Back from the Blogging Wilderness
Hello my loyal blog followers...myself and Dad, that is. I have returned after a a rather long hiatus and find myself in a very different political landscape as the one I left. Mckew, did indeed take Bennelong. The Liberals did in fact lose because they were out of touch. and, at long last, the government has apologised to the Stolen Generation for the suffering caused by ill advised social policy.
So all plain sailing now right??? Wrong.
Inflation, the faltering domesteic market, out of control cost of housing, and the threat of recession are all challenges that the Rudd government are already facing. Luckily they have the get out of jail free card of all first term governments..."We inherited this mess from the previous government".
The opposition are in dissaray and doing themselves no favours so far. But that is almost to be expected as they seek to define themselves. With Nelson's approval rating at 9%, the lowest ever recorded, he has plenty to do to define himself. So far he has thoroughly confused himself, caught between trying to extricate himself from the fatally unpopular howard doctrines, while at the same time attempting to stay true to those very same doctrines. You heard it first, here at the dentist, that Nelson will not have to worry as he will never face an election as leader. The question is, who will? Or more specifically, who would want to? A poisoned chalice it is.
Labels: Australian Politics, Brendan Nelson, Kevin Rudd, Stolen Generation
Annihilating them in the aisles.
Those kidders, the Australian electorate are poised to
ANNIHILATE the government in the upcoming election, according to John Howard at the party meeting cum news conference held today.
In the carefully staged media event, Howard addressed his party members with a choreographed performance, painting a grim picture to capitalise on his "Underdog" angle to the media
yesterday. You don't use words like
ANNIHILATION in relation to your electoral chances, unless you are trying to draw yourself up as some kind of backs against the wall hero. You don't invite every news organisation in the country either, unless you want to give the impression that it is you who is the underdog in this fight.But perhaps more revealing was his solution to his lagging support... run a campaign against Labor's economic credentials. He has no "Rabbit" to pull out of his hat, he says... the answer lies in undermining the oppositions economic ability.
To me it seems a particularly foolhardy way of winning back the dissillusioned electorate.... trying to emphasise just how much more dissillusioned they'd be under your opposition. This has been the Liberal tactic for the past 10 years, but as mentioned previously in my posts it is starting to wear thin, especially when Team Gillard-Rudd weren't even in Parliament 10 years ago.
The Australian Electorate simply would not fall for such a transparent, flaky strategy like that......again......surely?
Labels: John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd
How green was my policy?
Stern picked it up, Gore ran with it, and now everyone wants some of that green action. In the space of a year the concept of Global Warming has gone from being a vague notion of doom, akin to swimming too soon after eating, to something much more frightening. After all, this was going to cost the world money!!! GDP would plummet, the weather would tear strips from the neglectful, wretched, shortsighted human race, and worst of all the value of the beach house would be seriously depreciated when it slips beneath the waves. The village folk collectively shuddered....
So the world has got on with the business of working out how they are going to fix it. Wind Farms, Solar Energy, Geothermal power, Moon rocks, hydrogen, helium, lithium, berilium.... everything is a possibility, for the brave new children of the revolution.
Which is all well and good, unless polluting the earth with the contents of your sandpit is the backbone of your GDP.....
Australia, rather early on in the piece found that it had a natural talent for pulling rather valuable things out of the ground. And from this gift, the nation has risen in prominence, dutifully digging things out of the ground and growing rich for the exertion. Indeed coal alone contributes 15% to the merchandising exports of this sunburnt country. Due to rising demand for all things subterranean from our good friends in China and India, Australia has enjoyed an unprecedented boom period, a surge in wealth that has resulted in Wide Screen Plasma TV's becoming legal tender.... but now....what with Global Warming... nothing devalues the currency when you're using it as a life raft, after your holiday home has taken on a rather Atlantis-like quality. Global Warming is going to be catastrophic... we must find alternatives....
And so, I went hunting for the grand environmental plans of the Liberal Party and the Labor party in this election year. For the ALP I found as follows from this location:
http://www.alp.org.au/policy/index.phpAs you can see the thrust of the Global Warming solution for Labor is heavy investment in the development and proof of concept of Clean Coal... You can read about how the technology theoretically and in some places, practically works, yourself, but from my reading of it, it is a rather expensive and large scale unproven technology. The time frames put together are also rather a worry.... Labor aims to have The technology reducing CO2 emissions at power plants by 2020, and at close to zero emissions by 2030.
The Liberal Party's environmental "policy" or as near as I can make of it, can be found here:
http://www.pm.gov.au/government/sustainable_environment.cfmThere does not appear to be any clear policy on the money set aside for Solar energy development in the Budget, but perhaps Mr Costello hasn't got around to advising his staff to update their webpages yet.
They vaguely mention a bit of funding to make clean coal viable, but the jewel in the crown of their policy is their Nuclear Platform. We're sitting on piles of radioactive rocks so lets use them... and even better lets sell them to other countries as!
This idea perhaps has some merit, but I believe you need to read a little further down the page to see how seriously little Johnny takes this debate:
Australia contributes only 1.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which when compared to China’s greenhouse gas emissions, are an extremely small percentage globally. If Australia was to close down all of its power stations tonight, the savings in greenhouse gas emissions would be replaced by the growth in China's energy sector emissions in less than 12 months
Australia is home to roughly 20 million of the world's roughly 6.5 billion population. Let's do the maths shall we? 20000000 / 6500000000 = .3%
It appears to me that whilst Johnny is trying to emphasize the trifle that is our carbon emissions, we're actually contributing 5 times our "share". By emphasizing our "relatively low" carbon emissions, it appears he is trying to trivialise any contribution we make to reducing them.
This highlights the massively schizophrenic positions of both the Liberals and Labor on the issue of the Environment. The truth behind the matter is, for the short term at least, Australia is profitting off the polluting habits of the rest of the world. Whilst Labor talks about cleaning up coal to reduce it's emissions, there can be no safeguards on how the coal is burnt to whomever we export it to. The Liberals aren't even interested in cleaning coal up in any serious way. They maintain their policy of poking trivially around the edges of opportunities to make things better, with no real conviction.
The liberal party have always seen the environment as secondary to industry. From their trivialisation of the issue and buck passing, they still do. Their policy of "everyone else is doing it, and we'd be disadvantaging australia if we don't do it too", reaks of short term gain. 18 points behind in the polls, they are motivated by retention of power and are keen to belittle the environmental threat, while emphasising their commitment to Industry... One wonders whether little Johnny will still be speaking of "Knee Jerk" reactions when Kirribilli is swallowed up by the harbour. One thinks he will.
The Labor party, mindful of the perception that they are poor managers of the economy and unemployment rates (even if the liberals supposed economic "credibility" is heavily derived from the economic policies of Keating), have committed to an option which they hope will demonstrate their commitment to the economy as well as the environment, but which may very well not quite demonstrate either.
So where does that leave us? With all our eggs in one basket, or all our eggs in the other. Only time will tell, which basket, if either, is the right one.
Labels: Clean Coal, Environment, John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Policy, Solar, Uranium
wired for sound...and video....and data
The battle lines are drawn. The battle for hearts and minds of the Australian electorate this year will be staged around....the environment? national security? interest rates?
Actually, Broadband speeds!
Labor today have outlined a new plan to upgrade the national telecommunications infrastructure so that 98% of the Australian population will have access to broadband speeds 40 times faster than they do today. Wow. How could they pull off such a masterstroke of technological advancement? Who will pay for such an outlandish scheme? The Future Fund of course!
By naming the Future Fund, "The Future Fund", the government has ensured that it's use can be as generically applied as it's name. If they had called it "The public servant Superannuation Stockpile", things might be a little different.
But they didn't, and Labor are eyeing it off as the Australian telecommunications infrastructure's saviour from going the way of the railways. And rightly so. The Future fund is made up of the proceeds from the sale of T3, the 3rd Share offering of Telstra, plus any unsold shares from that issue. Now that Telstra is a private company, they are only obliged to look out for the interests of their shareholders, and not the nation at large. Therefore, despite having a monopoly on the country's telco infrastructure, there is no real incentive for it to invest collossal amounts of money into improving the country's infrastructure, as the country is wide and the population sparse. It isn't in the best interests of the shareholders. Investment may improve the country's fortunes, but not necessarily Telstra's.
So Labor have taken the bull by the horns and are proposing to dip into the Future Fund, to use the proceeds of selling off the Australian Telco infrastructure to greatly enhance it's infrastructure. This will supposedly get Australia up to speed with the rest of the industrialised world, giving us a network on par with everyone else...
So is this investment really necessary? Will this really enhance Australia's competitiveness in the world?
Perhaps. Little Timmy downloading the 6th Season of "Lost" in his bedroom will think so, but it goes much further than Little Timmy (as is sometimes the case). Australia is a bloody long way from anywhere. That's a fact. But in this international climate of free trade agreements, Australia needs to be open for business. Distance cannot be a barrier. For a long time we have had the smarts. While we still dig things out of the ground for a dollar we also sell know how. Industry leaders recognise the fact that we need to get closer to the rest of the world, in order to remain competitive. As Rudd puts it, we need to engage in "Nation building for the 21st Century".
Labels: Australian Politics, Broadband, Federal Election, Kevin Rudd, Telstra
Let the Character Assassinations Begin
Bring out your dead, or how Teflon John got it wrong.
The main problem with the moral high ground, is that if you choose to occupy it, you must be high on morals.
At the start of the year Labor brought out a couple of pre-campaign policy samplers. Nothing too meaty, and more to do with intent than anything else. As was to be expected, they were Pooh-Poohed by the government and all was well with the universe. But after another poll came out in February, this turned personal.
For once the tired old "Labor can't be trusted with your money" rhetoric clearly wasn't making inroads into the electorate. Why not this time? For one, it's a hard position to defend when interest rates are rising. Saying they'd rise even more if your opponent was in charge doesn't really hold a lot of water either. The mortgage belt tend to respond to the evidence before them, reactive animals that they are. And Rudd just looks like a banker... Labor = economic ruin, is a hard policy to promote when the supposed rabid unionist in charge could be your financial planner, or accountant, or bank manager.
So if you can't deride their character on policy, undermine their moral character was the call. Some liberal strategist who is probably down the centrelink by now, dug up a supposedly scandalous, but in reality quite harmless bit of info on lunches Rudd had held with Brian Burke, the corrupt ex-premier of WA. An outcry into the moral character of Rudd would follow surely..."Saint Kevin the fallen" would be the cat calls from the baying mob. He attended lunchs with this judas? Noooo... The reverberations throughout the electorate were... missing.
Merely a day or so later it came out that Liberal minister for the environment Ian Campbell had had a meeting with the very same ebola virus-like Brian Burke. He promptly resigned his post, in order not to taint the morally irridescent Holy Trinity of Costello, Abbott and Howard.
Body Count after the smoke had cleared? ALP = 0 Libs = 1
Why didn't the Electorate jump up and down and burn effigies of Rudd after this attack? I'd like to think that the Australian electorate are savvy enough to realise Politicians encounter many people in the business they are in, and the fact you cannot account for the high moral standing of all you encounter is not a fault of yourself. The fact that Ian Campbell had to be sacrificed in order for the Government's mud to stick, highlights the absurdity of the attack. Is Ian Campbell in some way morally compromised because of meeting with a lobbyist now proved to be corrupt? No. Unless he was of very little moral fibre prior to this (I won't be tempted to comment on that).
The upshot? People in White houses shouldn't fling mud. And yet the McCarthy like witchhunt continued into all MP's wheelings and dealings.... next up and probably with some legitimacy, Shadow Attorney-General Kelvin Thomson resigned after it was revealed he provided a character reference to one Tony Mokbel for a liquor licence in 2001... ill advised at the very least, considering Mokbel has been charged in absentia with importing cocaine and implicated in the murders of other Melbourne underworld figures. His poor old interns will probably be wondering if the character references he gives them will be worth the paper they are written on now. The actual nature of Thomson's relationship with Mokbel never really did come out, but was met with muted vigour by the Government. Once bitten twice shy, perhaps, or perhaps it sent a Government scurrying to their own records to weed out any possible impropriety anybody they had ever dealt with had committed since their dealings...
Body count: ALP 1 Libs 1
The ALP hit back barely a week later, with news that Minister for Ageing (but not an Ageing Minister, like some in the Holy Trinity), held shares in a bio-technology company , thus arising a conflict of interest, as said company related to his portfolio. While it initially appeared as an innocent mistake, it later emerged that as an act of contrition, he sold the shares and donated the proceeds to a "charity". Unfortunately the supposed "Charity" wasn't a charity at all, but the conservative values group Family Council Of Queensland...Looks like Santo forgot to read the Clause about "conflicts of interest".
Body count: ALP 1 Libs 2
Has it ended? Maybe... for what started as a desperate character assassination of Saint Kev, in order to peg a few points back in the polls, would appear to have backfired, and the Government's own moral credibility is the one on the line.... careful what you wish for eh John?
Labels: Australian Politics, Ian Campbell, John Howard, Kelvin Thomson, Kevin Rudd, Santo Santoro
