Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
A government-commissioned report into stem cell research has found the arguments for therapeutic cloning have not advanced since the issue was last debated in Parliament four years ago.
So what is the real debate about stem cells? Where is the main point of disagreement between opponents and defenders of therapeutic cloning and research on embryos?
In my view it rests on definitions of “personhood� and the “right to life�.
Note: This post is part of the series of Crikey Queensland election commentary and is cross-posted at Currumbin2Cook.
Update: The Poll Bludger comments on the Newspoll.
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The Australian highlighted a Newspoll on its front page yesterday which showed Team Beattie potentially winning with a larger majority than in 2004. That’s unlikely, as the swing back to Labor is not going to be uniform, and the optional preferential voting system makes 2PP projections unreliable. But there is no doubt in my mind that Labor will take seats off the Libs (and just possibly a couple off the Nats), though its poor position on the Sunshine Coast makes Liberal deputy Mark McCardle safer than he looks on paper and may also see some Labor seats fall to the Libs.
As I’ve previously argued in Crikey, Flegg’s blonde campaign is not the Libs’ only problem. Their baseline vote going into the election is already about as low as it can go – particularly in Brisbane, where Labor won 34 of 35 seats last time around (Redcliffe and Chatsworth were lost at by-elections in 2005). So in the second of our focus groups for The National Forum, Graham Young and I polled a sample of strong Liberal voters. We were interested to see how they’d perceived the campaign and whether any were shifting to Labor.
All the participants were strongly critical of Beattie, and their policy views strongly anti-Labor. But a number had considered shifting their vote. Joseph, a 35-year-old self-employed former public servant, had the line of the night: “They provide no viable alternative to Team Beattie. I heard the comment today that Flegg has been going around the state ‘drumming up apathy’.”
The incoming US Ambassador said this.
“I want to get out across the entire continent of Australia” to say that “it’s OK to disagree with this US policy or that US policy but still be pro-American because we have so much in common.”
Cool, hopefully he’ll let the Australian right wing echo chamber and keyboard kommandos know about this. So now that we have permission from our colonial master to be dissenting pro-Americans where shall we start?
Elsewhere: Guy at Polemica comments seriously.
Last night on Lateline the Prime Minister was busted spinning a contradictory line.
We’re grappling perhaps for the first time – for any Australian generation – we’re grappling with the reality that a lot of these things are no longer limitlessly available at a modest cost. That time is changing.
Then later in the piece.
I think we do have to be willing to see an even greater urban sprawl. Of course we do.
After hearing this last night I was taken right back to Elizabeth Farrelly’s August 30th piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in which she quotes the PM’s favourite touch stone.
Note: This post is part of the series of Crikey Queensland election commentary and is cross-posted at Currumbin2Cook.
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Gerard Henderson is only the latest pundit to make what is by now a trite observation – state oppositions seem incapable of challenging the Labor stranglehold.
Online focus group research on the Queensland campaign conducted by Graham Young and me for The National Forum last week and again last night provides a clue as to why. The puzzle is more complicated than the usual story about poor candidates and fundraising disadvantage.
Coalition state governments in the 90s weren’t afraid to be economic and social reformers. Greiner and then Kennett set a cracking pace. Not only was the pace much too fast for voters’ speed limits, but the liberal economic agenda and particularly privatisation were deeply unpopular. By the time the gloss wore off, voters punished Coalition administrations for placing ideology over services. The final nail in the Liberal coffin was the 2002 SA election. The Libs were punished for electricity privatisation, and supply failures in searing southern summers.
Tim Flannery in his book The Weather Makers has a chapter on three biggies, three possible adverse events in the future of our climate that we should avoid at all costs and that would spell big trouble for the climate system as a whole – and for us.
My copy of his book is still sadly packed in a box under the house, but I think one was the melting of ice sheets. I’m almost certain the second was the interruption of the Gulf Stream but I’m very sure the third was the possibility of the Amazon rainforest drying out and collapsing as an ecological system.
Last month The Independent carried a story Amazon rainforest ‘could become a desert’ – “And that could speed up global warming with ‘incalculable consequences’, says alarming new researchâ€?.
Continue reading ‘Amazing Amazon: here today, but tomorrow?!’
Part of the fantasy aspect of The L Word was the trajectory women’s circuit tennis player Dana took after she came out. She’d always been advised by her agent that revealing her sexuality would be a disaster for her endorsements. But later her engagement to a pr flack led to a bizarre photo shoot tie in with a fashion mag celebrating her same sex wedding. In the narrative of The L Word, Dana’s professional life only kept getting better – her lesbian celebrity endured after her tennis career came to a halt.
Back in the reality based community, life is different for world #1 Amelie Mauresmo.
Amelie Mauresmo doesn’t bounce around the court in a low-cut dress like Maria Sharapova or design her own outfits like Serena Williams. The world’s top-ranked women’s tennis player just wins.
Sharapova has the highest earnings of any woman in sport, though as the article acerbically observes, unlike Kournikova, she wins.
But it seems that being an out lesbian is not the only reason why Mauresmo’s earnings are dwarfed by those of her peers. Sport is not just about winning, but about celebrity and personality. And Mauresmo, who has one of the least sexualised images on the circuit, apparently needs to unlock hers. Being #1 in the world isn’t enough.
It’s more than just her sexuality that may be keeping sponsors away, said Dean Bonham of the Bonham Group, a Denver sports marketing firm. He said Mauresmo could command up to $10 million a year if she revealed a charismatic personality and compelling story to the public.
Griffith University emeritus professor Ian Lowe has an opinion piece in the latest issue of Australasian Science on how the politicization of science by the Federal government is driving scientists overseas to continue their work or even to ‘censor’ results.
“I think the Howard Government does not want independent science and there’s been a strong message to scientists that they can talk about their work but not its policy implications,” Professor Lowe said in a comment piece in Australasian Science magazine.
“The concern is scientists are doing a pre-emptive crumble and staying away from areas that are likely to cause any embarrassment.
“Either that or they are resigning or going overseas.”
Professor Lowe cited, among other cases, the recent departure of two of Australia’s leading stem-cell researchers to the US because of restrictions on stem-cell research that have been backed by Prime Minister John Howard and Mr Abbott.
It is possible that if a conscience vote is allowed on stem cell research, the brain drain may be reversed. Otherwise is it too much to hope that this needless mimicking of the The Republican War on Science in Australia can be avoided?
Note: This story was published in Crikey today and is cross posted at Currumbin2Cook.
Elsewhere: More commentary on preference strategies at The Poll Bludger.
Much of Labor’s electoral success outside Brisbane from 1998 was built on the back of exploiting conservative disunity through Queensland’s optional preferential voting system. With One Nation and other right wing parties and independents splitting the conservative vote, the Labor message of “Just Vote One” turned many regional and rural seats into effective first past the post contests. The fact that this strategy reinforced the theme of conservatives as a squabbling rabble was an added extra.
Because Queensland uses optional preferential, calculations of the vote based on a notional 2PP are misleading. Unfortunately the polling firms who have been surveying opinion have used very confused methodologies to measure preferences. In many seats it will be far more important whether voters direct preferences than to whom.
Surprisingly for an election in which voters are tiring of Beattie but the Opposition presents an unacceptable alternative, minor parties have struggled to attract either support or coverage for their campaigns. So both the Greens and Family First have made much of their preference announcements.
Continue reading ‘Crikey story: Preferences and the Queensland campaign’
…is that s/he is not John Mark Karr. The charges against Karr have been dropped because the DNA found at the scene does not match that of Karr.
This is deeply embarrassing for New Idea magazine, because the cover of this week’s edition screams “The Truth About Jon-Benet’s killer”, with the corresponding story inside proceeding on the assumption that Karr’s confession was the genuine article.
However, one can hardly blame the glossies for adopting the view that people’s guilt or innocence of crimes should be decided by journalists rather than juries and judges, when one considers the contemptible behaviour of right-wing commentators, including in the “quality” press, in relation to cases such as those of David Hicks and Jack Thomas. This despicable effort by The Australian’s legal affairs editor, Chris Merritt, is about as bad as it gets.
I’ve approvingly quoted Jonathan Holmes’ 2005 piece on nuclear waste many times on this blog and elsewhere, and he was in was in fine form again tonight. Tonight’s 4 Corners show centred around the possibility of creating a GHG ‘pricing signal’ – “any mechanism that adds a cost to the bottom line of businesses that are emitting greenhouse gases.” The stories of each of the self-interested participants interviewed by Holmes are predictable enough – The PM looking to drive a wedge between resource rich, booming states and their South-Eastern neighbours; the Coal Association balancing its bottom line with the need to be ‘doing something’; the entrepreneur with kind words for the NSW scheme from which is capital has been mobilised to produce a profit; and a seemingly unfaltering faith in the linearity of ‘technological development’ from just about everyone else.
However, As Brian has pointed out, the time to act is now if we’re serious about protecting things many of us hold dear. Continue reading ‘GHGs, Markets and Morals’
Note: Only 13 more sleeps til Queensland votes, and this post republished from Crikey will be followed up with a post on the impact of minor parties and preferences tomorrow. The post is cross-posted at Currumbin2Cook.
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Yesterday the Queensland campaign passed its halfway mark – 13 out of 26 days over and done with. And the impact of the second week of the campaign can be discerned from the weekend polls.
I suggested last week that the most likely result, had an election been held on the previous weekend, would have been a small loss of seats by Labor. The commentariat have now caught up with the fact that Team Beattie’s vote is holding up close to 2004 levels half way through the campaign.
In the Galaxy poll, the Nats have gained three points to reach 18%, but the Libs have slumped by four points to 22%. The ALP, meanwhile, is sitting on a 47% primary. Labor has gained 5% since the election was called.
Continue reading ‘Crikey story: Queensland – the state of the polls after week 2′
Frequent LP commenter Graham Bell has started his own blog. Go check it out at Ungrateful Troublemaker.
Ian Frazer, the discoverer, is doing a bit of a whirlwind tour today for the cameras – vaccinating some girls and young women in both Brisbane and Sydney on the first day that Gardasil is approved for use in Australia.
As yet there’s no government subsidy for the vaccine (which protects against the virus that causes the main form of cervical cancer), so the full course of three shots costs over A$400. There’s nonetheless no shortage of takers, and a growing number of men interested in the vaccination as well so they can be confident of not infecting their partners.
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