Who knows? But there was a “Socratic Forum” held on the topic “That Canberra is taking too much power from the States” at the Legislative Council Chamber in the Queensland Parliament House on Wednesday night. Speakers included bloggers John Quiggin and Andrew Bartlett. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend as I’d planned, but Sam Clifford was there, and has written a very informative and comprehensive post about the debate. It’s good to hear that someone – more specifically, Griffith Uni’s Professor Charles Sampford – spoke up in favour of the subsidiarity principle. It’s one that logically Kevin Rudd could have used to find a good philosophical ground for opposing the Queensland local council amalgamations (rather than being suspected of political opportunism) and certainly not an argument that would have been available to the aspirational nationalists. Howard’s notion of community has nothing to do with self governance but rather a cargo cult of election sweeteners dropping from his fist full of our tax dollars. The truth is that we’re likely to get continued centralism whichever way the election goes – if Rudd is elected it’ll be a bureaucratic control freak’s heaven of targets, metrics and spreadsheets – as his riff on the New Labour NHS policy seems to foreshadow. It’s hard not to agree with Sampford that it’s an indictment on the quality of public debate that so much of the shift of power has been debated only in the arid terms of electoral advantage.
Sampford then talked about the European idea of “subsidiarity”, the notion that decisions should be made at the lowest level of government possible. Sometimes that means the international level is the most appropriate, such as for a regional defence or trade plan, but often local/borough government is the best place to make the decision (such as for a new bus route). By making decisions at such an appropriate level, the people affected by the issue are given a real chance to have their say heard by the relevant elected representatives. The United Kingdom have begun to take this approach by creating the Scottish and Welsh National Assemblies and giving further power to local governments. The UK, one of the world’s most well known Westminster-style federations (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales; inside, outside puppy-dogs’ tails), provides evidence against Brandis’ suggestion that accretion of power at the highest and most centralised level of government is some sort of natural progress that should not necessarily be opposed.
Update: More from John Quiggin and Andrew Bartlett.
Mercurius’ bio is here.
Yesterday in broad daylight, on her way home from the shops, my wife found her usual path blocked by a confused, agitated and heavily armed young man. He would not let her pass, and kept repeating at regular intervals that he was “new to the area” and “not sure” what he might do.
To avoid a confrontation, my wife was forced to take a three-block detour to find a way home that didn’t cross paths with the fellow, or any other of the roving armed gangs with which he was clearly in company.
Upsetting? Certainly. Unnerving? Undoubtedly. Legal? You bet.
Welcome to Sydney, brought to you by the APEC security force. They are protecting us from young women walking home with shopping bags.
Continue reading ‘Guest Post by Mercurius Goldstein: There goes the neighbourhood’
I went along to the New Farm Neighbourhood Centre’s Politics in the Pub at the Powerhouse on Tuesday night where there was an interesting discussion about media ownership. Speakers were Arch Bevis, Labor Member for Brisbane, Drew Hutton, Queensland Greens Convenor, Kathy MacLeish from ABC TV’s Stateline, and Dr Jason Wilson from Creative Industries at QUT. Jason, who had a guest post published here this week about the project he’s working on – youdecide2007 – reframed the question of ownership to encompass what we’ve been talking about this year with the Government Gazette vs. the blogosphere wars – the potential of new media to disrupt the MSM’s “ownership” of authoritative opinion. (See also this article by Margaret Simons for more background and analysis.) I videoed his talk, and also some of the question time where I raised a few of those issues and sought a response from Bevis and Hutton, who’d focussed on the Howard government’s amendments to media ownership legislation. There were some more questions later, but we recessed to go and look at the red moon, and I got caught up with wine and convivial conversation.
Continue reading ‘New Farm Politics in the Pub: Media ownership’
Beneath the fold is the monthly repost of the LP comments policy. All commenters are asked to read the comments policy before posting and abide by the policy during discussions.
Continue reading ‘LP comments policy’
In a landmark decision, the High Court has today upheld the fundamental human right to vote, finding that the Howard Government had acted unlawfully and unconstitutionally in imposing a blanket ban denying prisoners the vote.
Last year’s legislative changes brought in by Howard’s government denied all prisoners the vote. The High Court has ruled this unlawful, while upholding the earlier principle of denying the right to vote to prisoners serving sentences longer than three years.
The court action was brought by Vickie Roach, an Aboriginal woman who is a prisoner at the Dame Phyllis Frost Prison in Melbourne.
Philip Lynch, Director of the Human Rights Law Resource Centre which ran the case, said, ‘In running this case, Vickie has stood up not just for the human rights of prisoners and Aboriginal Australians, but the interests of the entire community. She has done so with courage, integrity and commitment.’
As detailed before, Howard has introduced changes to the Electoral Act which will close the rolls within 24 hours of the poll being called, & only allow 72 hours for people to register change of address details. All of this spuriously argued for on the basis of protecting the integrity of the electoral roll – a claim the Government’s own officials have stated to be false and misleading.
But tonight, raise a glass for Vickie Roach – an Aboriginal woman who fought for a right we seem to have forgotten the importance of.
Cross-posted at Bernice Balconey’s Baloney
Malcolm Turnbull, as Minister for the Environment, has granted himself a six-week extension to further consider the Gunns pulp mill proposal.
Six weeks eh? If some commentators are correct and John Howard goes straight from the last APEC meeting to Government House to call an election, the Commonwealth’s Gunns decision is effectively postponed until after the election. Would Turnbull be brazen enough to postpone like this and then say yes to the pulp mill immediately after an election (if they won) or is this a sign that he’ll actually block the pulp mill? Either way, he’s given himself some leverage over the Tasmanian state Labor government and over Peter Garrett – leverage that will no doubt come in handy in an election campaign.
As Phil commented in a recent LP post on this,
I think we’re all about to find out how much Turnbull wants to be PM. There is no way some pipsqueak premier in the pocket of an industry that has no real future on the island is going to get his/their way.
Will he throw Gunns and Lennon under a bus? You bet.
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On Tuesday afternoon I attended Thomas Homer-Dixon’s public lecture at The Real University in Brisbane. This is a brief account of what he had to say.
His basic thesis, outlined in his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation is that systemic societal crises can, if members of those societies respond intelligently and catastrophe is avoided, be a source of renewal, innovation and progress. He began with an analogy with personal crises, which just about everybody will have experienced in one way or other by the time we reach a certain age. If we succeeded in coming through these crises, in the process we will usually have made beneficial changes to our lives which we probably would not have made voluntarily in the absence of the crisis. The same is true of civilisations.
Homer-Dixon argues that civilisations only experience potentially catastrophic crisis when a number of systemic stresses occur more or less simultaneously. However, contemporary global civilisation is facing such a scenario this century. The five key stresses identified by Homer-Dixon are:
Continue reading ‘Thomas Homer-Dixon in Brisbane’
Having just finished invigilating an exam at Bjelke-Petersen Memorial University of Suburban South-East Queensland, I am reminded of an anecdote told by a colleague who invigilated a mid-year exam at the same university.
Said colleague observed a female student sitting the exam, wearing a medium-length skirt, and intermittently hitching up the skirt and looking at her thigh. At one point the colleague glimpsed what were presumably crib notes written on the students’ thigh. Being a gentleman of reasonably senior years and great circumspection in his conduct towards students, he was at a loss as to what to do. The student was almost certainly cheating, yet he was unable to think of a non-offensive way to ask her to show him the crib notes. And if he had, this would still have left the problem of finding a non-offensive way to secure the evidence in a form usable by the Course Convenors and other University decision-makers.
A form of cheating such as this clearly defeats all attempts at detection and penalisation. The only remedy would seem to be prevention, namely the imposition of an exam dress code which requires the wearing of long trousers for students of both genders. At University level this should be unproblematic.
Continue reading ‘Striking an oblique blow against the patriarchy’
On the weekend Lenore Taylor in her regular spot in the Australian Financial Review pointed out that there will be no less than seven international talkfests between now and the end of the year on climate change. The pinnacle of all this activity will be the UN talks in Bali during the first two weeks in December which will launch the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to decide what the world is going to do after the Kyoto Protocol runs its course in 2012.
The APEC meeting next week is the third of the preliminary skirmishes which will try to determine the shape and nature of what is decided at Bali.
The shorter Howard is that the world should set ‘aspirational’ (non-binding) emission reduction goals, that each country should set its own target and timetable according to its circumstances and that these efforts should then be aggregated.
I think it’s very important that you understand that each country will set its own timetable. See the essence of the approach I adopt is that you aggregate the individual contributions of different countries with different circumstances. We have our own proposal for an emissions trading system to come into operation in 2012. We will set an Australian target next year after we have all the advice and all the evidence that we need to soundly base that target and I think other countries will do the same.
Continue reading ‘Talking about climate change’
Crazy president No 1 with plans to extend sphere of influence in the Middle East:
Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere, and the United States is rallying friends and allies to isolate Iran’s regime to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late
Crazy president No 2 with plans to extend sphere of influence in the Middle East:
They know that any action against the Iranian nation would be faced with a proper response
Dangerous provocative act by crazy president No 1’s armed forces:
The Iranian embassy in Baghdad says U.S. troops have freed seven Iranians hours after detaining them at a hotel in the Iraqi capital
An embassy official said the men were handed over to Iraqi authorities early Wednesday morning.
American troops raided Baghdad’s Sheraton hotel late Tuesday and seized the Iranians. Video footage also showed soldiers leaving the hotel with what appeared to be luggage and a laptop computer bag
Of course, crazy president No 2 has already had a go at dangerous provocation.
This is going to end well.
Note: The numerical designations of the crazy presidents is arbitrary. This is not to be taken as an indication of rank presidential craziness as, to be frank, they both seem equally insane.
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Dr Jim McDonald blogs at Rage and Enthusiasm, and is a former senior union official and adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Industrial Relations at Griffith University.
Labor’s new IR implementation policy announced by Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, fails the central principles of collective bargaining – the real “fair goâ€? character of IR in Australia for the vast majority of workers.
While this new direction might possibly mollify business interests, it lacks guts, is bad policy, and will cost votes. It succeeds in minimising the fundamental difference between the Coalition and the ALP. Work Choices applied 19th-century so-called “freedom of contract� provisions that maximise employers’ control over the workplace at the expense of workers, with explicit objectives to reduce workers’ pay and conditions. There is some acknowledgement of this in the “fair go� rhetoric of the Rudd-Gillard policy.
But, if the Howard/Andrews/Hockey industrial relations model fails the fair go principles – which most workers would acknowledge and the polls affirm the majority of people understand that this is the case – Labor should waste no time in addressing the unfair Coalition workplace mess.
Continue reading ‘Guest post by Jim McDonald: Rudd’s IR announcement’
Apparently natural gas bills are likely to get cheaper in Victoria in the short term, after the Essential Services Commission proposed a cut in the service charge paid to the monopoly distributors of gas throughout the state.
If natural gas would stay cheap nationwide, this will not only be good for those of us who currently have gas appliances, it will be rather convenient for governments both federal and state. New South Wales is seriously considering building a natural-gas fired baseload power plant instead of the coal-fired ones NSW has relied upon for many decades; federal Labor has proposed phasing out electric water heaters; for most people with gas available, a replacement with a gas system will be the cheapest alternative (and will have greenhouse emissions lower than solar-electric).
However, in the longer term, it’s pretty clear gas prices are going to go up, as explained to Geraldine Doogue in this radio interview with Nigel Wilson of the Oz:
Continue reading ‘Cheaper natural gas – not for long…’
An open thread where, at the mercy of your election-year mania, you may discuss various breaking politicking news that is not on topic for other current threads.
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