Archive for May, 2008

Dolly for pacifier of Cyprus frontbencher PM!

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Media and Politics
. 10 Comments

Glenn Milne’s Sunday columns - since the election - have turned into a weekly chronicle of Liberal disunity. If he’s historically been known as “the poison dwarf”, you have to wonder about who exactly needs an antidote from him these days. His modus operandi is widely suspected to be writing up any “insider” leaks that come his way - and since they never come from the ALP - his column inches are the battleground for the opposition’s leadership wars. He’s become the enabler of the Liberals’ self-destructive pain.

The latest instalment in this chronicle of woe for the Libs is the suggestion that Alexander Downer just has soooooo much to offer the Libs, he’s willing to make the noble sacrifice of turning his back on lucrative private sector opportunities and a chance to sort Cyprus out on behalf of the UN to take a frontbench position - hopefully Shadow Treasurer. Presumably under Turnbull’s leadership, since I can’t see Malcolm stepping down for Dolly. Does anyone really believe that hordes of Liberals are begging Dolly to get back into the fray? (It was suggested on the SBS news last night that Dolly is being drafted back by his admirers.) Or is it more likely that he’s found the private sector fields on offer aren’t as green as he might have believed… and that he doesn’t want Nick Minchin to determine who gets his seat?

Continue reading ‘Dolly for pacifier of Cyprus frontbencher PM!’

Paul Lennon resigns

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Politics
. 15 Comments

Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon has resigned.

It’s hard to be definitive from a distance, but he seems to me to have been an appalling leader. Mired in corruption scandals, joined at the hip to Gunns. Driving the Labor Party to record lows in the polls. But perhaps some of our Tasmanian LPers can give us some more informed perspectives!

Auntie ABC passes the “biased reporting” test

Published
by
tigtog
6 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, Howardia, Media, Policy and Politics
. 37 Comments

Today’s Age:

THE ABC’s flagship radio current affairs programs — often the source of tension and controversy in the Howard years — have won overwhelming endorsement from a landmark report by an external expert.

An audit of AM, PM and The World Today found they were almost 96% accurate.

[…]

The review, by an expert who reported to the ABC’s director of editorial policies, Paul Chadwick, found 95.3% of items sampled from the three programs were either wholly or substantially accurate for plain facts and were 97.3% accurate on the context of the facts.

Denis Muller, an independent media research specialist and a former associate editor of The Age, devised a method to review a sample of 150 current affairs items from last October.

I’m sure that some will cavil that this audit only covered three radio programs, and thus doesn’t account for the dastardly mind-control powers of Red Kezza on the 7:30 report, but it’s a fine result considering the relentless complaints of bias from the Howard government, and especially the complaints from former Communications Minister Richard Alston against these radio programs in particular.

It would be interesting to see a comparative audit of programs from before the time of Director Scott’s “impartiality” rules (adopted in late 2006) to see whether they have made any fundamental difference to the flagship news programs, or whether the new mandates requiring a “balance” of opposing opinions on any “matter of public contention” have just meant that various opinion programs have subsequently been hijacked by “balance”, no matter how ridiculous and poorly argued some of those “balancing” views might be.

My own suspicion is that the news programs before the new regime would prove to have been just as accurate as in this last audit, while the accuracy of content presented in the opinion shows would prove to have declined drastically since the mandatory “balance” rules were imposed.

Petrol price populism, Labor-style

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months ago
in Climate change, Economics, Energy, Markets, Policy, Politics and Transport
. 30 Comments

Well, at least they didn’t outright promise to do it…

THE Federal Government has confirmed it will consider cutting the GST on fuel excise as part of a larger review of petrol taxation, as motoring bodies demanded an overhaul of the entire petrol-pricing system.

Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed at the weekend that he is considering scrapping the GST that applies to the petrol excise as part of a review of the tax system — a move that would save drivers about 3½ cents at the pump.

Taking tax off petrol is a dumb idea, one that Nelson got a well-deserved bollocking for, and one that Labor shouldn’t be thinking about. But this may have a silver lining, if we’re lucky.

Continue reading ‘Petrol price populism, Labor-style’

Everything you always wanted to know about Azerbaijan but were afraid to ask…

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Culture, Europe, Film, TV, Video etc, International and Music
. 11 Comments

All the standard info is here and here. The country’s official website is here. But I’m still not finding anything that explains Azerbaijan’s entry in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest!

Continue reading ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Azerbaijan but were afraid to ask…’

Eurovision preview

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months ago
in Europe, Film, TV, Video etc, Imperialism, Levity and Music
. 87 Comments

Sadly, Dustin the Irish Turkey will not be taking the Eurovision Song Contest final stage tonight, after being eliminated in the semi-finals. But there’s still plenty to look forward to - awful Europop, truck-drivers key changes by the bucketload, hosts who can mangle an autocue in two languages, and some fairly bizarre pieces of surrealist theatre to accompany the inane tunes.

After making the sacrifice of sitting through both semi-finals, I can inform you that the only half-decent song amongst them this year is the French entry, “Divine”:

Continue reading ‘Eurovision preview’

Eurovision song contest 2008: Year of the diva!

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Culture, Europe, Film, TV, Video etc, Music and Perth
. 1 Comment

I have no idea whether it will be, but the songs that impressed me last night were the ones from Albania, Georgia and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Malta - good voice, lousy song). I didn’t see Friday night’s so not dissing any of the songs from the first semi (but I would like to diss Mr Denmark, who I hope has a long career in policing as he apparently desires).

Here’s an open Eurovision thread. Please no discussion of winners until 12.45am - because otherwise you’re doing the spoiler thing for our Perthling friends. So unless you want to earn the justified enmnity of Anna Winter, you’ve been warned!

May I also add, if SBS are reading, that next year I think we want to see more Julia Zemiro and less of the Pommie commentary…

Albania

Continue reading ‘Eurovision song contest 2008: Year of the diva!’

Lazy Sunday!

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Brisbane, Life, Photography and Urbanism
. 24 Comments

Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!

I have very little to report - since my weekends as with my weeks at the moment are a combination of sleeping and thesis work. So, instead a few photos of curios in the Brisbane CBD. First, a “printer’s devil” sculpted above the main door of the old State Government Printing Office in George Street. The origin of the phrase is uncertain and disputed but what’s certain and undisputed is that it inspired some rather fab sculpture on buildings. Secondly, two facades of old buildings between the Treasury Hotel and the Myer Centre on Elizabeth Street - the buildings themselves were demolished long ago (as long ago as the 1980s, I think) but their facades remain - seemingly immunised from redevelopment for reasons I don’t know. But I like the gap in the streetscape.

If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.


Printer’s devil by *phenomenologist on deviantART

Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday!’

Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Feminism, Politics, Terrorism, USA and War
. 18 Comments

I had a quick read last night of Susan Faludi’s rather stunning new book The Terror Dream: Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America. Faludi, perhaps best known as the author of Backlash, has written a cultural history of post s11 America, a diagnosis of the temper of the times as refracted through the myths the attack on America both revived and inspired.

It’s a little odd that one of the writers at Daily Kos took aim at the book because “every trend perceived is filtered through a gender disempowerment lens” - a “criticism” which I think really does an injustice to Faludi’s aims. It’s not that she’s taking some sort of circumscribed look at gender politics post-s11 (which in itself would be a worthy project) but rather that her point is that a myth overdetermined by gendered perceptions was cranked up to explain and narrativise what was (wrongly in her view) seen as being an unprecedented series of events on September 11 2001.

Faludi, in some of the most interesting chapters of the book, traces the origins of national myths of violation and aggressive response to the shifting frontier which characterised not just the “Wild West” but also the nation’s colonial beginnings - where “attacks” by Native Americans were perceived as both unpredictable and inexplicable - and interpreted as an existential threat which could only be met by overpowering force.

The arrest and prosecution of our antagonists seemed to be only part of our concern. We were also enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore our national myth of invincibility. Our retreat to the fifties reached beyond movie tropes and the era’s odd mix of national insecurity and domestic containment. It reaches back beyond the fifties themselves. For this particular reaction to 9/11—our fixation on saving little girls and restoring an invincible manhood—is not so anomalous. It belongs to a long-standing American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience.

Continue reading ‘Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream‘

Saturday Salon

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Miscellaneous
. 49 Comments

An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.

Populism and perish!

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Economics, Government, Howardia and Media
. 24 Comments

Some more comment on the Christian Kerr column I commented on recently comes from Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy, posing the dilemma for the opposition as “populism or perish?”. I actually think that choosing populism will lead to their demise, and possibly for a lot longer than this term.

In Laura Tingle’s column in today’s Fin, she quotes Rod Cameron, who for mine is one of the most insightful people around when it comes to talking about politics. Cameron argues that by flicking the switch to populism and disdaining to justify it with any coherent economic narrative whatsoever, the Liberals are trashing their own brand and committing political suicide. A lot of what they stand for ideologically has never been to the public’s liking (just as Labor ideology doesn’t go down all that well with a lot of voters) but if there’s one thing they have had in their corner, it’s the “economic conservative” image - the reason why Kevin Rudd was so keen to steal their clothes last year.

Too much political commentary assumes that both parties have identical options in political strategy. Continue reading ‘Populism and perish!’

Healthbook arrives, via Google

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months ago
in Ethics, Government, Health, Levity and Policy
. 25 Comments

One of the more widely praised ideas coming out of the 2020 summit was “Healthbook”, something that was genuinely novel, large in scope, and with real potential to make a difference. As the interim report put it:

Create a “Healthbook” (like Facebook) for Australians to take greater ownership of their health information and electronically share it with people they trust – for example their doctor, nurse or family members. Users could control their health “friends” and their level of access, share data as desired, and ask for real time advice on health issues. By 2020, this might include sharing your own genetic data with your doctor
or family. This would put the individual squarely at the centre of the health system.

Well, lo and behold, Google Health appears in the news, which offers pretty much the kind of services - for American patients - proposed for “Healthbook”. Joshua Gans is impressed.

There are obviously big potential gains from centralized electronic medical records systems like this. As somebody who’s had the odd diagnostic test over the years for the odd ailment, this stuff gets lost - I have no idea where the back X-rays I had done once went. And, on a population-wide level, there’s obviously enormous scope for doing anonymized statistical research on this data. But would I want my medical records on Google Health, or something like it? No way in hell. Continue reading ‘Healthbook arrives, via Google’

Six Rudd-y months

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Government, Media and Polls
. 27 Comments

Tomorrow marks the six month anniversary of the election of Kevin Rudd’s Labor government. Speaking personally, I think they’ve done a lot more good than otherwise, but it’s also arguably too early to assess the quality and mettle of the Rudd regime. It has become clear that Rudd’s in the business of painting quite a complex policy picture - a good example being Indigenous affairs, where the government have eschewed ideology, stuck to their election promises, added a big dollop of (worthwhile) symbolism and set lots of little programmes running in order to discern “what works” - all unified by an overall goal - “closing the gap”. We’re becoming used to the fact that we’re not going to see rabbits pulled from hats, and startling changes of direction, but rather a style of governance where the task of the state is posed as solving long term problems rather than carving out a political position and inviting argument in order to marginalise those on the wrong side of the preferred line, as was John Howard’s wont.

Continue reading ‘Six Rudd-y months’

Anglicans

Published
by
Mark
6 months ago
in Religion, Sexuality and Women
. 29 Comments

Props to the Sydney Morning Herald for staging such a good photo of Australia’s first woman Anglican Bishop, the Right Reverend Kay Goldsworthy. Sydney Anglicans, of course, don’t recognise her as a priest let alone as a bishop.

Meanwhile, the global Anglican communion is tearing itself apart over teh gay, with conservative bishops boycotting its world talkfest, the Lambeth Conference. They’re horrified that there’s an openly gay bishop in the US, and that some Anglicans support blessings for same sex relationships. Describing the conference as likely to be “painful”, the Archbishop of Canterbury has decided to throw parliamentary procedure out the window in favour of small group discussions in order to paper over the cracks. Dr Rowan Williams has also had the rather amazing idea that the conference might talk about, you know, religious stuff rather than sexuality. Not likely to catch on.

Blogroll update time

Published
by
Kim
6 months ago
in Administration, Culture and Notices
. 24 Comments

Folks, we’ve received a number of emails recently from sundry bloggers telling us they’ve moved. I’ve noticed that we really haven’t updated the blogroll for quite some time (the full list is here) and some blogs on it are defunct or inactive. Any suggestions (and don’t be afraid to self promote!) for inclusion and/or deletion (where you know something is no longer there) would be most welcome.

We tend to link to Australian and New Zealand blogs only, and blogs whose politics we’re broadly in sympathy with (needless to say, that doesn’t mean that we don’t think there are good blogs whose politics we disagree with). We also don’t link to MSM blogs, unless the blogger in question came from the independent blogosphere (which in practice means Tim Dunlop). The last thing to note is that we wholeheartedly believe the personal is the political, and seek to take a very broad interpretation of what constitutes a political blog (and remember also that we stray into other areas too).