Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Lexicographer supreme Erin McKean, whose wonderful work has been discussed on LP previously, argues in the Boston Globe that, in the words of Boing Boing, English is a user-modifiable technology. We should forget “I’m not sure if this is a real word”, she urges:
In short, if it seems wordish, use it. No apologies necessary.
“Wordish”, by the way, is a real word. You can read the rest of McKean’s fabulous column here.
Among the many bills the Coalition are committed to opposing in the new Senate is the legislation to change the threshold where a higher level of Medicare levy cuts in for those who don’t have private hospital insurance from 50k to 100k. The bill, introduced in May, was referred to the Senate Economics Committee which held extensive hearings and took submissions. The report [link to pdf] is out in time for the Senate’s spring sitting.
The majority report from the Labor Senators is careful to quote several comments from Peter Costello in his second reading speech back in 1996 and the explanatory memorandum in order to demonstrate that its stated purpose was to provide an incentive only to higher income earners. However, the grounds for defending the levy have shifted, reflecting over a decade of Howard era support for the private health industry. We’re now told that it would have a catastrophic impact on health funds. These concerns are largely dispelled by evidence from health policy experts and health economists cited in the report. There’s scepticism that the much heralded exodus from private health will actually take place, for two reasons - that the life time cover provisions are likely to provide the stronger disincentive, and that those who actually value private health won’t leave. In addition, the best estimate is that the costs to the public sector would be around 1.6% of inpatient expenditure, an increase relatively easy to absorb.
Continue reading ‘Senate Economics Committee reports on Medicare Levy Surcharge Bills’
The Fin Review reported yesterday that a host of resource company execs are descending on Canberra on Friday for a pow wow with Martin Ferguson. Initially this meeting was being presented as a way of circumventing the BCA, who released a doom and gloom laden report last week basically threatening a capital strike. But it’s now clear that it’s nothing of the sort, as Marn’s department have also sent the BCA an invite. Industry sources expressed pleasure at Ferguson’s involvement, telling the Fin that they found him easier to deal with and more amenable to their views than Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Hardly surprising…
Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday - that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Continue reading ‘Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two’
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will apparently be outlining a “narrative” for the government at the National Press Club today. Crikey’s First Dog on the Moon kicks off the speculation as to what shape it will take.
Anyone wishing to join in the speculation, or to parse the narrative later on, is most welcome to do so.
Newspaper, radio and internet group Fairfax Media will sack 550 staff as it struggles to contain costs following its merger last year with Rural Press and its acquisition of Southern Cross, amid a downturn across the media sector. New seven-day rosters will be introduced at the company’s Sydney newspapers the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald in order to avoid duplication and a review undertaken of Melbourne operations.
From the staff memo.
There will be criticism from some, inside and outside the company, that these changes, particularly in editorial, will compromise quality and critical mass in the metro mastheads and their mission. We reject that. This initiative has been carefully constructed by the publishers with full regard for the integrity of their mastheads. Our newspapers will remain true to their heritage and their values of quality and excellence.
Ok then. There are better media commentators who will no doubt analyse this to death but to this blogger the cuts are just another installment in the slow decline of the standalone newspaper as a community and public service.
Update: The News stable weighs in with Brad Norington and Mark Day providing some good commentary on the cuts as do Caroline Overington and John Lyons.
I’m afraid I can’t agree with Michael Tomasky:
Michelle Obama should have laid the schmaltz on even thicker than she did last night.
It’s all very well to talk about her and Barack Obama’s working class origins, but it might be a bit better to forget the American Dream narrative and actually discuss what might enable more than a minority of poor folks to actually get a bit of opportunity in a deeply unequal society. “Yes We Can”? Not through any actually existing Democratic Party, we won’t.
PS: The old white guy’s worse though.
It’s been 45 years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Via The Global Sociology Blog, I’ve just read this op/ed by historian Stephanie Coontz - author of Marriage, A History - writing in the Guardian to mark the anniversary. Coontz deftly turns many of the usual anti-feminist narratives on their head. Continue reading ‘Feminism good for families’
The water tank wars are going another round, this time in the Victorian state cabinet, according to yesterday’s Age:
The behind-the-scenes Government debate centres on the role of tanks in light of last year’s contentious decision to spend almost $5 billion on big water projects such as desalination.
It has intensified as the Government finalises its new-look green building code. Existing five-star rules require that all new homes must have a tank or solar hot water system.
Senior bureaucrats with the ear of Water Minister Tim Holding are arguing that, with the desalination plant set to come on line in 2011, tanks should be left to personal choice.
The think tank culture is weird. Although there are certainly think tanks around that put some effort into commissioning and fostering quality research, the origin of the beast lay in the business of shaping and shifting public debate through the media and influencing pollies. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it were, provided that we understand that the research produced may not always be peer-reviewed (CPD, with whom I’m associated, does subject its policy papers to peer review) and in particular we understand not just the ideological commitments of individual think tanks but where their funding comes from. That’s why there are legitimate questions to be asked - including but not restricted to the propensity to push climate change denialism - about the reluctance of some organisations such as Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute to even admit that disclosure of funding sources is in the public interest.
Because one of the things think tanks do is provide a ready source of op/ed copy, so-called “public debate” can go down some quite odd paths. Most recently, in Australia, the bizarre theme about the Enlightenment (and apparently the “good” Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the “bad” French Enlightenment) which was articulated to climate change denialism, and which also prompted some public weirdness from Craig Emerson. It’s noteworthy that just as the Rudd v. Hayek wars are really just proxies for a dispute about underlying policy orientations, that none of the gibberish that has come out of the new MSM meme of the month has anything much to do with scholarly study on the role of the actual Enlightenments in history or in philosophy. It’s not really a “battle of ideas” at all, just a convenient hook for some very tired positions to be hung on.
But everyone in this game - “progressive” or “liberal” or “conservative” - has a vested interest in pretending that what is being staged is some sort of “battle of ideas”. Hence we have Per Capita, a particularly neo-liberal bunch of progressives with strong connections to some of the Blairite Third Way orgs in London, holding a “Consilium”, whatever that may be, accepting most of the premises of the CIS’ Enlightenment-fest. And we get PC fellow Dennis Glover writing an op/ed for The Australian spruiking his mob’s definition of Kevin Rudd’s “reforming Centre”. The new ideas in question (and the PC’s website features slogans such as “Hard Decisions”, “Human Capital” and “Practical, Empirical, Fresh” demonstrating their desire to be the house intellectuals of the Rudd revolution) aren’t actually new. It’s all standard “social democracy = markets + human capital theory + communitarian welfare policy” Blairism. It’s just getting a run in Australia for the first time, and there’s no doubt that it is getting a run - with initiatives such as the marketisation of Victorian TAFE and Julia Gillard’s musings about vouchers being directly linked to this agenda. And the “truancy welfare quarantining” seems quite redolent of Blair’s first term - when backbenchers revolted over welfare cuts. And, as argued here recently, there’s evidence that this sort of thing misses the point in addressing the actual causes of poor school attendance.
Photo credit: me. A larger version of the image can be seen here by clicking on full view once inside the gallery.
The latest issue of Griffith REVIEW - Hidden Queensland - touches on a number of subjects close to my heart. In framing the issue, editor Julianne Schultz opens her introduction with a quote from a “well-connected insider” who expressed puzzlement in the lead up to the 2007 federal election - what did he know of Kevin Rudd and the rest of the crew from the North who might soon be moving into the Canberra corridors of power? Had they been from Melbourne, Sydney or “even Adelaide”, they’d have been on the radar. But what had been happening to transform a bastion of illiberality into the new centre of the “reforming Centre” in the two decades when he hadn’t been looking?
Whatever the merits of shale oil it seems that the Queensland Government has come to its senses by banning shale oil developments in the Whitsundays, and everywhere else for that matter, and specifically a plan to dig up 400,000 tonnes of the muck to see whether anything useful could be done with it.
The locals should be immensely relieved, in spite of foregoing 3000 jobs. Imagine that! A Queensland premier foregoing a resource development with 3000 jobs attached!
If you read the linked articles the shale oil monster has not quite been killed dead and I don’t think this means that Anna Bligh has finally “got it” in terms of the urgency of dealing with climate change mitigation. The notion that we can deal with the rapidly emerging problem in a leisurely way runs deep. In an interesting post last week Barry Brook tried to identify some of the deep irrationalities that prevent the necessary action from being taken.
As well as OpenAustralia being tweaked to focus on the Senate, the folks at GreensBlog have also welcomed in the first sitting of the new Senate tomorrow with a new address and look for the blog and a new website which should facilitate greater transparency and interactivity with the Greens Senators.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Newspoll Tuesday: Labor 56-44
Ok, in the parallel universe that is press reporting of polls, we get this from the West Australian:
Right. Yep. Because the natural order of things is that the Coalition vote should always be rising and its failure to do so is an aberration to be explained away by… stuff that happened in the same fortnight. Whatevs.
Meanwhile, Dennis Shanahan puts it all down to the waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for Costello to release his book. Which, by the way, the ABC is giving free publicity to by televising a National Press Club speech by the former Treasurer on the day of its release. What’s with that?
But note the common assumption that the Liberals should be gaining were it not for their leadership woes. Really? How do they know? Because they do. It’s not argued. But it’s there as the background assumption on which all the rest rests.
Elsewhere: For actual commentary on the poll, go visit Possum and the Poll Bludger’s crew in comments. The Poll Bludger also links to the rather interesting Essential Research poll (Labor 58-Coalition 42) which shows that there’s a 7% negative differential between state and federal ALP voting intentions among its sample.