I didn’t get a chance to post a link yesterday, but a revised version of my post on the end of humanities at QUT was published yesterday in the Higher Ed supplement of The Australian. You can read it here.
Archive for May, 2007
You would think McDonald’s would know a thing or two about image and marketing and how to come out more or less on top in the spin cycle. You would think that in the wake of the McLibel saga and sundry similar and related PR disasters (Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation, publicity about transfats etc), somebody high up in the company would have grasped the essential fact about bad press: jumping up and down and waving your arms around just fans the flames. Transnational corporate sooking is not only ineffectual, ridiculous and pathetic, it also makes the sooker look incredibly stupid and naive. I’m used to thinking of McDonald’s and its ilk as evil, but I always saw it as operating with a super-Machiavellian kind of smooth, skilled malevolence. Lately, though, McDonald’s media wing is acting like a n00b out of control.
Continue reading ‘McJob, n.‘
Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary has given birth to a son. The baby is shown here with his grandparents. Have you ever seen an official new-baby photo which totally excludes the parents? Imagine if the latest Danish princess had been presented to the world in one photo with the queen and king of Denmark. It wouldn’t have happened — it didn’t happen. It’s only happened in this case because the parents are a lesbian couple.
At least Dick looks genuinely happy.
The risk is that we might sleepwalk into changing the government in a fit of absent-mindedness, almost, if we the Government don’t let people know that your vote, come the end of the year, does have consequences, potentially dire consequences.
(Tony Abbott on Lateline)
The Australian people are pranksters. They are distracted by pretty things. They are absent-minded, and prone to sleepwalking.
Because lord knows it can’t be that the Howard Government is arrogant and out of touch.
People of Australia, it’s your fault that they have to spend over $100 million to remind you that they really only want what’s best for you. You’ll understand that one day.
Update: Full transcript of the very special interview with Abbott on Lateline.
For somebody whose invention still hasn’t been demonstrated to work, Max Whisson has gotten a heck of a lot of free publicity. First his old mate Phillip Adams gives him a plug in his column in the Oz. That’s fine. Now, there’s an episode of Australian Story devoted to him. Continue reading ‘Can I hire Max Whisson’s PR manager?’
Yes it’s time again for mate against mate, state against state, the cockroaches against the cane toads, the maroons against the blues as Queensland and New South Wales line up again for the first of Rugby League’s annual State of Origin stoushes tonight.
They say the Suncorp Stadium is no longer “the cauldron� that once was Lang park and visiting teams love playing here.
We Quincelanders do need to win, because the second match is at Telstra Australia in Sydney and the record shows we’ve never won there. (Well we did win a couple of times, it’s just that the ref didn’t score it that way.)
Bullshit and Lies Create Awesome Possibilities
Here’s a story you’re not seeing at News Limited for some reason, although it’s getting a big run at The Age, The SMH and The Brisbane Times. Plus The ABC.
The Industrial Relations Commission in Canberra is currently hearing a claim of unfair dismissal against the Federal Government. The claimant is Trent Smith - I first learnt of the case through the Hansard for the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade (parlinfo web permalink). I’ve been waiting since for the proverbial brown stuff to hit the proverbial rotating thing.
And now it has. You can find all the news that’s fit to Google here. Enjoy!
Work with me here folks, I’m having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around this thought.
If two former ABC types running for office as Labor candidates implies a bias in that organisation, does the same charge apply to the armed forces where two former well regarded members are also doing the same for Labor?
Just askin’.
In the news today, there’s some discussion of Labor’s intention not to wind back the VSU clock and reintroduce compulsory student union fees. The policy was apparently approved at the ALP conference aka the Ruddfest, but passed without notice until now.
I was an office-bearer of the University of Queensland Union three times, as a Vice-President, Treasurer and Clubs & Societies Officer, and in the salad days of pre-HECS and viable levels of AUSTUDY, spent just a little too much time on student politics and not enough time studying.
Even back then, I had reservations about the compulsory element of student unionism. The comparison, often made, to local government rates was not a particularly apposite one, and I think, as we saw with compulsory trade unionism, a captive membership encourages laziness, profligacy and poor performance among elected officials. Not always, and not necessarily, but the tendency is definitely there. Particularly at the older sandstone universities, there’s no reason why a well managed student union should not provide financially sustainable services attractive enough to induce students to join. Smaller and regional campuses are always going to struggle, because the economies of scale just aren’t there. It was, if people were honest, pretty clear to those of us involved in student politics that those who took an active interest in the union were always a minority - even though sometimes that could be quite a large one at UQ - as in the year of the Victoria Brazil fiasco and for a few years afterwards, where election turnouts rose to levels not seen since the early 70s. A Liberal Party dominated union executive proved quite an incentive for students to vote - with about 5000 votes cast in the last election I ran for the exec - in 1992.
His final question to the three evangelist brothers - admit it, we all wanted to know about that hair.
Image Credit: ABC-TV
crossposted from Hoyden About Town where we’ve ended up talking about Richard Dawkins on Compass instead
I saw one of the famous WorkChoices Workplace Relations ads last night - on sbs. If the government thinks it’s going to get much traction from the latest instalment of the $1.7 billion it’s spent on advertising since 1996, that smile on the PM’s face yesterday when he denied they were political (really - what a bad look…) will disappear as quickly as the half a mill or so they were going to spend on nice new chairs and a table for a dining room in Parliament House did. Contentless and pointless, and I’m amazed they had the audacity to repeat the famous line “protected by law”.
I’m still convinced that the commentariat’s puzzlement that people actually dislike their brand new AWAs and don’t act like smily happy worker bees is explicable by the fact that they’re all (a) completely out of touch and (b) on salaries way above the norm.
That’s why the reader response to Peter Lalor’s call for people to tell their own stories about their non-Choices under the unnamed industrial relations laws makes such interesting (and depressing) reading. It’s the lived experience, stupid!
It hasn’t gotten much attention in the national press yet, but it seems like Western Australia might just provide the first test case as to whether the coal industry has a future. Petroleum behemoth BP and Rio Tinto are conducting a feasibility study into a geosequestering coal gasification power plant at Kwinana, an industrial port 40 kilometres south of Perth. According to the article in The Australian, construction could begin in 2011, with power being produced as early as 2014. 90% of the CO2 produced will be geosequestered in “saline formations under the sea” off the coast.
While the details are sketchy, the proposed plant seems to be a fairly standard IGCC gasification design - coal is converted into syngas, CO2 and other pollutants stripped out for sequestration, and then the hydrogen burned in a gas turbine.
For mine, there are two things of interest from this news. The first is that these companies think that they can be producing low-carbon power from coal within the decade. The second is the truly eye-watering cost. At $2 billion for a 500 megawatt power plant, the construction costs come to $4000 a kilowatt. Even allowing for the first-of-a-kind construction problems as the Olkiluoto-3 nuclear plant in Finland and taking opponents’ estimates of construction costs (and noting that Finland, like its Scandinavian neighbours, is just about the most expensive area on Earth to do anything), the construction cost per kilowatt capacity is pretty much the same. Furthermore, if you ignore the costs of intermittency for a moment, it’s around the capital costs of wind farms right now, and wind farms have much lower operating costs because there’s no fuel to buy.
Both major parties are backing geosequestered coal as not only a technically feasible option for low-carbon electricity, but cheaper than nuclear and renewables. Based on the reports of this project, it seems that the technology has a long way to go on the cost-competitiveness front.
From today’s Crikey email:
The Coalition’s current obsession with political advertising – demonstrated both by its “know where you stand� IR ads and Glenn Milne’s claim that Liberal strategists believe Labor is timing ad spends to influence the polls – suggests that Coalition honchos might finally be on to what’s been very plain to many observers since Rudd took the leadership. Labor has consistently avoided playing to the commentariat’s game plan and sought to communicate with the public directly – not just through ads but also through Rudd’s television appearances (whether his former gig on Sunrise or his soundbites on the commercial news programs).
In his Saturday column, Courier-Mail assistant editor Dennis Atkins previews the themes of the negative ads the Coalition plans to run during the campaign itself. Liberal sources have been telling Atkins that Howard and Costello are keen to see an advertising strategy which re-runs the Mark Latham L-plated leadership ads of 2004.
It’s interesting that the issue that they’ve picked on to focus to indicate the supposed danger of a Rudd ascendancy is one that’s already been part of an attack against the Labor leader shortly after Beazley was toppled – the Goss government’s decision not to build the Wolffdene dam when it took office in 1989.
According to Atkins, the Libs plan to paint Rudd as being responsible for South East Queensland’s water crisis.
In Victoria (and I presume other Australian states have passed similar rules) new homes now need to meet “five-star” energy efficiency standards, implying things like roof insulation, double-glazed windows, solar heating systems and rainwater tanks, which were supposed to cut the energy requirements by up to 50% compared to existing building stock.
Unfortunately, according to a leaked report to the state government, it’s not working. New Victorian houses are using 6% more energy than the state average, not less. Why? Several reasons. New houses are much bigger than the state average, meaning that the efficiency gains in heating are chewed up by the sheer volume that needs to be heated. And lit - often with halogen downlights lighting the place up like a movie set. And, of course, the ubiquitous plasma TV. Particularly in response to the expanded house sizes, this seems like a textbook case of Jevons paradox in action.
In response, the leaked report apparently recommends placing “some restraint” on house size, as well as including more aspects of the house (such as lighting) under the energy efficiency rules.
Rather than further micromanagement, I suggest Andrew Leigh’s approach to the great milk shortage.
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