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.
I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.
Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.
The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.
Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:
You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.
Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column - whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten - in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.
Mount St Michaels College, a Brisbane Catholic Girls School under the care of the Sisters of Charity, has adopted a novel approach to teaching mathematics.
Currently, along with all the other festivals that are no doubt happening at the moment, Melbourne is hosting the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). Films worth seeing during MIFF include Persepolis(fans of Marjane Satrapi’s gorgeous graphic novels should make sure to see that flick). Since I already possess the DVD, I won’t bother forking out to see Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, but if you haven’t seen this Australian, ahem, classic, it’s a nice night’s entertainment. The other day, I saw Rock ‘n’ Nerd, which was an interesting insight into the career of Tim Minchin. Since deciding to change his image from that of a talented nice Perth boy with short curly hair to that of a talented nice Perth boy with a messy mane, Minchin’s career has gone from strength to strength. Rock ‘n’ Roll Nerd shows all the stresses and joys that go with being an increasingly popular singing satirist piano playing dude. The YouTube video features Tim performing “Dark Side”, a song about trying to be deep because you’re girlfriend wants you to be deep, even though you’re not deep at all.
Update: Fans of Summer Heights Highplease note that August 10 is Sorry Ranga Day. “Sorry, Ranga”. (Sorry Ranga Day is an initiative of ABC Commercial).
Tourism promotion is a weird thing. Like the unrolling the huge ball of string come to Melbourne message (?) which hardly survived its unravelling by the Chaser. Something I read recently about the career end of Geoff Dixon as CEO of Qantas pointed out that one of the challenges for an Australian airline is that Australia is only on the way to Antarctica. So how to induce people to come here? Efforts to promote the joint seem to waver between “natural beauty” messages and weird distillations of Ozculture - whatever that might be. Perhaps it’s Lara Bingle? Now we’ve got Baz Luhrmann either leveraging his new movie - Australia - you know the one, our Nic’s in it - for a government sponsored tourism campaign, or, alternatively, leveraging Australia off a movie with the same title. Did I get that right? It’s all very recursive!
Would it just have been simpler if we’d made Lord of the Rings here? Worked for NZ tourism. With tons of Australian actors… How *do* you market/represent/thematise a post-colonial culture?
For those wondering how the Victorian government is travelling, here’s a good summary from The Age’s Paul Austin:
The great public transport squeeze and the water crisis could make or break Brumby.
WHEN he became premier a year ago, John Brumby hit the ground running. He enjoys the plaudits he receives for injecting new energy into an ageing Government. But he is less keen for people to dwell on a couple of big questions that arise from all the activity evident in Spring Street: why does Brumby have to run so hard, and what is he running from?
Brumby is having to run so hard because he is playing political catch-up. The Government is scrambling to find a policy framework that matches the on-the-ground reality of a city and state groaning under the pressure created by the twin challenges of climate change and a population explosion.
Melburnians regularly talk about the old days of tram travel.
These were the days before a tram trip could result in having to give your name and address to a “customer relations officer” because you’re either a fare cheat or forgetful*.
I hope that Anthony Foster and his family, who intend to confront Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell in Sydney this week over the Catholic Church’s treatment of their late daughter, Emma Foster, who took her own life in January and her sister Katie, both of whom were raped as primary school children by Father Kevin O’Donnell, aren’t dismissed as “Catholic bashing” and raining on the World Youth Day parade or subjected to victim blaming as Anthony Jones was. Foster told the tragic tale of his daughters’ abuse and how it marked their lives horrendously for the worse, and probably brought Emma’s life to a close, on Lateline tonight.
Ross Garnaut will be speaking in mainland capital cities next week about the Garnaut Report. Sydney and Perth are already booked out, but if you’re in Melbourne, Brisbane or Adelaide you can still register. Adelaide’s Tuesday, Melbourne is Wednesday and Brisbane’s Friday. I’ve booked myself a spot for the Brisbane gig.
At Australian Policy Online, Swinburne Politics Professor Brian Costar writes about how the press got the Gippsland by-election (and the state by-election for Kororoit in Victoria) so wrong:
We are told that the Rudd government is “reeling” from the “backlash” it suffered in Gippsland, where it took a “savage swing of 6.5 per cent.” The reaction to the Kororoit result has gone even further – some accounts would have us believe that the Brumby Labor government is set for certain defeat in 2010.
Let’s get real. On Friday 27 June the National Party held the seat of Gippsland; on Sunday 29 June the National Party still held the seat of Gippsland. On Friday 27 June the Labor Party held the seat of Kororoit; on Sunday 29 June the ALP still held the seat of Kororoit.
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be, it would be so nice
It’s school holiday time (which doesn’t - obviously - mean parent holiday time!)… I’m due to submit the first draft of my PhD thesis on Friday some time (possibly late-ish). The marking’s all done. The conference is over. But that wonderful thing called semester starts up again on the 21st. And I don’t have either the time or the money to take my preferred break - which was going to be an intertubes-less week in a cabin by a beach somewhere reading books, followed by a week of partay-ing in Sydney or Melbourne, followed by a week back in Brisneyland under the doonah. So give me some vicarious holiday goodness! Do we get enough holidays? What do we do when we take them? Are we ever away in a wired world?
I have to defend the town I lived in from 1996 to 2002 from the all too flippant calumny in this comment. (And incidentally Nancy Pelosi, one of whose Congressional campaigns I worked on, as well as heaps of local ones for both the Democrats and the Greens… - she’s so right in this comment about the Clinton campaign.) As I’ve said about a thousand times before, pro-Americanism or anti-Americanism is the dumb. It’s far too complex a country to condemn or praise in toto, and - incidentally - one I’m proud to be a citizen of. But I will say, as someone largely brought up in Brisneyland, that San Francisco is one part of the world where there’s enough cultural similarities that we can feel, not at home, but able to negotiate our way into feeling like this is Heimat, as it were. Or, at least, I felt that way. Continue reading ‘I left my heart in San Francisco…’
Some of the tensions in Rudd’s governance and indeed in his Cabinet over climate change issues are discussed by Brian in this post. Brian’s thoughts could usefully be read together with Shaun Carney’s column in yesterday’s Age [via Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion]:
The central tension for contemporary Labor is the need to weave together its disparate supporting tribes and Rudd’s car plan, which co-opts concern about climate change to underpin the ALP’s more traditional working class base, tells us how he wants to do it. When Labor was last in power, under Paul Keating, it managed to hold on to most of its white-collar support base but lost office when parts of its blue-collar base, pummelled by the effects of economic deregulation, concluded it had lost touch. Since then, the white-collar left has coalesced more solidly around the Greens - an effect that has been turbo-charged by the death of the more moderate Democrats. This has two consequences, both of which make it harder for Labor to hold on to power.
When some terribly serious coot makes a history of 90’s Australian pop, I doubt they’ll deign to mention TISM.
But for a kid from the country who, in those pre-Internet days, was blown away when the diet of Hits and Memories radio was turned on its head by the introduction of JJJ to Albury in 1994, TISM are special. This is Serious Mum and their p*sstake dance-pop will remain a touchstone. So I was saddened to read that Jock Paull, aka Token Blackman of TISM, got a tumour that may not have started in his brain, but crept into his lungs, and ended his life prematurely at 50.
So, in honour of a man whose name I didn’t know until now, but whose music made me laugh every time I heard it, let’s all demand a vodka rider from our nearest student union, and dance like a d******d to one of TISM’s finest moments, He’ll Never Be an Old Man River. Guitarists may pass, riffs live forever…
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs 
Tourism promotion is a weird thing. Like the unrolling the huge ball of string come to Melbourne message (?) which hardly survived its unravelling by the Chaser. Something I read recently about the career end of Geoff Dixon as CEO of Qantas pointed out that one of the challenges for an Australian airline is that Australia is only on the way to Antarctica. So how to induce people to come here? Efforts to promote the joint seem to waver between “natural beauty” messages and weird distillations of Ozculture - whatever that might be. Perhaps it’s Lara Bingle? Now we’ve got Baz Luhrmann either leveraging his new movie - 
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