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18 Responses to “Saturday Salon”
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Thanks Kim for passing on openaustralia.org - it’s great.
It would appear that the government is now getting serious about ramming a wedge into that gap in the middle of the opposition.
Pity it doesn’t seem to be getting much press.
Aaaand it’s Hewett v Federer in the fourth round at Wimbledon on Monday night. Lleyton’s just beaten young Bolelli in straight sets, 6-1 6-3 7-6.
For all the good it’ll do him.
Yes, PC, but I suspect the time of Nadal has come and he is going to win more slams than Federer in the next 3 or 4 years. And not just on clay.
Peter Stanley’s new book, Invading Australia, about fears of Japanese invassion during WW2 has just come out. Had a look at it in the bookshop the other daqy. Looks wonderful.
It has an excellent section on the Brisbane Line and - bragging rights - he gives a generous acknowledgement to my work in the area.
Anyone who’s ever enjoyed an xkcd webcomic strip should watch this youtube: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98qOGY0
to get the most out of the latest xkcd panel: http://xkcd.com/442/
Pure feel-goodery, totally snark-free!
tigog - that was awesome.
What’s Hewitt lost now, eleven times in a row to Federer? As usual he’ll be lucky to take a set off him.
The good news is that Australia have beaten New Zealand again. The Boomers regained the Al Ramsay Shield in Melbourne at The Cage tonight by wrapping up there series win 2-0 over the Tall Blacks. Now the Boomers depart for warm-up tournaments in Europe before then heading to Beijing for the Olympics.
some more on Garrett & Caring for Our Country as requested.
I’ll try and be brief - so to that aim you can see my original rant here at post 29.
First, a little history: so we had the Natural Heritage Trust first set up with proceeds from the partial sale of Telstra in 1996 by Howard, building on the Landcare movement Labor started. The NHT1 (as it’s now known) was essentially a smörgåsbord of grants aimed at various environmental problems of all sizes and shapes (everything from wastewater treatment to the degradation of north-facing slopes,) and was roundly and rightly criticized for being a massive exercise in pork barreling (analysis showed grants going to marginal Liberal seats all too often) which just happened to have some massive benefits for the environment.
It was also criticized at the policy level for being scatter shot, non-strategic and virtually impossible to quantify the good work achieved - of which there was actually a lot, not least that it engaged many thousands of Australians in their local environment, making them passionate and active volunteers. But the Auditor General understandably gave the whole thing a D- because tracing what was achieved with taxpayer’s money, especially in the environment, is very difficult.
Then we got NHT2 - this essentially tried to fix all of the above. The government embraced the regional delivery model through Catchment Management Authorities and similar regional mechanisms set up by the Labor states. States and territories that didn’t have regions were asked to create them, and each region prepared a regional strategy and investment plan that showed a) how the funds would be spent on key environmental priorities and b) how the issues would be tackled in a holistic way. So out of that we got 56 regional environmental business plans, if you like.
It was a hard slog to set it up, but several independent evaluations showed that it was well worth the effort. The regional delivery model for the environment works. It gives regional and local communities a strategic, landscape vision, and it gives the federal and state governments the knowledge that that their key environmental priorities are being addressed in an integrated fashion at the right scale.
Just so we’re clear, no it wasn’t all perfect. Some plans were shite, monitoring and evaluation still remained/s an incredible challenge, and some regional communities still went the vegemite approach. And there’s no denying that a major impetus for Federal Libs to set it up was as a mechanism to bypass giving funding to the states, so at times the politics stunk. But overall we had finally got the mechanism right, and big strides in monitoring and evaluation were happening after much confusion. The Auditor General gave it a much improved C+.
Finally, under the NHT2 model, the vast majority of the funding available was delivered through the regions.
Enter last year’s federal election. Labor went into the election without a policy on Natural Resource Management (NRM), and what they did have didn’t even acknowledge the regional delivery system. Instead they made ad-hoc election promises all over the place, in the end stripping nearly $500 million from the NHT budget, as they claimed they would use “unallocated NHT funding”. But in real terms it wasn’t unallocated. The Feds had been investing in 3 year investment plans with the regions, and they are set up to continue to need those funds to deliver. Labor put a $500 million hole in that with a grab bag of community level grants that duplicated existing systems, more money for the Great Barrier Reef that duplicated an existing system and degraded it in others…on it went.
So when Garrett finally sat down as Minister, it was clear he had no time for regional NRM model. In fact he would have abolished it I think if his department hadn’t fought tooth and nail. So the regions have been given an arbitrary 60% of their average funding over the last 5 years against a 1 year investment plan, which if you think about it, by the time Canberra gets money out the door, will be more like 8 months. Yet every independent evaluation shows that for effective environmental management & outcomes, you need long-term consistent investment, there’s very little you can achieve in 8 months, let alone be able to maintain it.
Labor re-ordered the priorities, and are now using the bulk of the money to start an open call for grants system - in other words, exactly replicating all the mistakes of NHT1. Cynics have suggested it is to give big environmental NGOs like WWF & Greening Australia a chance at the pie, as they did very well under NHT1, and not so much under NHT2, because guess what, they aren’t the best choice in most cases.
To compound it, Labor claimed they would announce 2-3 measurable outcomes against their 6 priorities - but they haven’t announced them yet, yet Garret just launched the first call for grants.
This is rank, arrogant, stupid, politicised shite policy for the sake of being different.
There are only 3 bright points to be acknowledged:
funding for Caring for Our Country is now a core item, no more selling off public assets to get money for the environment, a la NHT 1 & 2
climate change is now squarely recognized as an issue whereas under Howard we had the farcical situation of NRM regions not being able to invest in climate change risk assessment etc.
Garrett substantially increased funding for the National Reserve System.
And for the coup de grace, the changes will cost many hundreds of jobs across the country, as regions strip down with their limited guaranteed funds. So watch now as years of hard-earned corporate knowledge and community engagement just walks out the door, not to mention that increasing unemployment in regional areas is simply stupid policy too.
sorry, too long, I know. I’m just in despair.
myriad, thank you for coming back with more details as requested over on Rantledon.
I’m fairly gobsmacked at the futility and stupidity of the reorganisation as you describe it, I admit. As you say,
There should have been more than enough kudos and ACTUAL IMPROVEMENTS to go around if Labor & Garrett had simply been willing to fix up the stinky politics that were undermining NHT2, especially in terms of funding climate change risk assessments.
I know that particularly for many retired people, the Landcare movement is a big part of their community service and social involvement. It helps them engage with student volunteers as well, which builds community ties. I’m sure that various of the other regional initiatives under NHT1 do similar good, even if it’s not as directly measurable as the bean counters might like.
Garrett’s approach as you describe it seems perilously close to taking something that wasn’t broke (just a little wonky), and chucking it away rather than giving it some axle grease and tightening the nuts and bolts.
Garrett’s approach as you describe it seems perilously close to taking something that wasn’t broke (just a little wonky), and chucking it away rather than giving it some axle grease and tightening the nuts and bolts.
yep, Tigtog, that’s exactly what he’s done. I am used to new governments, having been out of power for a long time, making mistakes. But that screaming you hear is not just a baby gone out with the bathwater, he seems hell-bent on feeding it to the wolves as well.
Basically all he needed to do was come in, talk a lot about the new cooperative federalism and removing any pork barelling, tighten up the focus on key national priorities and integrate climate change, and of course rebadge it to waste a few million on communication and letterhead & make it Labor’s own, but this…. well I think I’ve said enough.
The thing that was/is great about NHT2 too, was it took all that local Landcare style volunteerism and joined it up with serious science and large strategic approaches, while still recognising the critical importance of engaging people at the local level to love their local patch etc. Mind you, we had enough of a fight in the shift from NHT1- NHT2 to convince the Liberals that community engagement and capacity building is so important - it’s the hardest thing to measure and quantify, yet the most critical, because the way you get a landowner to change their practices is seeing their neighbor doing it and talking about it over the fence. When the Libs did the NHT1-2 transition they wanted everything onground without understanding this, and we slowly educated them, and to their credit they listened.
Well Garrett hates the term capacity building, thinks networks are confusing and wasteful, and seems to be living on some parallel planet where if you do lots of science and target a threatened species, it will magically and strategically right itself.
The key message: it’s people that change the environment, for good or bad, so at least 3/5th of environmental work is engaging people and changing their behaviour.
The most infuriating thing about Garrett is he thinks he knows, so he’s ignoring all the advice from his department. He’s going to face a massive community backlash - or at least I hope so. Burke, his co-minister for Caring for Our Country, is actually showing more promise because he knows nothing about the area, and knows it, so he’s much more open-minded.
Scuttlebutt is that Garrett has 12 months in his portfolio to prove himself. I think he’s already proved he’s an idiot and hope Rudd removes him soon before he does any further damage; although what he’s already done is colossal. A department is like an enormous ship; once you’ve started changing its direction it takes huge effort and time to turn it back the other way.
Myriad,
I only caught up with this on Friday, and was somewhat gobsmakcked at the initial news and then, following it up on line, increasingly horrified. What is the purpose of doing research on ways to adapt to climate change, when this is the instiutional framework we have to deal with?
If dealing with ongoing environmental change is our task, then we need to build it into the core of all our natural resource management, public and private. It cannot be done using rolling grants.
This smacks to me of ideological theory dressed up as “smart economics”, all the time forgetting that we have to build this on already factured and stretched social capital.
Garrett must be the beard.
Evolutionary scientist fights the good fight against arrogant ignorance: http://www.badscience.net/2008/06/all-time-classic-creationist-pwnage/
The Coalition is being very smug and reminding everyone that while Labor will need seven votes to pass legislation, they will only need one - Fielding - to have a 38-all “blocking majority”
If Labor hadn’t preferenced FF in ‘04 that seat would now be held by a Green and the votes might be going 39-37
Serves the VIC ALP right for being such dimwits.
What possible use is an right wing ALP hack who can’t do the numbers? Thats surely all they’re good for.
Lefty E, my bet is that there are many right wing Labor pollies who are thrilled with the hacks’ work.
Better Steve the bible basher than bloody greens, in their view, anytime.
Hey Roger,
Garrett must be the beard.
for whom, Eric Abetz?!
Well, I finally go around to doing up a post about my Havana sojourn, if anyone’s interested!
>>(11) “Garrett must be the beard”… yeh, but who’s he covering for, cui bono?
Surely it can’t just be party hacks playing pissing games in the wind “(dressing up) ideological theory .. as “smart economics”” … “for the sake of being different.”
At least the depraved cynicism of labor and liberals colluding to pass the (water use and and food production) disastrous forest planting tax avoidence scheme last week was done in the name of something understandable: keeping the newlaborich demographic happy with financial schemes that they can feel a bit virtuous about indulging in.
But watching parliament makes me think we’re gonna be stuck with the juvenile party game of the perpetual campaign. Poor fella the country.
Garrett’s been ashamed of himself since being pwned by party droids into sending (false ) letters out pre- the 2006 Victorian state election, putting it about that the greens were doing a preference deal with the libs. That christmas he was at Woodford folk festival on some panel, and someone from the very large audience pulled him up on it, elephant in the room that it was. It was awful, his shame was palpable. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when he gets in a quite room with Rob Hirst.