…it’s one of the reasons one converses with folks, instead of carving solitary manifestos onto a park bench with a pen-knife

Oh there you go, making unwarranted criticisms of my life’s work again.

More to my point (which in fairness was not particularly clear, being carried way downstream on a current of sarcasm) was that in searching for those very solutions, the narrative of TEH EVIL RICH using their heartless technology to deprive TEH NOBLE POOR (who are, in these tellings, always curiously devoid of agency) is not only unhelpful, it’s also rather inaccurate and misleading. And problems are generally better solved by accuracy than by the machinations of interested parties. Witness Iraq, where accuracy went straight out the window so early in the game. One could give numerous examples, but it would be tedious.

“I was thinking of these ‘less imaginative’ people who didn’t choose their place of birth more carefully. Also the less robust infrastructure subject to stronger and more frequent storms in some parts of the world.”

Not to quarrel, but these two sentences go some distance to illustrate a bit of what I’m on about, in more than a few ways. But as you say, it’s a topic for a different conversation.

CK — “the poverty of his own thinking…” Well, as Hong Kong Phooey used to say, “Hmmm, *could be*!” I try never to rule out the possibility that I’m being an idiot, and if so, how; it’s one of the reasons one converses with folks, instead of carving solitary manifestos onto a park bench with a pen-knife. On the other hand, not that anything I’ve said is of a completeness, and I wouldn’t claim it was; still, which is the part that isn’t at least somewhat true?

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warns that in some forty poor, developing countries, with a combined population of two billion…[crop] production losses due to climate change may drastically increase the number of undernourished people, severely hindering progress in combating poverty and food insecurity. (Cited in George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’)

I was thinking of these ‘less imaginative’ people who didn’t choose their place of birth more carefully. Also the less robust infrastructure subject to stronger and more frequent storms in some parts of the world.

Not to mention a bunch of drowning Pacific islands and the odd river delta here and there, like Bangla Desh and Vietnam.

I thought also of the less imaginative and less awake types who found themselves living in a ditch when the levies broke in New Orleans, but I decided not to go there. After all no science can prove whether global warming had anything to do with Hurricane Katrina, although logic and commonsense says it did.

Kelly is wrong. There was nothing clever about Howard’s speech. It was the old “of course he WOULD say that, wouldn’t he” line.

Fact is, it doesn’t matter what Howard says now. Because nobody believes him, and even if he turned into Cicero overnight, it still wouldn’t make any difference. The punters have already made up their mind about presenting the Rodent with a pink slip. And about time.

the advantages of which they largely shared with the ‘poor’ (you could also read as, less imaginative)…

In which j_p_z demonstrates the poverty of his own thinking…

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/niggers/english/e_ncn

Way too simple. Another way (among many) of stating the same case would be, A bunch of people used the fossil energy to create vast and previously non-existent wealth, massively and imaginatively raising the material standards of human well-being (and transforming themselves into “TEH rich”); and they also ‘used the energy’ to create head-spinning technological, medical, and agricultural innovations, the advantages of which they largely shared with the ‘poor’ (you could also read as, less imaginative) on an international scale. This could conceivably have made global poverty a fossil of human existence. But instead the poor then took this incredible unearned windfall and, rather than using it to become non-poor, simply used it to quadruple their numbers, roughly every thirty years or so, thus ensuring that poverty will be with us humans for a very long time to come. Thanks, guys, you did us proud.

THAT’s for starters. I’m not anti-poor people, but I am pro-accuracy. And if we’re all going to march joyously into the future on an ostensibly ‘equal’ phenomenological footing, then *some* of us (by which I mean “most” of us) seem to need to have a bit of fookin’ common sense knocked into our noggins. To paraphrase Mistah Orwell, All animals are awake, but some are apparently more awake than others.

Finally, the Australian people have demonstrated Burkean ‘prejudice’ in their judicious evaluation of the need for change when asked to vote in referenda, including and especially the 1999 republican referendum, on changing the constitution.

That use of quotation marks to suggest that Burkean ‘prejudice’ should be distinguished from the kind we usually mean when we use the word - one whose praises Burke sings in a certain passage of his Rantings on the French Revolution reminds me of a certain device Derrida employed in On Grammatology. Perhaps the task of the next generation of conservative intellectuals will be to explicate the differance between Burkean prejudice and prejudice.

Brian, I just can not see how anybody can think they will get away with arguing that climate change and economic Groth are mutually exclusive. The whole concept is insane and this speeech just confirms the Libs have no idea.

Sounds like a disaster (not).

Well any attempt to address climate change that is not an initiative of, and led by, AP6 is irrelevant. AP6 is made up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population and its primary polluters.

John G, the thing about AP6 is that four of them, including India and China, are already signed up to Kyoto, which India and China are getting plenty out of. The US almost certainly will sign after Bush goes to history’s dustbin, leaving our bloke if he’s still around like a shag on a rock.

Kim, I think that Howard is groping Magoo-like towards a viable policy, taking pot shots at the Europeans as he goes, as is his wont. Howard’s “rising” is maybe about the rising waters at Kirribilli but more likely the rising support for Rudd and the Labor Party.

All I’m saying is that I’m not sure Paul Kelly thinks Howard’s play is a masterstroke, but in the end it doesn’t much matter what Kelly thinks.

What a piss-poor, boring speech that was. Content aside, I reckon I (and many of the other commentators in the blogosphere) could have done a better job for him - he should sack his speechwriter.

DD, that’s why I asked way up-thread if anyone knew who it was. I find it rather curious that nobody seems to, and an odd contrast with Don Watson’s or Graham Freudenberg’s well-known roles writing speeches for the frighteningly articulate Keating and Whitlam respectively; maybe both were sufficiently secure in their own rhetorical gifts not to feel that their speechwriters needed to be kept anonymous. But with Howard it’s almost as if he expects the punters to believe that he’s making up his own speeches as he goes along.

Wasn’t Greg Melleuish (apologies if I have misspelled that) speechwriting for him a while back?

Interesting. Forget reform - the new politics of the 21st century is all about rebranding.

If I could sum it up it would be is that Howard’s vision for the future is the last decade all over again.

The only things he seemed to say in the speech were
* economic growth is good
* global warming is a low priority
* Labour is bad

Its best understood by looking at his response to Kevin Rudd’s talk about human capital.

On human capital, at COAG I put on the table $100 million to tackle diabetes, to be matched collectively by the states.

That’s the sum total of his policies on human capital in the speech. A no brainer health initiative. Then he spends the rest of the time allocated to human capital bagging Labour’s educational credentials.

I guess the problem is that he spent so much time criticising Labour’s policies and ideas he forgot to include any new ones of his own. At the moment its Rudd with broadband and early childhood intervention and Howard with nothing new.