disease we won’t be able to combat, no matter how hard we try; possibly one we haven’t even thought of yet, or contemplated in its ferocity. Or, if not disease, who’s going to take bets we won’t have wiped each other out with nuclear weapons? Or that we haven’t been baked alive under a (globally) warming sun?
The more problems we solve, the more we reduce the Big Problem to one thing: over-population.
And there’s nothing we can do about that.
Medical advances? Beating Global Warming? Diverting asteroids to miss our planet? More efficient food production? They all make sure we just go on breeding and breeding. Sex is great. Growth is great. But there are limits to both. Absolute limits.
The more problems we solve, the more our fate as a species comes closer.
We’re going to breed ourselves out of existence.
BB Well we could have another World War to reduce the surplus population but that is just cruel?
Do they look for people with a fever using that?
Too bad you wont be able to use depleted uranium weapons
as some here think uranium is just supercharged fairy floss
(bit like their thought processes sometimes)
I have no in-principle objection to nuclear power in Australia, but my reading of Ziggy’s report was that it was quite an expensive option for Australia (and there is the issue too of the long lead time as we have lost the expertise). And the furphy that renewables and other options can’t do the job really is a furphy that has no doubt been picked up from the urinals of the pro-coal power lobby. (Rough trade indeed).
The report below by Diesendorf Denniss and Saddler shows how we could get to clean energy future. (Admittedly their solution involves quite a lot of waste wood incineration which most greenies don’t like, but I don’t see why that disqualifies their approach)
http://www.wwf.org.au/publications/clean_energy_future_report/
We’ve been generating nuclear waste for 50 years now. What harm has it done?
I truly can’t be bothered listing them all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
And the problem will only get worse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
Of cause anger has caused the biggest death tolls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
And of cause the big problem; no it doesn’t magically go away, it just hangs around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
The biggest problem however is the loss of civil liberties required to run a nuclear industry. Nuclear waste is dangerous, let me utter the magic right wing word, “terrorist”. We are not talking about a a serious fight at Sydney airport here ( I remind you the federal police didn’t actually make it to the scene), we are talking very serious consequences.
Gusface
Fairy floss can supercharge your thought processes because it’s pure glucose and glucose is the only source of energy your brain can use.
Dio,as you full well know, its what you do with it
fredn
Can you point to a single nuclear death related to nuclear WASTE in that wiki article or in any other?
Don’t agree, lock up the pope and educate the women would be a good start.
Diogenes
The nuclear industry is a package, for immediate deaths look no further than Russia. The deaths from lower exposure take some time. Lower doses are required to make you sterile, but your a doctor I’m sure you have listen to the warnings about exposure to x rays. Gamma rays are a lot more energetic and as a result require lower exposures to create similar problems.
Um, the estimated total number of humans who have ever lived is something over 100 billion. The population today is 6.7 billion. Population is still increasing, but not exponentially – overall the rate of increase is slowing, so it will never reach the levels Diogenes suggests.
Actually you haven’t listed any. None of those incidents involved nuclear waste. Given the number of nuclear power plants in the world, I am pleasantly surprised to see how few incidents there have been, and how trivial most of them have been. So thanks for that link.
What? OK tomorrow, try to break into your nearest power station, and then come back and report what the security guards at the station do to your civil liberties.
And then you’d have to take into account deaths caused by chest x-rays, or UV light, or airplane flights, or medical isotopes, or people living near hills.
This entire list proposes fatalities for 1) those associated with Chernobyl and 1 person from the radiation effects of 3 Mile Island.
One of the events listed is people dying on a Soviet submarine, but that doesn’t count as the nuclear power industry, that is military.
Will be interesting if the hold true to the…’..experienced reporters writing unbiased, long-form stories, analyses, and profiles..’
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/washington-whispers/2009/4/25/aol-to-launch-politics-news-site.html
Why bother, most don’t even have security.
What am I being blamed for now?
Prove it, break into one to show that your civil liberties aren’t curbed at regular power stations already operating.
Sorry Diogenes, it was Bushfire Bill at 543.
The reason for the “lol” was that I had to linked to an example of environmental damage caused by the so called “safe” storage of nuclear waste a mere few posts earlier.
The question itself is a red herring as those asking it are proposing a far greater role for nuclear power in energy generation and thus a much larger amount of nuclear waste – increasing the chances for environmental and/or human damage.
Also, from Wikipedia:
“At Maxey Flat, a low-level radioactive waste facility located in Kentucky, containment trenches covered with dirt, instead of steel or cement, collapsed under heavy rainfall into the trenches and filled with water. The water that invaded the trenches became radioactive and had to be disposed of at the Maxey Flat facility itself. In other cases of radioactive waste accidents, lakes or ponds with radioactive waste accidentally overflowed into the rivers during exceptional storms.[citation needed] In Italy, several radioactive waste deposits let material flow into river water, thus contaminating water fit for domestic use.[48] In France, in the summer of 2008 numerous incidents happened;[49] in one, at the Areva plant in Tricastin, it was reported that during a draining operation liquid containing untreated uranium overflowed out of a faulty tank and about 75 kg of the radioactive material seeped into the ground and, from there, into two rivers nearby;[50]; in another case, over 100 staff were contaminated with low doses of radiation.[51]“
Well Oz, if the number of nuclear power plants currently operating is x, and the number of deaths caused by waste from those plants is zero, as seems to be the case, then if the number of plants is increased by, let’s say, ten times, to x times 10, then the number of deaths will increase by a similar ratio, to zero times 10, which is, um, zero. QED?
Oz
I can’t find any reference in that to any illness let alone a death. Even if we have ten times as many nuclear power stations, the negligible number of deaths is still negligible.
Oh no, now I’m agreeing with Adam!!
Of course this may only affect aboriginals as Marlinga did so may not count.
There were also other cases where good white folk, miners, were contaminated by radioactive water.
Ignoring the hilarious logical and scientific premise of that post, there’s one more issue. “Harm” is not completely restricted to “human death”. If you think the death of a person is the worst, or only bad thing, that can be damaging to the environment then there’s little point on continuing with this discussion.
To summarise, there’s three key flaws in your approach.
1) You believe that the only measure of damage or harm is the number of human deaths.
2) Following, you believe that since that’s the case, no damage has occurred.
3) You don’t wish to accept that the increase in waste will increase the chance further incidents occurring. The probability is disconnected from past events. Just because there hadn’t been a death from plane crashes until 1908 did not mean that increasing the number of planes in the sky would result in that number remaining at zero.
Deforestation doesn’t directly cause any human death or harm. On your idiotic logic it is “harmless” and fine.
And you accuse me of hilarious logic?
Obviously there were no plane crashes before there were planes. By contrast, we have had nuclear power plants since 1954, and there are now about 400 of them. The amount of harm they have caused, however defined, and even including Chernobyl, has been trivial, and certainly vastly less than that caused by coal-fired plants, even aside from CC.
No crap, that’s why I picked the date of the first plane crash death and not the first plane flight.
I don’t recally anywhere ever suggesting that this wasn’t the case. But we aren’t talking about nuclear vs. coal. We’re talking about phasing out coal and discussing what to replace it with. Good try.
Unless you can show us how renewables can produce the power we currently get by burning coal, then yes we are discussing coal v nuclear. Believe me, I would love to be persuaded on this point, but so far I’m not.
We have low level radiation stored in hospital basements around our entire country. Are you honestly suggesting that it is safer keeping low level radiation there, rather than in a dedicated and purpose built waste dump?
We don’t JUST need to REPLACE power sources, we actually need MORE POWER. By 2050 we will need DOUBLE the electricity generation we have now, EVEN IF we are able to improve efficiency by 10%
So the need for using technologies such as nuclear is even GREATER than simply a need to SUBSTITUTE, we actually need ADDITIONAL sources of power far beyond what we are currently producing.
And you don’t wish to accept that if there is more nuclear power, there will be more investment into waste storage solutions because there will be more demand for such technologies.
BTW, sloppy journalism as usual. The Pratt charges werent DROPPED the case was suspended by the prosecution due to his health. Big difference
Is Media Watch running a thing against Peter Popov, the huckster religious scammer?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7BQKu0YP8Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxqRN5vjDHQ
Oz, more people have died from war, famine, cigarettes and most probably alcohol related violence than have died from nuclear waste – at least on the available evidence. Your hysterical opposition to nuclear power is silly.
The most well-known nuclear disaster was due to rank incompetence and poor technology. Any 21st century nuclear plant would be miles ahead in safety, technology and efficiency. Bring it on.
This should not be taken as opposing renewable energy but we should not put all our eggs in one basket. There should be a mix of technologies. I, for one, support decentralising distribution and generation by having all houses be installed with solar panels for example.
Even massive renewable advocates say AT BEST we would only be able to have about 40% of our energy generated by renewables by 2040. That leaves a massive gap that I think should be filled by nuclear and some gas, instead of coal.
Very interesting. But what’s it got to do with watching the media?
Channel 9 runs is infomercials even though he is a proven scammer.
Holmes argues that it shows a problem with regulation, if he is paying them to run the infomercial then it is an advert, but if he is donating the show to 9 who run it then it would be a programme that would be subject to the FACTS rules. Channel 9 refused to disclose to Media Watch if they are paid for the show.
GP @ 579, let them put it in your back yard then.
Oz isn’t the only one who doesn’t like it and I suggest those of you who do write your mp’s and volunteer your neighborhoods …..
On environmental matters here in WA ….
Only after you write and volunteer for a coal fired power station in your back yard.
581 – Peter Popoff
Ah, I see from the Media Watch website that he’s on Australian TV now.
Gee Tony Jones absolutely destroyed Plimer. Exposed him as no better then Andrew Bolt, and just out to sell books. Didn’t think Tony had it in him but he sure did his research.
Do you mean John Pilger?
No, I mean Ian Plimer
No 589
Pilger is a bit of a fruit cake. If you watch his recent documentary “The War on Democracy” he essentially praises Hugo Chavez and spends the whole time bashing America. So much for journalistic integrity.
Must admit to a skim over the nuclear issue. Not that I care, it ain’t going to happen…but…
Did anyone mention the fact that even uranium will run out?
I read a little time ago that as a resource it has about seventy years to run.
Not a good look when one thinks of its real life.
I don’t know if we should call that a documentary.
The guy is a nutcase, i mean he openly advocated that Iraqis should kill Australian soldiers. Enough said.
This is untrue, generation IV breeder reactors breed more fuel than they use.
Gosh o Gosh Sorry about that lengthy piece.
Didn’t realise select and copy my email from Crikey The Publication, not me, would give us quite all that! And that is what was sent to my email box. Who needs to subscribe??
My interest is the supposed Afghani’s letter and why and how was this weird rubbish sent to my email address?
Crikey The Publication using info via The Pollbludger? Cannot imagine how other.
Abuse of William, and me, if so.
Ignore content after..
‘Quite possibly the country’s niftiest blog network’.
‘I read a little time ago that as a resource it has about seventy years to run.
This is untrue, generation IV breeder reactors breed more fuel than they use’.
WHAT?
No 593
Pilger is reminiscent of a male version of Germaine Greer. UnAustralian and repulsive.
GP, that comment tells us nothing about Greer or Pilger but plenty about GP.
Oh no, not another GFC – Great Flu Crisis.
This is a strange story.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/28/2554212.htm
http://www.theage.com.au/national/mps-pay-rise-adds-insult-to-injury-20090427-akob.html?page=-1
I never knew that! I always thought it could only be used for costs on servicing the electorate only.
Ever wondered what 7723 booth results look like in a map?
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/04/28/australian-political-map-via-7723-booth-results/
Oh that’s sexy. I’m moist now!
Ewww, I suddenly feel dirty!
bob
Yes, they kept that very quiet. I didn’t know it either. The only thing Labor and Liberal can agree on is giving themselves a pay rise.
Possum
Very beautiful. It’s almost an optical illusion. It looks very blue but if you look closely it turns all red. And the 10% of booths that are most remote are almost all blue. That makes it easy to work out who gets the NBN and who doesn’t!
It’s just a matter of time before we get our first case in Australia. So far, I don’t think anyone could fault Health’s response. But I just wonder what the Liberal’s plans are for attacking the Government on this one. You just know they have one….
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25391366-5006301,00.html
Diogs,
Liberal response is:
“We will decide which bugs come in and the means by which they do so”.
Wow!! That was quick! I should point out that an unidentifiable type A flu virus is not necessarily swine flu.
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25397600-5005962,00.html
Can someone please tell me the rationale for giving MPs an electorate allowance. Does it serve any purpose other than to give the incumbent an unfair advantage over their opponents at election time?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25395364-7583,00.html
More denialist crap in The Daily Denialist
The WHO has raised the pandemic threat level from 3 to 4, which means that verified human-to-human transmission has happened in Mexico. If/when they confirm human-to-human transmission in the US, the threat level will rise to 5 which means a pandemic is imminent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8021827.stm
Tim Holding replies to Bolt
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25395582-5000117,00.html
The author of the Daily Denialists article;
Wow! They really pull out the experts on climate change don’t they!
Diogs,
Adam is a historian and dabbles in politics.
My understanding re electoral allowances is that -
*they cover staff costs above and beyond normal staff (and I think perhaps overtime) – the gripe amongst electorate officers (I was one briefly) being that the Feds use their allowance for these purposes and the State MPs think it’s their own money and don’t…so Fed MPs tend to be prepared to pay extra if staff go to out of hours meetings and State ones don’t.
*they’re for the many incidentals that are part of the job – buying raffle tickets (nearly every community function an MP attends has one and an MP will attend a couple a week at least; locals expect their local MP to spend big), raffle prizes, etc.
*office expense overruns (at least in Victoria) come out of the MP’s pocket.
Not defending, explaining.
He’s not writing op-eds in the OO purporting an expertise on AGW.
zoomster – thanks for that. But why do MPs get printing allowances?
To print things duh
So how is that not a re-election allowance?
Looks like the Repugs are politically exposed on Pandemic Preparedness.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/27/gop-stripped-flu-pandemic_n_191732.html
MPs have to send out huge volumes of mail, and are also expected to produce electorate newsletters several times a year, to be sent to 80-90,000 households. That’s a lot of printing and postage.
The Advertiser has moved onto another piece of civil engineering fantasy with a story about a $4 billion proposal to build the proposed 22km Norht – South corridor in one hit:
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25397206-5006301,00.html
Obviously an engineer somewhere is advising them but its quite weird:
- the government has already committed ot building this project
- however it will take ten+ years at current funding, built in stages
- the price quoted is WAY TOO LOW – the claimed $4 billion would barely cover the 6 km tunnel proposed, let alone the other 16km of the route. I’d say this would cost $7Bn+ in 2008 $.
- for any policy people present, don’t believe those who claim its good to deliver these as one large project. I did some work in canberra on this a few years ago. There are economies of scale in road projects combining them up to about $300 million value. After that the number of potential bidders declines and unit costs go up.
The thing I can’t work out is who has paid for all this proposal work to be done? Someone with money is behind this story; I doubt its RAA as quoted.
Belinda Neal caught in Mexican swine flu scare
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/28/2554240.htm
Blackout in Sydney again.
All hail the NSW government!!!
Don’t they know who she is??
Re: the electoral allowance rise- surely a reasonable option is to take out the loophole/rort that allows MPs to keep the money they dont spend as income
Blackout in Sydney CBD again…
Diogenes, here’s a good article on the swine flu issue which you would be interested in.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/swine-flu-outbreak—-nat_b_191408.html
Seems as though the US was the original source of the 1918 pandemic and could be potentially a major source of spreading this one globally also given the interflow of people in and out of the country.
The scariest thing about this flu is it is a genetic mixture of pig, human and avian flu.
and the blackout is over…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor
If it was the pope saying this, you’d believe it!
After encountering the virus, Ms Neal said to it “Do you know who I am?”
I wonder if any creationists will appreciate that events of this sort are more supporting evidence of evolution at work?
No, I didn’t think so…
Scorpio
I have just started reading a book about the 1918 flu – I thought it started in europe first then spread elsewhere, including the USA? The Wikipedia article puts it down to an origin in Austria.
According to Vexnews.com, this http://www.andrewrixon.com.au/ website is of a Liberal pre-selection candidate for Kooyong. Sample:
Here’s his solution to the GFC:
http://www.andrewrixon.com.au/index.php?pr=How_the_Australian_Liberal_Party_will_go_about_fixing_the_Global_Economic_Crisis
Socrates @ 632,
The yanks like to share things with the rest of the world. GFC virus, AIDS virus and Flu virus.
I bet Obama is grateful to George Bush for leaving a few little problems on the plate for him to sort out and test himself with in his first term of office.
HIV most likely originated in Africa.
ShowsOn @635: I love this -
Most agreeable galactic expansionist policy I have seen yet!
Fortunately he provides a thorough explanation of how human reproduction works:
http://www.andrewrixon.com.au/index.php?pr=How_Human_reproductive_system_works
So pigs might fly?
Hey, think of your own jokes, pal. (625)
Well yes, but it was only when it got to the US that it became epidemic. The first few AIDS cases in Australia all had US connections.
My submission to the NSW Redistribution Commissioners
SUBMISSION RE 2009 REDISTRIBUTION IN NEW SOUTH WALES
Dear Electoral Commissioners
I would like to propose two changes to Division names in NSW. The first is to rename the Division of Berowra as the Division of McMahon. The second is to rename the Division of Prospect as the Division of Evatt.
The Rt Hon Sir William McMahon was a federal MP for more than 30 years and was a minister continuously from 1951 to 1972, serving as Treasurer and Minister for External Affairs. He was Prime Minister in 1971-72. He is the only deceased Australian Prime Minister not to have a Division named after him. (I believe the Division of Cook is now officially named after Sir Joseph Cook as well as Captain James Cook.)
The Rt Hon Dr Herbert Vere Evatt was a judge of the Hight Court of Australia 1931-40, a federal MP 1940-60, Minister for External Affairs and Attorney-General 1940-49, and Leader of the Opposition 1951-60. He was President of the UN General Assembly and a highly regarded representative of Australia. He did not become Prime Minister, but two other Divisions, Charlton and Calwell, are named for Opposition Leaders.
Both these eminent Australians deserve to have a Division named after them. It is unlikely, however, that new Divisions will be created in NSW since the state is not growing as fast as other states and is losing a seat at this redistribution. It will therefore be necessary to rename existing Divisions.
The Division of Berowra was created in 1969 and takes its name from the town of Berowra situated on Berowra Water north of Sydney. The Division of Prospect was also created in 1969 and takes its name from the Prospect Reservoir, which is near Mt Prospect in western Sydney. Neither name therefore commemorates any person or event of any significance, and neither name has existed very long.
I suggest that both these names could be abolished without any loss of tradition or affront to any local sensibilities. I would suggest in fact that the people of both areas would welcome Division names that commemorate eminent Australians. Since Berowra is a safe Liberal seat and Prospect a safe Labor seat, naming them for former leaders of these parties respectively would be appropriate.
I hope you will view this proposal favourably.
Yours etc
Yeah, but we all know how it “SPREAD”!
Frankly I’m dismayed by the measured response of many people on this blog to the swine flu outbreak. Surely there must be someone to blame, and some way in which it is the fault of one or other ideological approach? I saw Diogenes trying to stir the pot earlier, but no one appears to be going for it yet.
I’m not at all surprised that the flu has spread from pigs to humans, after all humans have been eating pigs and feeding humans to pigs for… gee, well at least since Deadwood if HBO is to be relied upon, which of course it is. Surely there is some PB vegan somewhere who can blame omnivorous humans for this problem?
Come on! It’s been, what, 48 hours already? Let the blaming and animosity begin!
http://www.andrewrixon.com.au/index.php?pr=How_the_Australian_Liberal_Party_will_go_about_fixing_the_Global_Economic_Crisis
There?
What a tool.
say’s? wtf?!
His writing everywhere is a grammatical nightmare.
Perhaps Belinda Neal and her party should be placed in quarantine for a suitable time upon their return from Mexico? With the influenza virus having an incubation period of two weeks, she might be banned from any public meeting or speaking to anyone outside her house (including journalists) till say, after the next election?
Socrates, Turnbull would agree – Heffernan was on the same trip.
Scorpio, tread carefully on this topic, if you please.
Poss
In that case, given bipartisan support, adopting the precautionary principle, who knows how long the virus might remain dormant but dangerous? Perhaps a ban on Neal and Heffernan opening their mouth to speak while anyone is within earshot till, say the year 2100. I understand they have found samples of the 1918 virus in bdodies preserved under the permafrost some 90 years later. We must be careful.
Andrew Rixon sounds like just what the Libs need in one of their blue-riband seats, a complete nutter. I do hope they chose him.
In a question asked at the Rudd and the PNG PM press conference it was said that the WA premier had just stated that his budget would never go into deficit. Is this true and if so is he for real?
Here is his contact page:
http://www.andrewrixon.com.au/index.php?pr=Contact_Us
I believe Aspartame is the artificial sweetner used in Diet Coke.
I guess that means the W.A. premier is going to shut down a heap of schools and hospitals.
Or blame it all on Rudd and demand more federal funds
Yeah Adam, i was well aware of the potential for that to be misused and was intentionally brief. I just hope that people are responsible and sensible enough to resist that which you fear.
Or raise taxes to cover the shortfall in revenue.
He could also follo0w the path of the Texas Governor and refuse all Federal stimpac money and threaten to succeed from the Commonwealth! lol
They already tried that once, in 1933.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessionism_in_Western_Australia
Diogs @ 616
“He’s not writing op-eds in the OO purporting an expertise on AGW”.
So you think posting here is the second eleven of op ed writers?
Someone here said how will the Libs use the flu epidemic against the govt. well their ABC is doing it for them with headlines like this
When you read the article this statement is what they are basing the headline on
Then the last half of the article goes on to show a completely different picture to their headline.
ABC are getting as bad as the Libs with their half truths and misleading headlines.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/28/2554504.htm?section=justin
Well, we saw the person who chooses the op ed pieces each day on Q&A a few months ago. She proved herself to be a total dunce who contributed absolutely nothing to the show. So the utter dreck published on those pages isn’t surprising when you get to see the lack of intellectual rigour behind the person who does the selecting.
Shows On,
Don’t pout just because they knocked you back.
This hasn’t actually occurred, but if it ever does, I’ll cherish it like a badge of honour.
vera
I was getting quite nervous that the ABC/Libs hadn’t attacked the response to the flu. Now I can rest easy.
Bule
I’ve got a friend who is an intensivist and is on all the CBR committees etc. He says SA is completely unprepared if it really hits the fan. We’re fine as long as it doesn’t get to Mexico City levels though.
Diogenes, glad to have been a help, no need to be anxious any longer
If it gets really bad in Mexico, they might be forced to quarantine the whole country to contain the disease and allow it to burn out which could take months. The Ruddster could call an early election thereby getting rid of Heff and BNeal in one move.
I thought the federal government has the stockpile, and will send it out to different states as necessary?
What’s an intensivist? Is it someone who is, like, really really intense?
Diogs,
Given that there are only a few confirmed diagnoses of the “Swine” flu and that the virus allegedly brought into Australia is similar to what is already around aren’t we going into “Pandemic” tabloid mode rather quickly.
I remember the good old days when flu was flu. You just caught it, let it run its journey, you recovered and got on with life.
Unfortunately H1N1 derivatives have evolved to be a lot nastier than that.
If only Australian members of the 4th estate (OO) could be honest enough to write about their failures. This assessment was bought on by the ridcule of CNBC and other media’s lack of coverage on the developing GFC.
http://coloradoindependent.com/27577/business-reporters-confess-news-sins-while-us-economy-collapsed
Not really. The deaths have only been in Mexico and there have been various speculations put forward for that. It does not appear to be all that deadly outside Mexico.
Shows On,
Wrong and rejected again. Another badge of honour??
Loved these two comments on the ABC article.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/28/2554504.htm
Anyone who gets off a plane with sniffles and who just has a common old cold will be reported as “suspected of having Swine Flu” by our hysterical media. By the end of the week they’ll be reporting 100s, just wait and see.
So much for all the rusted-on Liberals calling Kevin Rudd a socialist…
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2553890.htm
Has the virus mutated into a form which is only toxic to Mexicans?
Americans seem impressed with Republican, Senator Collins efforts to block the $900b part of the stimpac. 90 pages of comments so far in just one article panning her.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/27/gop-stripped-flu-pandemic_n_191732.html
Only “toxic boars”. Kevin Rudd should be careful!
Bob1234, our tax system is still the detritus from Howard’s reign. Only after Rudd’s tax review can we truly say that Rudd is a neo-liberal insofar as tax is concerned. Of course, Rudd will not raise taxes too much, but that’s due not to ideology but politics.
scorpio,
Good avoidance of all the usual cliches. Well done!
Isn’t it toxic bore?
ShowsOn
Tamiflu is only a tiny part of “preparedness”. I can’t even find out if it actually works on swine flu, and if so how well.
It’s more the number of patients who will need hospital beds, ventilators, doctors and nurses. There’s only a handful of people who have been measured up for those wacky masks that definitely stop you getting the flu from patients (those masks you see people wearing don’t do much after about 10 minutes.
Adam
An intensivist is an ICU physician.
GG
The mortality is 10% in Mexicans, so far. They might not have very good health care so we don’t know what it would be here. This flu IS different from normal flu. It has been killing young, healthy people whereas the normal flu only kills the very young, the very sick or the elderly.
Not sure whether to laugh, cry or throw up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/opinion/28douthat.html?_r=1&hpw
667,
Obviously I’ve missed a few details on the SF stories. Sounds like some of the MP’s are stuck over there atm?
Not when it involves “swine” flu!
No doubt Diog knows more, but wouldn’t the deaths in Mexico and not elsewhere simply be explained by the slower progression rate of influenza compared to other “scarry” viruses like Ebola? Plus they say it seems to be responding to anti-viral drugs. So the non-Mexican cases may not have had time to advance to acute stages yet.
I thought there was a kind of “trade-off” in virus risk between communicability and chance/speed of your death. Viruses that develop very fast and kill people quickly are less likely to be spread a long way before detection and quarantine. Influenza might kill a far smaller % of victims, but becaues of its two week incubation period it can be spread to a lot more people in the mean time. So the overall death risk is high, because a lot more people get infected. Is that right Diog?
Tamiflu and Relenza work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_flu_2009
Diogs,
Do you have any understanding of “normal” influenza death percentages and the profiles of the victims in Mexico? The information seems to be really scattered and confusing and the reporting is focussing on the pandemic aspect to the exclusion of other relevant facts.
Socrates
As always you are 100% right.
I should add that I’m NOT making a criticism that we aren’t prepared for a pandemic of swine flu. All these things are based on risk management. To spend an extra $1B on preparedness would almost always be a waste of money as it wouldn’t be needed. And if it really gets bad, the extra $1B would make bugger all difference. The reality is that we can’t afford to be prepared for all disasters and that we just have to play the odds.
Read the article. He is saying that if Cheney feels so strongly that torture was necessary, he should’ve been willing to defend that policy at an election.
I thought Tamiflu was effective against all H1N1 variants, because it acts against the neuraminidase section of the virus (the N part in H1N1), which very rarely undergoes beneficial mutation? My year 12 biology understanding is that it deactivates the enzyme that allows copies of the virus to break out of cells.
A good explanation here of why the virus has been causing more problems with younger, healthy people. Also it appears that flue injections “may” provide some degree of protection against this strain.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/28/2554815.htm?section=australia
This new GFC, it’s all the Neocon conspiracy. Not content with inflicting the world with the old GFC with their extreme unchecked capitalism, now the Neocon is inflicting the world with a new GFC (Great Flu Crisis). Especially to deflect the criticisms about the release of the torture memos. It’s all linked back to that great Unknown Unknown Known Known:
http://greenpagan.newsvine.com/_news/2009/04/27/2737925-flu-kills-the-torture-memos-rumsfeld-tamiflu-bioterror-genocide-etc
Yes, how convenience also that it “started” Mexhiho so the poor amigos can be blamed, again, for everything. The Amigos are NOT happy.
Ouch! I would hate to be injected with a “stove pipe” although sometimes the needles feel almost as big as that.
The Finnigans @ 694, LOL
bob and GG
I’ll look into that and talk to the ICU friend, who has dropped the ball completely on this one because he’s more interested in negotiating an acrimonious hospital contract.
Tamiflu can only be said to work once the data is in on the swine flu and it’s too early to say that ATM although it looks like it should work.
The Wikipedia article on Influenza is quite good. It suggests mortality rates for different strains of Influenza, whihc have varied greatly in Lethality. There are also a lot of measurement difficulties, because its hard ot estiamte how many of the population who aren’t medically treated contracted a disease. Here are some stats:
1918 Spanish Flu – 2% to 20% (including over 10% in young adults)
Usual Flu mortality – 0.1% (mostly the old and very young)
Also the mortality rate varies with treatment. The 1918 flu was 9% lethal to white British army officers, but 21% lethal to indian British soldiers (who got less treatment).
So if the Spanish one is killing 10% of hospitalised patients, that is pretty severe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_outbreak_in_Mexico
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_pandemic
Dio, I know the quality of Wikipedia varies, please tell if any of the above is rubbish.
A good test is to see if it mentions Lyndon LaRouche anywhere.
Don’t you just love him?????
Socrates
The actual number of deaths from the “Spanish flu” is highly debated and varied five-fold from 20M to 100M but the wiki article is pretty straight down the line. I might add that the Spanish don’t call it Spanish flu. I think they called it Polish flu.
The spanish Flu in 1919 was mostly deadly to young, fit people and they didn’t have flu vaccines then.
The reason given was that young, fit people have a much more aggressive immune system than infants or the elderly, and that an overly aggressive reaction to the spanish Flu virus is what killed the young and fit in greater proportion than infants or the eldrely 90 years ago.
BTW I borrowed a book called “Flu” by Gina Kolata off Xanthippe last night. It was written in 1999, prior to SARS and Avian flue, and followed the (then unfashionable) search to understand the causes of the 1918 flu. So far it seems well written and well reasearched. The finding of strains of the 1918 virus in permafrost bodies started in the book but was successfully concluded later.
The impact of the 1918 pandemic is staggering; it seems to have gotten “lost” in the raction to the end of WWI, but it actually killed more people than WWI. It was very infectious – it spread world wide within six months, even to the Arctic and Pacific Islands.
There are photos showing trams in US cities in 1918 with every person wearing a face mask, and nobody being permitted to board the tram without one (a mask).
Always look at the references used.
Politicians who have had recent contact with swine should certainly be barred from Parliament.
ronically, Israel has an outbreak of Swine Flu too.
Perhaps the Jews were right about pigs?
And the Muslims.
Jews aren’t allowed to eat Muslims?
The government is calling it Mexico Flu rather than Swine Flu due to cultural sensitivities.
Eating pork is against Islamic rules.
Tim Minchin has a song about the middle east (I believe it is “Peace Anthem for Palestine”) with the line “we don`t eat pork, you don`t eat pork, lets not eat pork together”.
Gee I love News Ltd. speculative headlines:
“Swine flu fears COULD drive petrol prices lower”
http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,27753,25399017-31037,00.html
I look forward to “Sun MAY or MAY NOT rise tomorrow”
Stories of this sort seem to be excuses to add an update to a webpage, rather to actually report important information.
No, we can’t offend swine, now can we?
My beautiful Iceland map
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/i/iceland/icelandmapindex.shtml
(I love that fiddly bit on the north-west corner)
Conroy responds to Coalition/AAPT broadband cost claims:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/conroy-slams-broadband-cost-claims-20090428-alh8.html
I wonder why that third electorate in the inset is non-contiguous?
The “Sudhvestur” electorate looks slightly gerrymandered to me…
Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, p. 40
Not to put down Christophers objective, fact based assessment of organised religion….
but I thought the reason that the Muslims originally avoided pork was more based on the fact it was really unhealthy to eat in the 600s….It was included in the Hadith as a result of Muhammed trying to prevent people from dying.
712
I am no fan of Senator Conroy, but I listened to his speech at the Press Club today, and I gotta say it was good. He covered the basic points and made his case well without noticeable hyperbole, and gave reasonable answers to the questions.
But then I would say that, as I am already strongly in favour of the NBN project, and regard it as essential infrastructure for the 21st century. If only we could bring him and Rudd around on their odious and unworkable internet censorship plan…
He is arguing directly against secular explanations of that sort.
My mistake, it wasn’t a hadith, its in the quaran.
And the bible too (but only the old bits!)
It is an odd arrangement I agree, but I don’t think it’s a gerrymander. I think it’s a grouping of the suburban areas around Reykjavik.
So his ‘all jews and muslims are secretly hot for pork’ is a better explanation? I’m a staunch atheist, but Hitchen’s arguments about religion are largely absurd.
Parts of China are as hot as the Middle East, at least in summer, and the Chinese have always eaten pork with gusto and without apparent harm to their health. The Chinese word for “meat” actually means “pork” unless otherwise stated.
I’ve always understood it was because they (Jews, Arabs) were from nomadic cultures and pig raising tied you down to the one spot, thus making you fat and lazy and degenerate.
No, if you read what he wrote, he says 1) eating pork wasn’t always banned 2) there are certain features of pig meat that are similar to human flesh, 3) other features of pigs that resemble human behavior, including the sounds they make when they are slaughtered. 4) the times these rules against eating pig meat were started was a bloody time when extreme violence, human sacrifice, and even cannibalism occurred between people.
Hitchens is suggesting that one reason these rules started, was because the features of pigs and pig meat resembled that of human flesh being eaten, or burnt, or left to rot.
But predate Islam
As ther
Sorry, in mid rant I pressed post
Adam:
More from Senator Extremely-Young – http://greensmps.org.au/content/media-release/greens-announce-paid-parental-leave-bill
The “quarantining” for the mother won’t go down well – let alone the rest of it
of course left wing women seem to think they can just spurn moderate and conservative women and still win – so, yeah….
Anyway, I can’t be assed.
The long and the short of it is that hitchens argument is not very convincing. Eating pork was banned in m pre-Islam religions in the region – which could allow for his assesment; however, as these various relgions formed over thousands of years, and some didn’t end up banning pork, it seems a unconvincing that it stems from ancient semites’ reveration of the pig.
The claim that these views emerged over a ‘ bloody time when extreme violence, human sacrifice, and even cannibalism occurred between people” is fairly spurios. I mean they emerged in the Torah thousands of years before they emerged in the Koran. So were both relgions forged by the sword? I suspect larger societal influences were in play.
Anyway, if you want Showson, you can have last play. I can’t imagine anyone wants to watch this.
723 Zoomster,
I took a biblical history class at university in the US [ "biblical history" = treating the bible as a history book as opposed to a religiou document ] and I was in a 14+ year relationship with my first husband who was/is Jewish. Lots of background information over the years
…… and I’ve always understood it to be simply because God said in the bible words to the effect of not eating those animals with cloven hooves.
It’s apparently mentioned in leviticus and deuteronomy..both old testement right?
Yo ho ho, yes, both OT books there
…..
I thought everyone loved a nice goat pie
Some good news from Perth: http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,25397982-5017963,00.html
6000 new jobs for WA thanks to Colin Barnett, after Aboriginal land owners finally signed the agreement with the Premier. Compare that with Rudd’s two stimulus packages, which haven’t created a single job.
Herr Doktor, dont know what dialect you are speaking. But in Mr. Lu’s dialect, meat is “meat” and pork is “pork meat”.
A useful tool here.
http://www.mandarintools.com/worddict.html
Bree
Just because there are still a lot of ex-coalition ministerial staffers seeking employment doesn’t mean no jobs have been created by the stimulus packages. The problem is we also have countervailing forces that are destroying jobs at a faster rate. But if you think that we shouldn’t have any stimulus, well then, lets let the voters decide.
Bree,
Doctoring the truth. So stupid when you are easily found out.
“It is an agreement with Aboriginal people with no precedent, and those who signed off on it yesterday, including WA Premier Colin Barnett, Woodside chief executive Don Voelte, Kimberley Land Council chief executive Wayne Bergmann and federal Minister for Resources and Energy Martin Ferguson, all spoke of how far the nation had moved since the land rights crusade at Noonkanbah, where in 1980 an Aboriginal community resisted mining exploration”.
Regarding the WA deal, while I am all for such deals, it maybe the “no precedent” claim is a bit dubious. I thought deals have been struck just last year in NT? they weren’t the first either, with a number of mining companies negotiating to provide training and employment for local Aboriginal people in mining land access deals for some years now.
Bree @ 733,
Gee you sleep late
……. check #584 (this same thread) from which I cross post the following little bit.
Bottom line it is NOT a done deal YET ……… could end up as protracted, if it ever happens at all, as the Gunns mill in Tassie ….
True, Socrates, this isn’t the first deal with traditional land owners for industry jobs but this one is significant because it will create 6000 jobs, at a time when unemployment is growing by the week.
juliem, protests from greenies to block the creation of 6000 jobs will not be popular with WA voters at the next federal election.
Agreed Bree; its a good idea.
The whole concept of deals with mining companies to provide jobs specifically for Aborigines in remote areas is a very good one IMO. I have met Noel Pearson’s nephew, who has worked on that topic for several years, and the consequent benefits to both the aboriginal community and more widely are undeniable. Its not just a money thing; the sense of self reliance a well paying job brings to those in remote Aboriginal settlements is just as great as in high unemployment areas in western Sydney and Melbourne. i.e. a huge social gain.
Bree but the Libs decision not to stand a candidate in the Fremantle-by-election surely will give the Greens an MLA?
Perhaps Bree can tell us how it will be possible to (a) build new buildings at every school in Australia and (b) lay fibre optic cable to every urban household in Australia, without employing anyone?
I fully support the Kimberley gas deal, negotiations for which of course began long before Barnett was premier.
Bree, if you read C A R E F U L L Y in the lines I included in #739 …..
Peter Garrett does not equate to “protests from greenies”. Pete is one individual who is the relevant Government minister to boot. One person doesn’t equal in this instance multiple people.
My reference to the Gunns mill was merely in that the process for approval through Pete’s office was so long and protracted and once procured, had so many conditions attached to it that it will likely mean the mill never gets built. I am merely surmising that when he does address this issue 9 to 15 months in the future that he will put similar extremely restrictive conditions on this venture if he approves it at all.
My recollection of Noonkanbah is that they resisted sizure of their land by a WA Liberal government, not mining exploration, but it was a long time ago…
Adam,
And that’s the essence. This is good deal for the local people, a good deal for the Companies involved, a good deal for the Feds and a good deal for the local State Government. It’s obviously been negotiated over a long time through governments of different persuasion.
Colin Barnett has contribution is to show all the business acumen and negotiating skills of someone who bought a winning ticket in Tattslotto.
Yes Glen, on the Fremantle by-election, I would prefer the Greens beat Labor but of course I wouldn’t have said that had the Liberals run a candidate.
The Greens may win the seat in a by-election but in a State election they’d lose it specially if the Libs stand a candidate.
Should n`t this discussion of the Fremantle By-election be on the relevant thread?
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2009/04/03/fremantle-by-election-may-16/
Is “The Whig Party” Adam’s straight man?
Rather than hollow insults, what is your objection to paid parental leave?
A number of countries allow it to be paid to either the father or the mother, but ensuring at least 6 weeks is reserved for the mother is a good caveat as women do tend to go through certain physical and mental obstacles immediately after birth.
Glen,
As our resident moderate Lib on board, please tell me if you have the guts to defend this right wing lunatic? he is off his rocker imho and I’m betting most of the Libs I know would agree with me …
[
On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh went on a long rant about how anything associated with President Obama ends up failing. He used newspapers and CNN as his primary examples, but then turned to some far more inflammatory (and completely inexplicable) examples.
"[E]verywhere Obama is spreading Obamaism, there is a deadly disease taking place, either in the TARP community or in the newspaper business,” he said. “Obama goes to Mexico — they have an earthquake. Obama goes to Mexico — get pig flu.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/27/limbaugh-obama-goes-to-me_n_191923.html
]
New Essential Research poll according to The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25399684-12377,00.html
HAHAHA.
Rush Limbaugh is always a bit of fun but he often goes way too far.
Essential Research is biased BTW i dont believe in their polling.
He’s like Bolt. They’re over the top just to bait people in to leaving big reactions in their comments.
I never fall for it. He’s not worth my time. He’s just doing it for a reaction.
New thread.