Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
As well as moving servers, we installed the new version of WP. If anyone’s having any problems with the functionality of the site, please report them here.
Update 06/12/07 We’ve still got some issues to sort out, it seems, so in the interim we’re still blogging at LP in Exile where you can read all our most recent posts.
An open thread where, at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
You may, of course, wish to discuss the election! I’m writing this ahead of time, on Wednesday night before I head down to Sydney tomorrow. To me, it feels like the election is already over, because I voted last week, and I think it’s been in the bag since the Kevin07 election launch. Thanks to everyone for all the feedback and camaraderie and bloggy goodness during the campaign and I wish you all happy voting and a lovely election! Don’t forget, if you’re in Sydney, you might like to look in at the LP/NM/2SER election night party - details in this post.
Crossposted from LP in exile, where you can make comments while we wait for all the bugs to be ironed out of our new site.
P.S. from tigtog: I’ve made this “blidget” to keep people up to date on the latest posts over at LP in exile. It takes a little while to load, it works in Firefox, I’m not sure how well it works in IE.
Update: The blidget seems to be more trouble than it’s worth, bollixing the site for too many folks. It’s gone.
If Joe Hockey - or his Labor successor - start talking about what a great idea the “not-an-ID-card” Access Card - is, here’s a tale from the UK about the hazards of giving governments too much personal data. The Guardian reports:
On October 18, a junior civil servant at the child benefit offices in Tyne and Wear set in train a series of events which put 25 million people at risk of fraud, forced the resignation of the government’s most senior tax collector, put in doubt the future of the government’s ID card scheme, and reinforced doubts as to the competence Gordon Brown’s administration.
It is understood (though not yet absolutely established) that on that Thursday, two CDs, password-protected but containing the government’s entire database of child benefit claimants, including the bank details of 7.25 million families, were sent from the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) offices in Waterview Park, Washington, to the National Audit Office on Buckingham Palace Road, London. The government and police believe they were sent by a civil servant with IT know-how, unregistered, via the HMRC’s internal postal system, operated by the private courier TNT. But they did not arrive.
Continue reading ‘25 million people’s personal data “lost in the mail” by UK government’
From today’s Crikey email:
In reflecting on the Labor policy launch last week, I wrote:
Rudd is banking on the fact that there are future-oriented Australians out there in sufficient number who believe that as far as John Howard is concerned, they’re the forgotten people.
Kevin Rudd has now released a new “chapter” in his home town pitch. While the best mates of the Coalition leadership might take some time out of their ongoing love-fest to rubbish Rudd’s aspiration to make Brisbane a financial hub for the Asia-Pacific, all that proves is how out of touch they are with the Sunshine State.
It’s not all battlers, stupid.
Now our Prime Minister is treating voters like heedless children who simply haven’t thought carefully enough about what change might mean.
Mr Howard says there is always a risk with changing Government.
And he warns voters flirting with the idea that a Labor election victory is not like an unwanted Christmas present, that can be returned on Boxing Day.
“It’s not like that. It’s much harder than that,” he said.
How insulting.
If you read Tony Abbott in today’s SMH, it’s more of the same - this utter disbelief that the voters could possibly have a mind at odds with the wishes of the current government, and that any voters who are thinking of voting the Coalition out of office have simply overlooked the bleeding obvious about how hopeless, scary and ruinacious a Rudd government will be. The title condescends from the start: The goods or a gamble?
Something unprecedented will happen on Saturday. A highly effective government will lose despite generally good economic circumstances or 12 months of opinion polls will turn out to be wrong. Australians are not reckless gamblers, at least not with the future of their country, so I think it’s much more likely voters will prove the polls wrong than change the government.
Patronising shite.
Hugh Mackay, talking on ABC Radio with Virginia Trioli this morning, made some excellent points which I found largely persuasive. He argues that until this year, the Australian electorate has been largely disengaged from politics for a decade, and Continue reading ‘Careful there voters! You can’t return the Boogieman like an unwanted Christmas present, you know! But Unca John can keep your economy safe…why won’t you trust me?’
A quick survey of today’s broadsheets reveals that the Liberal Party dirt unit has been working overtime and is coming up with zilch.
Apparently 13 ALP candidates are still listed as employed on government websites. So they MUST HAVE BROKEN THE LAW, you know, because government websites are renowned for being up to date. Oh, and the Liberal Party is waiting for the ALP to produce evidence that no crimes were committed before they will refer it to the AEC. I’m not really sure on what planet that makes sense.
Even worse than that, a staffer of George Newhouse is anti Semitic Zionist, which is a crime against humanity or something. Especially when the Jew hating pinko ALP staffer’s boss is Jewish and his father was a Zionist.
Finally Tony Abbott is given a free pass in the SMH to have another go at running his “Are all you voters are so dumb that you don’t realize that we are the greatest thing that ever happened to you?” argument. Though, I don’t care about that one so much because every time Abbott tries to communicate he offends about three-quarters of the population.
Seriously, is this all they’ve got? Where’s the sex, drugs, and scandal? Frankly, I just don’t think that their hearts are in it anymore.
Cross-posted at LP in Exile where you can make comments while we wait for all the bugs to be ironed out of our new site.
There’s an interesting post over at one of the Age’s election blogs by Jason Koutsoukis, where he looks at some of the predictions made by the pseph blogotariat (detailed here at Oz Politics) and wonders why the press gallery pundits are so shy of calling the result (aside from their presumed desire not to make an appearance in one of Gerard Henderson’s snarky columns):
Unlike those of us in the Canberra Press Gallery, they most probably don’t spend their days talking to politicians, and nor would they spend much time talking to the legions of strategists, spin doctors, and advisers that we spend so many hours a week chatting to.
Yet my prediction is that these casual observers will be a lot closer to the mark than us professionals, which gives me a slightly uncomfortable feeling.
The reason most journalists are not making a prediction is because we live in terror of offending one side or the other and of being cut off ‘the drip’. So most of us hedge our bets and don’t say what we really think.
Indeed.
And, as I’ve been suggesting, and as Margaret Simons argues too, coverage of the election is deeply distorted by the poll driven horse race focus as opposed to writing about politics as if it mattered. But, to continue my reflections on the online coverage of this campaign, isn’t it the case that those same pseph bloggers who’ve dominated discussions about the increasing profile of the political blogosphere have completely shared that focus on the horse race and the polls? Continue reading ‘Predictions and reflections’
I’m heading down to Sydney on Thursday morning. There are two events on over the weekend which LP people might find interesting. I’m speaking at a public forum on Friday night, along with Chris Nash and Rachel Hills, which is part of the UTS Australian Centre for Independent Journalism’s Public Right to Know conference. Details are here - it kicks off with drinks at 6.30pm.
On Saturday night, LP, along with New Matilda and 2SER, is holding an election watching/celebration party at the Bat & Ball, 495 Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, starting at 6pm. There’s bands and djs stuff, and you can read more about that here.
Cross-posted at LP in Exile where you can make comments while we wait for all the bugs to be ironed out of our new site.
There’s a greater focus on the role of the Senate since the Howard Government gained control of both Houses. That’s a very good thing, and let’s hope it continues.
Most of the Senate focus has been on the importance of minor parties who will keep the majors honest. This argument often assumes that a vote for the major parties is a second-best option. But as with everything in politics, there are pros and cons to every decision, and there are some very good reasons for supporting the Labor party in the Senate, too – or more importantly, there are very good reasons for voting more progressive Labor MPs into the Caucus. So here’s why I’m going to be voting Labor in the Senate in WA, and why I think you should too.
The latest status report cross-posted from LP in Exile, where we’re still blogging for the time being. Please visit us over there, while we sort out some remaining issues relating to our move to our new server.
We were hoping that we’d be shifting back to LP-proper later on today, but it looks like there are a few remaining bugs to be ironed out. The site is successfully running on the new server, but there are a few gremlins caused, I think, by the WP upgrade. We’ll keep you informed of progress!
Donation button problems rectified.
Thanks very much to everyone who was kind enough to make a donation, and if you’re still inclined to, it’s been pointed out to me that there’s a problem with the link on the new site as the “pages” on the sidebar don’t seem to have transferred across with the rest of the database, so you can do so via this link I’ve just created. Please let us know if it doesn’t work, but I’ve just tried it and it seems fine.
As we hear that China’s emissions from power plants are due to rise 60% by 2017, that Australia is proclaimed world champion polluter and that New Zealand’s Southern Alps have lost about 5.8 cubic kilometres, or almost 11 per cent, of ice in the past 20 years, the IPCC has released its Fourth Assessment Synthesis Report on climate change.
Words like “unequivocal�, “catastrophic�, “abrupt and irreversible� have featured in press coverage. Here are some quotes:
“These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie … but they are even more terrifying because they are real,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
He also nominated Climate change as the “defining challenge of our age.”
“We need a new ethic by which every human being realises the importance of the challenge we are facing and starts to take action through changes in lifestyle and attitude.” IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri.
“Climate change poses an urgent challenge that threatens the environment but also international peace and security, prosperity and development.” British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
“My view is that there’s a serious challenge … my view also is that the world is not coming to an end tomorrow.” Australian Prime Minister, John Howard.
The Oz ran an article on the front page Rudd vow to take charge on warming highlighting that Rudd will personally lead the delegation to the UN conference in Bali next week.
It also ran an AAP article Libs at war over Kyoto where:
NSW opposition energy spokesman Peter Debnam … contradicted Coalition climate policy, saying Australia should have signed the Kyoto protocol long ago.
Debnam also referred to clean coal as an oxymoron.
Following up from Mark’s post about the role of citizen journalism in this campaign, it’s a good idea to have a read of this sharp piece of analysis from Margaret Simons in Crikey about how the election has been reported. She recognises the difficulties journos labour under because of the scripted and micro-managed nature of modern campaigning, but she’s surely right that the press can do better than this. Junk the “insiders” perspective for a start - I mean, who believes that the “strategists” and “Labor figures” being quoted today are doing anything other than spinning about Labor’s chances to keep expectations low, seize the underdog spot, and gee up the troops. But no sceptical razor is applied to these claims, and we get another tedious story about the horse race shaped to suit the parties’ own communications strategy. It’s a revolution of managing expectations, dude!
Or consider what Christian Kerr calls Barrie Cassidy’s “tizz” over Rudd’s failure to appear on his show. As Kerr says, there are “1.368 million reasons why Rudd chose Rove”, and he actually has a democratic duty to try to get his message across (and build his persona) to as many voters as possible. Stuff the navel-gazing weekly pundit-fest.
Elsewhere: Barry has more on Barrie.
Cross-posted at LP in Exile where you can make comments while we wait for all the bugs to be ironed out of our new site.
It will be very nice indeed in the event of a Rudd victory to read the papers reporting about what the government is actually doing, policy-wise, rather than an endless succession of stories and non-stories about polls and the horse race.
It’s certainly been the year of the poll, and in the closing stages of the campaign, almost all observers but the most recalcitrant have finally caught up to the fact that they’ve been telling us something for a long time.
But not all. Take the Adelaide Sunday Mail’s leader writer, for instance:
That Prime Minister John Howard’s Government stands this morning under threat is a mystery.
Really?
Tony Abbott seems to think so too – and I suspect that he’s not alone in his total disbelief that the electorate might be about to dispense with the services of its rightful masters. Only the last Minister brave or foolhardy enough to say so in public.
It’s intriguing to note that commentators this year have almost unanimously expressed surprise or puzzlement at the “it’s time� factor in the polls. The electorate must be bored, or something, or we’d have seen the baseball bats. How can this be when the Dear Leader still retains public esteem?
The answer may lie in what the polls aren’t asking.
In the latest instalment of her Sunday Age commentary on the intertubes election, Rachel Hills was kind enough to quote me:
Mark Bahnisch, founder of leading Australian blog Larvatus Prodeo, believes that, to change this, citizen journalists need to focus on beats not being covered in the mainstream media, and to find original voices.
To elaborate on that a little, I think that “citizen journalism” is possibly an unfortunate choice of term. As Hills writes:
It can be difficult to determine exactly where the line between citizen and professional journalism falls. After all, even hardened political commentators are also citizens and there is substantial overlap between independent and mainstream media, both in personnel and in the exchange of information and ideas.
There is an increasing recognition (well analysed by Margaret Simons in her recent book The Content Makers) that journalism as a form can, and perhaps should, exist independently from the medium which delivers it. Just as “blogging” is now too narrow a concept for what has become a practice rather than a platform, so too I suspect that aspects of “journalism” crowd out what’s involved in “citizen”. Continue reading ‘Citizen journalism 07′
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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