An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
To predictable cries of shock and outrage, the Australian government has taken another step along the road to agreeing to sell uranium to Russia.
As far as substantive proliferation risks from this, there are none. Russia, you may remember, has a stockpile of 14,000 nuclear weapons, only 5,000 are “operational” – the rest are in storage. Beyond this, the Russians currently have a stockpile of around 1000 tonnes of highly enriched uranium, enough for 80,000 modern weapons, or 20,000 if you resorted to Hiroshima-style technology that you could build in a local workshop. Russia does not need our uranium to build more bombs, or even to supply bomb-making material to other nations if they were silly enough to do so; they have more than enough in stock already for that.
The biggest things that Russia can do for nuclear non-proliferation are to reduce its own arsenal as part of an arms reduction treaty with the United States, get rid of its stockpiles of surplus HEU and bomb-grade plutonium (which, incidentally, Australian uranium is helpful for; you can mix it with bomb material and burn it in a nuclear reactor, at which point it is no longer useful for making weapons), and, most importantly, be very careful what nuclear technology it’s prepared to share with potential proliferators. While it won’t make much difference either way, there’s a perfectly arguable case that selling uranium to Russia may make it marginally more willing to listen to us on those issues.
Continue reading ‘Exporting uranium to Russia, and domestic nuclear “hedging”’
With election day tomorrow, it’s time for another open thread about the South Australian election. This thread provides an opportunity for commenters to discuss the campaign and results, share links, make predictions, and so forth!
Please note LP’s statement on electoral comment.
Update: Live chat at The Poll Bludger starting now (2pm AEST).
Previous discussion: here.
With election day tomorrow, it’s time for another open thread about the Tasmanian election. This thread provides an opportunity for commenters to discuss the campaign and results, share links, make predictions, and so forth!
Please note LP’s statement on electoral comment.
Update: Live chat at The Poll Bludger starting now (2pm AEST).
Update: Latest Newspoll results – Labor 35, Liberals 36.5, Greens 25.5. More detail at The Poll Bludger.
Previous discussion: here.
Today’s Question Time saw some interesting tactics from the government; suspending standing orders to allow Tony Abbott to talk about health and hospitals policy. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who saw the debate, but from what I heard on the tv, it looked like Abbott was mostly in bluster mode, and Rudd quite assured. Clearly Labor believes that Abbott wants to talk about anything but health, and that his lack of command of the detail, and lack of any substantive alternative policy will work to the ALP’s credit.
So, the debate Rudd challenged him to on Tuesday will be interesting. It’ll also keep the media focus squarely where the government wants it to be for the next little while.
Elsewhere: Bernard Keane.
Elsewhere: Tigtog at Hoyden.
Update: The commentariat seems to be impressed by Abbott’s performance. By way of example, Samantha Maiden:
But the egg ended up all over Labor’s face as the Opposition Leader rose to the challenge, hurling abuse at Kevin Rudd.
Righteo, then.
Update: Bernard Keane in Crikey today:
If Abbott could spend Tuesday’s debate repeating yesterday’s dose and bagging the Government and explaining that he didn’t cut health funding, it’d be fine, but there’s now an expectation he must do more than criticise Rudd, that he must offer something positive. It obviously wasn’t in the Coalition’s planning to be producing a full-blown health policy at this stage. Rudd himself will presumably use the debate to make yet another of the many announcements about health funding that he promised back when he kicked off the health debate. If so, Abbott’s failure to produce something of substance will look particularly poor.
All of which is why, despite the alleged risks of debating your opponent, Rudd is happy to be doing just that.
Ben Eltham has a neat piece in New Matilda today comprehensively detailing the reasons why the ‘Rudd quaking in his boots’ story is tosh. He makes a very good point about the relative inattention given to the Essential Research poll compared to that other poll which always makes the News:
The Essential survey polled more respondents and had a lower margin of error than Newspoll, making it a more reliable gauge of current voting intentions. But the Essential poll didn’t fit the current media narrative that Kevin Rudd is losing his shine, so most outlets ignored it.
There’s another astute observation in Eltham’s piece:
It would help if the Coalition had spent the last two years developing viable new policies. But they haven’t. So Abbott is almost required to make policy on the run in the run-up to the election. This leaves Labor all sorts of opportunities for counter-attack.
While, as I suggested the other day, the polls are reflecting both a return to partisan normality in the absence of Liberal dissension and the continued inability of the Coalition to make inroads into the centre ground, the years of Liberal leadership wars are still having an effect. The Libs could have learnt something from the oft-repeated story of state conservative oppositions, one would have thought; leadership is not the magic bullet. Changing the leader, in the absence of anyone doing the hard slog of policy work, just leaves the latest bunny in the headlights holding the magic pudding.
That’s where Abbott is now.
They’re at it again:
Members of the Liberal Party have been creating a minor storm about the matter of Indigenous recognition. In statements made to the Adelaide Advertiser yesterday, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott implied that formal recognition of traditional owners at the beginning of significant events is superficial and unnecessary. ‘I guess this is the kind of genuflection to political correctness that [Labor ministers] feel they have to make’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s appropriate to do those things, but certainly I think in many contexts it seems like out-of-place tokenism.’ Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey weighed in a few hours later, claiming such recognition was a ‘farce’, while Senator Eric Abetz called it ‘outdated’ and a ‘fad’.
One of the more eye-opening things to come out of this, for me, was learning on Q&A that the soporific Peter Dutton had actually offered his resignation to Brendan Nelson, so strong did he feel about not attending the Apology.
These sorts of culture war debates are, of course, plagued by false dichotomies. They’re also plagued by sneaky elisions of meaning – if something is ’superficial’, that doesn’t imply that it is ‘unnecessary’, but rather that the meaning embodied in the words should provoke thought, stimulate reflection, change minds, incite action. To that degree, there’s a sort of validity in the criticism, as Stephanie Convery says, but not of the sort that Abbott and co. think:
But the problem is not in the act of formal recognition but in the assumption that lip service is all there is to it. The truth is, there is a disconnect between political symbolism and action on Indigenous issues in Australia. The recognition of traditional owners, the welcome to country, is essential if only because it draws attention to this disconnect. It reminds the non-Indigenous listener of the fact of their colonial heritage, of the continued existence of Indigenous people and culture, and their direct relationship to everyone who calls themselves Australian. Or at least, it should.
Continue reading ‘Acknowledgement of country ‘culture wars’’
Peter Costello’s written a bit of a spray about Tony Abbott’s parental leave scheme in The Age. Actually quite an amusing read.
I don’t know if The Great Pretender’s distaste will have that much impact in the Coalition ranks, but you’d have thought there’d be enough other reasons for Liberals to think twice about the wisdom of the Abbott experiment.
It’s been widely observed that Abbott’s business impost disables his ‘Great New Tax On Everything’ line, because – unlike Labor’s ETS, which hands out money to big business – it probably would be, as large companies pass on the tax to consumers.
I haven’t noticed anyone pointing out that the parental leave plan also contradicts the theme Abbott was developing against Rudd – that Rudd’s announcements were over ambitious and it was better to go with more incremental, smaller scale policy. This was the political logic of the ‘Direct Action’ slogan, and to my mind, it’s not a bad line of attack. But it can hardly be credibly pushed when, as Costello says, Abbott has taken the ‘my policy’s bigger than your policy’ road.
Then, there’s the fact that this ego driven strategy on Abbott’s part shifts the focus from the government back on to his own credentials and capability to be Prime Minister, which is pretty dumb opposition politics at this stage of the game. After the insulation debacle, the Liberals should have been reiterating their story about the government’s policy woes. Instead, they’re defending their own policy. Not smart.
Via Joe Romm, a fascinating snippet: a scientific conference on geoengineering is to be held in California, with the goals of:
- Identify potential risks associated with climate intervention experiments
- Propose a system to assess experiment design for potential categorical risks and suggest precautions to assure their safe conduct
- Propose voluntary standards for climate intervention research for the international scientific community
For what it’s worth, (and unlike Romm), I think geoengineering may be a marginally less awful option than the others we are leaving ourselves, and have argued for carefully controlled scientific trials of geoengineering technologies. So, in that sense I believe a conference like this is a great idea.
But what makes it particularly interesting is that the sole strategic partner of this conference is none other than the “State of Victoria, Australia”:
Continue reading ‘Who’s interested in geoengineering?’
In comments on my thread on the failure of the Abbott parental leave thought bubble to halt a move back to Labor in the polls (and the reasons why), I observed that Possum’s observation provides further confirmation that it was probably private polling inspired in the first place:
Tony Abbott should consider himself a little lucky today with the Newspoll sample, as other unpublished phone polling that was in the field last week and over the weekend picked up movement more akin to Essential than Newspoll. So saying, it all comes out in the wash given enough time. (And no folks, that isn’t a Newspoll conspiracy, it’s simply normal sampling error – put it back in your pants).
So, I still think we’re seeing some movement back to Labor in public opinion, despite the apparent stasis in Newspoll.
Despite the fact that Abbott’s been having a dream run in the media (always seemingly ready to be amused and entertained with something or someone that can be represented as providing colour and movement), it’s actually much more difficult (and probably more unwise) to run the ’seize the attention’ opposition strategy than sometimes perceived. It has a pretty short use by date. And it doesn’t necessarily work; just ask Mark Latham.
I think that the true (if more prosaic) story about the narrowing of the party vote in the polls over the last few months is that it’s a return to partisan normality. Federal governing parties have very rarely enjoyed the sorts of overwhelming advantages state incumbents have had, and not surprisingly so, as the nation is a much more variegated and complex beast. That, and the perceived end of the GFC, leaves less room for Kevin Rudd to adopt the ‘above politics’ stance beloved of Labor premiers (and of ‘New Labor’ administrations more generally); or rather, it doesn’t succeed in hoovering up as much of the soft vote when the opposition unites behind a leader and rejoins the partisan game.
The spin on Newspoll this morning – in the absence of any movement in the two party preferred – was the banner headline of doom for Kevin Rudd’s approval ratings. That’s more or less a waste of newsprint. If we had a breakdown of the Newspoll figures, I strongly suspect we’d find that Rudd’s drop over the last few months has mostly come from Coalition voters. That reflects the perceived increase in strength of leadership and unity among Coalition partisans in the electorate; Rudd’s ratings are still higher by a significant degree than the ALP party vote, which implies that he’s still rated by undecided and soft voters; as does his advantage over Abbott and his commanding lead in the PPM stakes (once upon a time, of course, the all important indicator according to Shanahan and crew). I doubt, therefore, that he’s got much further to fall, all other things being equal, or that there’s any remaining drag effect in the party vote.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion going on throughout the media about the value of the value of a widely-used screening test for prostate cancer, the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA test. The original inventor of the test, Richard Albin, has written an op-ed piece in the New York Times arguing that the test’s popular use for screening has led to a hugely expensive public health disaster.. Albin points to two recent studies, an American study which shows that PSA screening does not reduce death rates, and a European study which shows a marginal decrease in death rates but that 48 men were treated (and thus suffered serious side effects) for every life saved.
I happened to be listening to ABC local radio talkback. A representative from one of a prostate cancer patient’s group put the case quite strongly that Australian use of the PSA practice was significantly different to that in the United States, and the current recommendations were that men should “discuss PSA testing with their doctor”. As I understand it, different branches of the medical profession have different views on this – the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand recommends routine PSA screening for men as young as 40, and presents the story of one 46-year-old who had a prostatectomy after PSA screening in support of the idea:
Continue reading ‘Is the PSA test worth it?’
This morning’s media reports that the Opposition now intends to support the Federal Government’s intention to bring back the Susso for several categories of welfare recipient including those on Newstart Allowance.
The use of the term “Susso” is not mere hyperbole as the percentage of the recipient’s income which is quarantined will only be able to be accessed using a special smart card (which will, over time, become generally recognised as the quarantinee’s smart card) at designated retail outlets which have the necessary hardware to read the cards. Further, in some towns in the Northern Territory where the scheme is in place for indigenous people, stores are reportedly establishing special checkouts for holders of the card in order to minimise delays in the other checkout queues. Anyone spending their quarantined income is thus “outed” as a welfare recipient – and exposed to all the prejudices which many in our society hold towards such people – whenever they co shopping.
The mooted national extension of the income quarantining scheme could have some interesting but unpleasant consequences for university staff and the Australian university sector as a whole.
Continue reading ‘Pssst! That’s our lecturer! In the Susso queue!’
The CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have done a brief snapshot of the state of Australia’s climate. For example this map shows the increase in mean temperature per decade from 1960 to 2009:
It has become hotter everywhere, in some regions by as much a 0.4C per decade.
Continue reading ‘BOM and CSIRO report on the state of the climate’
End of the road for Glenn Milne?
There’s an intriguing little piece by Jason Whittaker in Crikey’s media briefs today, implying that Glenn Milne’s days as a columnist for the News Limited Sunday papers (and full time staffer) are over. I wonder what that signifies? Continue reading ‘End of the road for Glenn Milne?’