Brendan Nelson’s gone on holidays this week, meaning that there might just be a coherent opposition response to the release of the Government’s emissions trading scheme Green Paper on Wednesday. In Crikey, Bernard Keane takes a look at who Nelson was talking to last week (aside from all those phone hookups with Turnbull, Hunt and Bishop pleading for him to start articulating Coalition policy):
Nelson’s flirtation with a retreat on an ETS appears to have been orchestrated at least in part by the climate change holdouts at Concept Economics. Concept is run by Henry Ergas and Brian Fisher, and senior Howard Government staffers Peter Conran and John Kunkel are also there. According to Lenore Taylor, Nelson met Warwick McKibbin, who is urging Australia go it alone with a special McKibbin trading model, with Conran and Kunkel last week. Fisher, previously the greenhouse mafia’s go-to bureaucrat when head of ABARE, last week attacked the Garnaut Report and said we should wait a decade for an international agreement on addressing climate said. Ergas has previously and again today argued a hardline “let the planet cook” approach that favours adaptation to climate change over mitigation.
I hope that we will be spared the sermons from an authoritarian leadership about the spiritually dead, the soulless, secular uncaring, of liberal Australia society violating the sacredness of life etc etc as well as the repeat of the attacks on Islam and Muslim-Australians for undermining western civilization.
Can I suggest a theme? Sermons on reconciliation with a liberal Australia and secular humanism instead of ones on heartless and godless liberalism.
With the exception of Mark Latham’s Diaries, few books on Australian politics hit the best seller list these days. Whether that’s a sign of the anodyne and airbrushed nature of political personalities Latho himself took aim at is, I guess, a matter for speculation. Perhaps it’s because the insider horse race stuff really does have a very limited audience outside those who see themselves as Insiders. But in the promotional stakes, now, it seems, forthcoming books are mined for whatever juicy tidbits (or otherwise) might actually influence the insider horse race, or at least get Insiders excited. Typically, there’s a fair bit of astroturf going on here, with rival newspaper chains Fairfax and News contending for serialisation rights and trying to extract “news” value from touting otherwise tedious memoirs or turgid accounts of political history.
Peter Costello’s forthcoming tome is being talked down by the News Limited punditariat as likely to be “boring”. In other words, he supposedly won’t be tipping a petulant bucket on John Howard, according to “insiders”. This - for the News Limited opposition cheer squad - is good news because it means that their quixotic and probably doomed quest to install Costello in the Liberal leadership can proceed. It’ll be interesting to see how the Fairfax papers - which have the serialisation rights - play the book, which in any case won’t be released for yonks.
Big Brother 2008 has been an inglorious farce. It seems there will beno Big Brother 2009. Reports in other media that the show has been cancelled by Channel Ten appear to be confirmed by posts on the show’s forum site.
There’s more to the demise of Big Brother than meets the eye. It’s a final and emphatic rejection by Australian TV viewers, especially younger ones, of a nasty, confrontational approach to culture.
Ten’s core audiences, the 16 to 39 and 18 to 49 viewers have said ‘not interested any more’. It’s a message for all Australian TV. The positive, affirming debut of So You Think You Can Dance Australia started in spectacular fashion in February and finished its first season strongly.
Just in: “Lefty” Tim Brunero mourns the demise of BB. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
THE science tells us that continued high levels of carbon pollution have led to global warming and if the world continues on a business-as-usual trajectory the consequences for us all will be significant. The economics tells us that the cost of responsible action is much less than if we as a planet fail to act on climate change now. The longer we delay, the higher the cost.
There’s been some (rather entertaining) discussion on a recent thread about alternative names for mainstream media blogs. After all, they really are a different sphere, aren’t they? Coincidentally, and it’s a happy coincidence, a guest Hoyden at Hoyden About Town has posted a very comprehensive guide to how to attain that bloggy success you’ve always hankered after. And the rules aren’t all that complex. One of the important tips - men blog about sport and politics, and women blog about dating. However, some things transcend the gender of the writer:
Now whether a male or female writer, one simply *must* make all sorts of gender generalisations, mostly about de wimenz.
If the ranks of columnists, pollies and industry shills lining up in battle formation to trash Ross Garnaut were thinking he was some sort of milquetoast retiring academic and policy wonk, who’d roll over in the face of the media noise machine, they’ve evidently made the wrong assumption. In fact, Garnaut seems to be doing his level best to keep the Rudd government from wobbling.
Garnaut’s retort to Michael Costa’s op/ed has the temerity to mention the elephant in the (Macquarie Street) room:
“The New South Wales [Treasurer] is a well known denier of the science,” he said.
In his article this morning, Costa called for “a sensible debate on important issues”. Decrying Garnaut as a “Chicken Little”, Costa himself painted all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios if dirty coal producers aren’t compensated.
Costa calls for “dispassionate” analysis. This from someone whose self interest - as the Treasurer responsible for the sale of electricity “assets” in a crumbling government - couldn’t be more blatant.
I was interested to read of the loud condemnations by Morris Iemma and Kevin Rudd of the cover of the latest issue of Art Monthly Australia. The cover features detail from a print of Polixeni Papapetrou’s Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs. In this artwork, the artist’s then six year old daughter, Olympia Nelson, is portrayed naked. My first thought was to wonder whether either Iemma or Rudd had actually seen the magazine in question, and that’s still unclear to me. My second thought was to wonder whether one of the media themes of the day - embodied in this piece by Nicholas Pickard in Crikey - had any merit. Pickard argued that the magazine’s editor, Maurice O’Riordan, was a “total fool” who was playing into “Hetty Johnson’s hands”. The two subtexts appear to be that the Bill Henson controversy had faded away, leaving artists to go about their business as normal (or something), and that O’Riordan was courting more controversy in order to increase sales of his mag, heedless of the dangers of raking up the cinders of the fire the Bill Henson controversy started.
But, unlike a lot of people who might have an opinion about this new controversy/furore/”debate”, I thought I might go and buy a copy of the magazine in order to form my own view. So I did.
Well it’s July so it must be time again to condemn. Here’s a twenty second open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except short films from Auckland about monsters.
A fortnight ago, after the characters at The Opposition Organ went into full on attack mode, confecting a picture of governmental chaos and evil spin from Kevin Rudd and his minions, we could witness the construction of one of those “media narratives” we’re constantly told by… the media… are so important. Last year we saw the then Government Gazette go into brain explosion mode, trying desperately to shore up the foundations of the then media narrative - that Howard was a political genius blah blah with a veritable plague of rabbits concealed in his Akubra. That was a bridge too far. Because it showed the narrative dissipating before our eyes as the effort being put into walling it off from reality was too painfully evident. Something similar is happening this year, with the cracks very indiscreetly showing, as the beleaguered “political class” of punditocrats effectively bemoan their lack of influence by letting a few too many cats out of the bag while trying to sew up the rips in the fabric of their dreams.
So we had Andrew “Insider” Bolt, who recently “celebrated” ten years of his column by “toot[ing] [sic] [his] own triumphs [sic]” (the link is to Grodscorp’s fisking not to Bolta’s auto-Birthday party), claiming - how embarrassment! - that it was journalists who swung the Gippsland by-election (the link goes to the post at LP not to Bolt’s blog). On Saturday, we had Christopher Pearson joining his News Limited colleague Glenn Milne in touting the saviour like potential of Peter Costello - the “man of the future”, we’re told! Although he apparently has “no malice” for Brendan Nelson, what’s one of the factors that Pearson cites as demonstrating that Nelson is doomed?
Partly it’s a case of not having won over the press gallery.
Yep, that’s the reason why Nelson bombs in the polls. Must be all those journos who live in Gippsland being over-sampled. I actually suspect Costello’s smart enough not to believe this nonsense, though I also imagine he takes the flattery in the spirit with which it’s given. Continue reading ‘Good spin and bad spin and media narratives (and the Garnaut Report)’
As John Quiggin suggested it might, the Garnaut Review report has begun to reframe the debate on climate change policy. Based on an inspection of the weekend papers, it’s also started to reframe the political analysis, with some of the punditocracy remembering that an election doesn’t have to be held until 2010. (Planet Janet, of course, is one of the more prominent exceptions to this rule.) So, suddenly, the fate of Kevin Rudd doesn’t depend on one by-election in a safe Nationals seat or next week’s Newspoll, but how he responds to the big challenge of climate change. How long that perception might last is another matter. But while we’re talking about the long term, Possum Comitatus has compiled a fascinating cornucopia of data on the long term demographic challenges for the Coalition’s vote, building on some work by political scientist Ian Watson which was discussed in a post here a while back. Possum also has some unsolicited advice for the Liberals in responding to climate change:
So the Coalition has to start appealing to much younger demographics or they will likely find themselves in permanent opposition.
Something for them to keep in mind if they start trying to play political games with the emissions trading system and climate change – issues with large support in the younger demographics.
Folks who read my going on hiatus post last weekend might have noticed I came back this weekend! I’m still in break mode, and in fact I’m off to the beach for a week on Tuesday, heading up north where it’s nice and warm, but I was feeling bloggy today so - because I was in the mood, I did some blogging. While, as noted in a couple of posts here and around the shop recently, a lot of portentous debates swirl around blogging, the baseline should be that it should be fun. Of course there are all sorts of private and public benefits to blogging, but if you’re not enjoying it, then it’s not worth doing. I did want to thank everyone for their kind words in the thread last week, and also observe that the reason why I thought it was a good idea to take a break had nothing to do with that post I wrote about Tim Blair and the concerned feminists of the Australian right, though I do regret the fact that I let some of the animus generated last year lead me into personalising the issue that I was writing about. I expect better of myself. But mainly I just got to the point where I was feeling that some of the frustrations attendant on blogging were outweighing the benefits, so I thought it was time to take a spell.
There’s a lot of rubbish written in the dead-tree media about blogging. On the one hand, there’s an obsession with comparing it with journalism (thus setting up a frame in which blogging can never seem worthwhile). Political blogging isn’t journalism. It’s not “breaking news”. Personal blogging isn’t simply a series of trivial comments about “what I had for breakfast”. Blogging is writing. That writing may tend more towards personal, literary, academic, political, parenting, food or craft, but it’s all writing. That is what we practice and we have a lot of fun on the way.
On a related note, Mark also recently suggested that the blogging/journalism conversation (or stoush) acts to obscure much of what is actually interesting about the practice of blogging (and presumably if a lot of bloggers actually wanted to be journalists, not being shrinking violets and being generally smart cookies, they’d have done that), particularly insofar as it avoids all sorts of conversations being dominated by “white blokes in suits”. So, as Helen suggests, if you want to read something sensible in the dead tree media about blogging, read this piece written by… a blogger. Elissa Baxter riffs off some research into blogging and happiness, and interviews a range of Oz bloggers, including Helen herself and our own Suze, about why they blog and what they get out of it.
[Via Boing Boing] Iran is contemplating legislation which would make blogging a capital offence - if it “disturbs mental security in society”.
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