As Mark mentioned, the CPD hosted the third ‘Common Ground’ forum, this one on climate change. It was an ecumenical gathering with plenty of shiny suits (Slater Gordon lawyers sponsored), hipster urban types, young professionals, and plenty of the interested public.
CPD Director Miriam Lyons introduced the forum with two distinct images: Schwarzenegger standing in front of a crushed car talking about climate change on the doco Heat and Labor MPs with sticky fingers thanks to Anna Rose’s baking efforts. Continue reading ‘Reflections on CPD’s Common Ground forum on Climate Change’
Just a quick plug for an event being held under the auspices of the Centre for Policy Development on Wednesday 26th November at the Customs House in Sydney:
Ahead of the release of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme White Paper in December, the need for optimism and constructive discussion about climate change is stronger than ever.
The Centre for Policy Development brings you a Common Ground discussion on climate change with the topic ‘Australia should lead, not follow’.
Join keynote speakers Bob Carr (former Premier, NSW), Pru Goward (NSW Shadow Minister for Climate Change) and a diverse panel of voices: Fiona Wain (Environment Business Australia), Steve Hatfield-Dodds (former CSIRO, now Department of Climate Change), Andrew Bartlett (former Democrats) and Imam Afroz Ali (from the ‘Australian Religious Response to Climate Change’ initiative).
The Common Ground series is designed to move away from stereotyped clashes, and explore areas of common ground which can be articulated to a common purpose. Personally, I’ve got zero time for Bob Carr, but some of the other speakers sound interesting, and I hope that the discussion will be productive. And there are drinks afterwards! You can register via the link above, and I’d be fascinated to hear from any Sydney folks who go along.
Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.
I have to confess at the outset that I haven’t read the report - I am really busy with work at the moment and I simply don’t have time (or energy when I do have time), but I wanted to comment instead on the practice of not reading. I was struck by this when reading Mark’s post from last night about the reactions of Gerard Henderson and Kevin Donnelly to the report released by Stuart Macintyre’s history curriculum panel. Donnelly, when interviewed on Lateline (and why is it necessary to interview him - for balance? … so that the substance of the story can be obscured by inscription in a “history wars” frame - what happened to journos perhaps reading the report and reporting on its substance not a press release?) couldn’t actually point to anything in the report which would support the line he wanted to run about a “black armband view” and wanted to mutter something dark instead about Labor being tricky about pretending not to be as left wing as they are. Incidentally, that’s the cunning new strategy that Chrissy Pyne came up with the other day, if we believe his ghost writer Glenn Milne.
Similarly, Hendo appeared to be reacting to a press release. Now these characters are held up as “public intellectuals” and their assemblage of titles (thinktank director, educator/consultant, etc) supposedly represent authority and expertise. Obviously, they’re just going to push the political line they run with constantly, but what’s happened to the idea that you should actually inform yourself about what you comment on?
(Hendo, I suppose, doesn’t have time, what with having to write 50 emails a day to Robert Manne about what they each thought about Indonesia in the 1960s, or monitoring the ABC all day for “bias”…)
Something very similar is operating with the reaction of Warren Mundine to the NT Intervention Review. Andrew Bartlett asks some pointed questions:
Yet almost all the attacks seem to be ignoring the evidence about what has been happening on the ground, and the views of the people that live there, instead treating policies such as universal compulsory quarantining of welfare payments and scrapping the permit system as sacred totems which cannot be touched, regardless of the evidence.
Continue reading ‘Review into the NT Intervention: on not reading and stereotyped debates’
I wasn’t the only person to notice on Friday night that Possum, The Poll Bludger and Andrew Bartlett (among others) popped up on a new blog platform at Crikey. One take on this move from Duncan Reilly - writing at The Inquisitr - was that it constitutes “a welcomed step in legitimizing blogging in Australia”. From my point of view, that’s the wrong way round. I very much doubt that any of those bloggers lacked “legitimacy” - Possum’s performance in outgunning the GG crew in the pseph analysis stakes, The Poll Bludger’s hosting of a rolling psephological conversation and the quality of the informational and analytical blogging he does and Andrew Bartlett’s commitment to a transparent and open political debate all have that quality in spades already.
I think what’s more significant here is a recognition from Crikey of a shift from a relatively static form of internet publishing to a more dynamic and interactive one. It’s a better model in some ways than cherry picking bloggers to write static articles, because it encompasses the whole context of the form.
There’s obviously also a commercial element in the decision - frequently updated sites with lively and long comments threads multiply the page views and thus the advertising revenue. And, as with the general trend towards blog networks, it should be possible for Possum and the rest of the mob to earn a modest living from what they do without all the hassles of being their own advertising agent, and to concentrate on the content and the community without being their own tech support. What will be interesting is the degree to which there’ll be a crossover from Crikey “readers” to Crikey blog participants/commenters.
What does this imply for the independent blogosphere? Continue reading ‘Crikey goes bloggy’
I note that Brian Costar has been thinking along similar lines to me and Andrew Bartlett on the subject of the formation of the Liberal National Party. He’s put his finger on the key challenge for the Borg and his crew, who haven’t had any amalgamation bounce if today’s Galaxy Poll is to be believed:
The new party is almost certainly to be more conservative than the pre-existing Liberal party – especially on social issues – and this might not prove attractive to the urban middle classes, who are certainly more numerous in Queensland than when Bjelke-Petersen mis-governed the state. Unless the party can harvest Brisbane seats from Labor it will not win government.
Continue reading ‘Queenslandism II’
Like Andrew Bartlett, I agree entirely with Andrew Bolt regarding the shameful weaseling by the International Olympic Committee regarding the whole idea of granting the 2008 games to the authoritarian dictatorship of China in the first place.
crossposted
UPDATE: It has been pointed out in comments that LP has not discussed the Rudd government’s continued determination to introduce ISP-level internet filtering this week. To redress that lack I’ll quote a post I made at Hoyden About Town a couple of days ago in its entirety below:
No surprises: internet filtering test results show products block legitimate content
We said it would. Despite a cheery press release from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that all is going well, an analysis of the actual test results shows that the tested filters slow connection speeds significantly (which means ISPs would have to increase capacity, the costs of which would be passed on to consumers) and have a false positives rate that would block at least 10,000 legitimate sites (and that’s for the best product result - most would block more). It gets worse:
None of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely. Let’s count them again. None.
How long will the Rudd government continue to pretend that having this cumbersome, costly and ineffective product shoved at us under an opt-out scheme is in any way a good idea?
Via Tim Dunlop at Blogocracy.
Let’s take a look at today’s political “news”, News Limited style, and the ongoing construction of the “media narrative” that according to the press gallery gang, is the only news fit to print.
As noted here, The Opposition Organ spent a bucket of dosh to add extra questions to Newspoll, and chose to run with “Voters Want Costello” as its front page headline over the (presumably less welcome to the masthead of denialism) numbers on climate change, showing overwhelming majorities attributing climate change to AGW and support for an ETS, with a big majority for “not waiting on the world”. So that’s establishing the news agenda through polling to feed the current “media narrative” - centring on the Liberal leadership and Peter Costello lovin’ in particular. And selectivity in emphasis. Then we get selectivity in reporting. The numbers in Newspoll, as Possum points out, don’t show that the voters the Liberals need to persuade are particularly persuadable by a putative Costello return:
The Coalition needs ALP voters to shift to the Coalition, yet ALP voters have a breakdown of 15% more likely and 20% less likely. If Costello became leader, he might not lose voteshare, but neither does he look like he would gain much based on these results.
But Dennis Shanahan doesn’t mention that.
Let’s go back a bit and remember, as Mark pointed out in his review, that the extracts from Inside Kevin07 that kicked the Costello talk off were themselves highly selective - one bit of research done before Rudd became leader and highlighted while the other internal polling and focus group research showing Costello for PM being about as appealling as a piece of wet lettuce was studiously ignored. And let’s not forget either that the “Costello the Saviour” narrative basically depends on the publication date of a book! Leadership calculation by publishing schedule! Melbourne University Press and book distributors hold the nation’s future in their hand!
Then, the big showdown Bolta talked up on the Coalition’s emissions trading scheme stance comes - and Nelson gets rolled.
Meanwhile, the Labor government has basically done away with mandatory detention.
I would venture to suggest that is rather more important than all this other confected nonsense.
Continue reading ‘Reality and unreality in the pundits’ world’
Monash academics Nick Dyrenrfurth and Paul Strangio in retelling the story of the “fusion” of the non-Labor parties at the end of the first decade of federation make an explicit comparison with the formation of the Liberal National Party in Queensland a hundred years later.
The Deakinite Liberals of 1909 entered into fusion in a spirit of sorrow rather than enthusiasm. One declared: “I feel very strongly that we are about to make a mistake and yet, I am sorry to say, I see no possible way of preventing it.” The Age, self-appointed guardian of Liberal-Protectionist faith, was dismayed by coalescence: “Fusion is not a political blend in which liberalism and conservatism give and take, fusion is a sort of political boa constrictor (that) has swallowed liberalism whole.”
Writing in Crikey on Friday, Richard Farmer believed he had cut to the heart of the reasons why the foundation of the Pineapple Party has been accompanied by so many alarums and such bitterness:
Underlying the problem is clearly the impossibility of combining liberal thought, free market believers, Neanderthal agrarian socialism and intolerant social conservatives.
Incidentally, one might note that exactly the same problem has been evident in the post-Howardian Liberal Party, absent the dead hand of Howard himself and the glue of office.
In Queensland, of course, the political traditions and electoral and social geography of the state make both the free market strand and the social liberals very much minority constituencies, and there’s no doubt they will now be swamped by the social conservatives and the agrarian socialists within the LNP. This, of course, raises the question of whether ideology matters, a question posed by Andrew Bartlett in commentary on the contemporary Queensland fusion. Continue reading ‘Queenslandism’
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong will be releasing the government’s Emissions Trading Green Paper today at the National Press Club. The Minister’s address can be seen on ABC1 at 12.30pm. The Green Paper will fill in some of the blanks left remaining after the release of the Garnaut Review’s interim report last week. No doubt it will also set the tone for the developing political debate over the next few months, and a key to how that debate will proceed politically is a poll by Essential Media [link to pdf] which suggests that the Coalition’s “wait for the world” message (if indeed that is their message!) is the wrong one.
As to the substance of the Green Paper, Crikey has set out a number of benchmarks by which the policy could be evaluated. These, of course, are open to debate, and indeed it’s worth recalling that the whole purpose of a Green Paper is to stimulate debate and consultation while signalling the parameters in which the government wants to shape policy.
No doubt there will be substantive contributions here and throughout the blogosphere and the media later on today (and links in the thread are most welcome), but you’re also most welcome to start discussing the Green Paper right now!
Relevant links over the fold.
Continue reading ‘Emissions Trading Green Paper thread (& links post)’
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.
Continue reading ‘Art Monthly furore!’
The new Senate won’t formally sit until 26 August, but scrutiny of the Greens Senators, Family First’s Stephen Fielding and South Australian Independent Nick Xenophon has already been ramped up, since they all now collectively hold the balance of power. Props to my CPD colleague Ben Eltham for interviewing Xenophon and thus introducing him and some of his policy positions to those of us who aren’t familiar with South Australian politics.
While the Greens’ policy positions are well known, or if they’re not, they’re reasonably accessible, and thus transparent for those who take the time to look, Xenophon’s disclaimer of any left/right ideological commitment and indeed the relatively narrow range of issues on which Fielding has taken a prominent stand raises an important question. Unfortunately, we’ve lost our most prominent blogging Senator - from the Senate, that is, not from blogging. One of the Democrats’ more laudable stances was accountability to their membership (although aspects of that commitment - particularly the low threshold for a leadership challenge - were also probably a large contributor to their downfall), and Andrew Bartlett carried this level of accountability to a broader public through blogging the work of the Senate, which also allowed for public input into his legislative and policy decisions.
Continue reading ‘Open Senate?’
Senator Andrew Bartlett gives his final speech around 6pm tonight. You should be able to catch it on NewsRadio, or streaming on the Parliament House website.
The silver lining is that he intends to keep blogging. While the Australian Senate will lack the benefit of his insights, the Ozplogosphere doesn’t have to. I look forward to his continued blogging contributions, and any other contributions he plans to make to Australian public life.
Peter Martin advises us of a new initiative in the public scrutiny of Australian politics - OpenAustralia.org. The site places Hansard on line with a searchable database, tailored to scrutiny (with the ability to comment) of individual members. It’s a volunteer run site, riffing off the UK site TheyWorkForYou. It’ll be interesting to see how useful it proves - one potential drawback is the much stronger levels of party discipline in the Australian House of Reps (and unfortunately, the site doesn’t seem to focus on the Senate, which is going to be the site of a lot of legislative log-rolling, as tigtog comments at Hoyden in her post providing an overview of the new Senators who take office on July 1). No doubt it will be useful for grabbing quotes from Question Time, but a lot of the really interesting stuff that affects citizens that goes on in Parliament takes place in Senate committees.
Elsewhere: More from Public Polity and Andrew Bartlett.
While most of the focus in the climate change mitigation debate has been on power generation and transport, there are a number of other emissions sources which are large and pose mitigation challenges of their own. Andrew Bartlett has often raised the issue of emissions from farm animals, and emissions from forestry have come up repeatedly here. But one that doesn’t get much attention is emissions from industrial processes, particularly the production of steel and concrete. Locally, manufacturing cement makes up less than 1% of total emissions (which is the kind of thing you can find out from the excellent AGEIS tool), but globally it’s a different story - getting definitive statistics is hard, but this IHT article quotes around 5% of global emissions, most of it in the developing world.
But a new Australian company claims they’ve got an alternative available that reduces the life cycle emissions from concrete by about 80% compared to standard, Portland cement-based concrete. Zeobond, a Melbourne company, use something called “geopolymers” to make concrete that doesn’t contain any cement. And, even better, we can apparently already buy their product - though they’re not exactly forthcoming with pricing information at this point. In any case, they’re featuring on the ABC’s Catalyst on Thursday night, along with a story on London’s plans to generate its own energy. Should be worth a look, either on TV or as a podcast.
As far as steel goes, the only substantial research program for reducing the emissions of steel production is the European ULCOS project. It appears that eliminating CO2 emissions from steel production almost inevitably means carbon capture and storage. Like it or lump it, it seems that we’re going to need CCS technology, whatever we do about coal.
Lawrence Springborg is one step closer to achieving his grand dream of five years’ standing – a united conservative party in Queensland. This courtesy of new Liberal President Gary Spence, who, to the fury of some Liberals, has responded to the Nationals’ plebiscite by agreeing to a vote by rank and file members – and appearing to prejudge the result by embuing the “Liberal National Party” with an aura of inevitability.
That may be a tad premature, as the announcement of the “breakthrough” was quickly followed by anonymous Libs leaking about the possibility of a break away party should the Pineapple Party become a reality. There’s also the position – articulated by Brendan Nelson – that nothing should happen until discussions on amalgamation at federal level are finalised – at some indeterminate time in the future.
Unhappy Liberals are characterising the new party as a Nationals takeover.
So exactly who’s doing the assimilation? Resistance is futile, as the Star Trek version of the Borg intoned monolithically, because Lawrence Springborg has already been anointed leader in advance of any decision by the new party, and no democratic process is apparently envisaged for the division of the spoils of opposition. In fact, as Graham Young reports, so undemocratic is the process that former assimilation critic George Brandis has gone quiet after a deal for Senate preselection, which also protects Barnaby Joyce’s interests by giving him a Senate seat (Ron Boswell’s) even if he loses at the next election.
Continue reading ‘The Pineapple Party: The Borg’s assimilation agenda’
Recent comments
Adrien, Ambigulous, Adrien, Liam, Mark, Liam [...]
David Rubie, Paul Burns, Brian, David Irving (no relation), kymbos, kymbos [...]
Adrien, Katz, Paul Burns, Kingsley, Mark, Liam [...]
Paul Burns, David Rubie, Mark, Brian, Paul Burns, Baraholka [...]
equaseks, Peter Wood, Mark, Peter Wood, Peterc, Tim Macknay [...]
Adrien, Legal Eagle, Michael Sutcliffe, Mark, Tyro Rex, Adrien [...]
Ambigulous, dylwah, murph the surf, wizofaus, David Rubie, Mindy [...]
jrbarch, Mindy, Mark, Mark, Leon, Derek [...]
Mindy, Admin!!! HELP!!!, FDB, David Rubie, FDB, David Rubie [...]
Ambigulous, suz, Colin, un ami des beaux arts, adrian, suz [...]
Bilko, Paul Burns, Dave Bath, Bilko, Nabakov, Adrien [...]
RobWindt, Pappinbarra Fox, Ai! Que Dolor!, Patrick B, peter jones, Paul Burns [...]