If Liberal campaign strategists aren’t worried about the amount of friendly-fire being aimed at Tony Abbott lately, they should be.
During the last fortnight, Abbott’s parental leave scheme brain-fart has drawn flak from Peter Costello, business groups, Our Lady Shanahan of the Stay-At-Home-Mums, Catholic and Anglican charities; and members of his own back-bench went into a mighty sulk when he sprang it on them. Last week Andrew Bolt gave Tony a slap on the wrist for his commentary that he (Abbott) felt “a bit threatened” around homosexuals. Then this weekend it’s been Noel Pearson taking exception to Abbott’s taking exception to Welcome to Country and acknowledgement of traditional owner ceremonies.
So in a period when most of the mainstream news outlets have been prepared to soft-pedal on Abbott and indulge many of his antics and much of his tomfoolery, the biggest hits are being delivered by his own ideological fellow-travelers. That’s gotta hurt.
These problems aren’t evident in the party room, yet. Coalition politicians have generally shown some discipline, stayed (mostly) on message and managed to keep mum about any misgivings they may have. But outside the party room, Abbott is blotting his copybook with many of the people he will most rely upon for third-party endorsement of his policies. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, to have discipline in the party room during an election year. If Abbott can’t find anyone outside the party room to give him a push, there will be a major credibility deficit when trying to promote his policies later in the year.
To predictable cries of shock and outrage, the Australian government has taken another step along the road to agreeing to sell uranium to Russia.
As far as substantive proliferation risks from this, there are none. Russia, you may remember, has a stockpile of 14,000 nuclear weapons, only 5,000 are “operational” – the rest are in storage. Beyond this, the Russians currently have a stockpile of around 1000 tonnes of highly enriched uranium, enough for 80,000 modern weapons, or 20,000 if you resorted to Hiroshima-style technology that you could build in a local workshop. Russia does not need our uranium to build more bombs, or even to supply bomb-making material to other nations if they were silly enough to do so; they have more than enough in stock already for that.
The biggest things that Russia can do for nuclear non-proliferation are to reduce its own arsenal as part of an arms reduction treaty with the United States, get rid of its stockpiles of surplus HEU and bomb-grade plutonium (which, incidentally, Australian uranium is helpful for; you can mix it with bomb material and burn it in a nuclear reactor, at which point it is no longer useful for making weapons), and, most importantly, be very careful what nuclear technology it’s prepared to share with potential proliferators. While it won’t make much difference either way, there’s a perfectly arguable case that selling uranium to Russia may make it marginally more willing to listen to us on those issues.
Continue reading ‘Exporting uranium to Russia, and domestic nuclear “hedging”’
Today’s Question Time saw some interesting tactics from the government; suspending standing orders to allow Tony Abbott to talk about health and hospitals policy. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who saw the debate, but from what I heard on the tv, it looked like Abbott was mostly in bluster mode, and Rudd quite assured. Clearly Labor believes that Abbott wants to talk about anything but health, and that his lack of command of the detail, and lack of any substantive alternative policy will work to the ALP’s credit.
So, the debate Rudd challenged him to on Tuesday will be interesting. It’ll also keep the media focus squarely where the government wants it to be for the next little while.
Elsewhere: Bernard Keane.
Elsewhere: Tigtog at Hoyden.
Update: The commentariat seems to be impressed by Abbott’s performance. By way of example, Samantha Maiden:
But the egg ended up all over Labor’s face as the Opposition Leader rose to the challenge, hurling abuse at Kevin Rudd.
Righteo, then.
Update: Bernard Keane in Crikey today:
If Abbott could spend Tuesday’s debate repeating yesterday’s dose and bagging the Government and explaining that he didn’t cut health funding, it’d be fine, but there’s now an expectation he must do more than criticise Rudd, that he must offer something positive. It obviously wasn’t in the Coalition’s planning to be producing a full-blown health policy at this stage. Rudd himself will presumably use the debate to make yet another of the many announcements about health funding that he promised back when he kicked off the health debate. If so, Abbott’s failure to produce something of substance will look particularly poor.
All of which is why, despite the alleged risks of debating your opponent, Rudd is happy to be doing just that.
Via Joe Romm, a fascinating snippet: a scientific conference on geoengineering is to be held in California, with the goals of:
- Identify potential risks associated with climate intervention experiments
- Propose a system to assess experiment design for potential categorical risks and suggest precautions to assure their safe conduct
- Propose voluntary standards for climate intervention research for the international scientific community
For what it’s worth, (and unlike Romm), I think geoengineering may be a marginally less awful option than the others we are leaving ourselves, and have argued for carefully controlled scientific trials of geoengineering technologies. So, in that sense I believe a conference like this is a great idea.
But what makes it particularly interesting is that the sole strategic partner of this conference is none other than the “State of Victoria, Australia”:
Continue reading ‘Who’s interested in geoengineering?’
This morning’s media reports that the Opposition now intends to support the Federal Government’s intention to bring back the Susso for several categories of welfare recipient including those on Newstart Allowance.
The use of the term “Susso” is not mere hyperbole as the percentage of the recipient’s income which is quarantined will only be able to be accessed using a special smart card (which will, over time, become generally recognised as the quarantinee’s smart card) at designated retail outlets which have the necessary hardware to read the cards. Further, in some towns in the Northern Territory where the scheme is in place for indigenous people, stores are reportedly establishing special checkouts for holders of the card in order to minimise delays in the other checkout queues. Anyone spending their quarantined income is thus “outed” as a welfare recipient – and exposed to all the prejudices which many in our society hold towards such people – whenever they co shopping.
The mooted national extension of the income quarantining scheme could have some interesting but unpleasant consequences for university staff and the Australian university sector as a whole.
Continue reading ‘Pssst! That’s our lecturer! In the Susso queue!’
The CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have done a brief snapshot of the state of Australia’s climate. For example this map shows the increase in mean temperature per decade from 1960 to 2009:
It has become hotter everywhere, in some regions by as much a 0.4C per decade.
Continue reading ‘BOM and CSIRO report on the state of the climate’
Today’s Essential Research poll might show the reversal in the movement of the polls, which I suspected prompted Tony Abbott’s parental leave thought bubble last week. My view was that Abbott’s speech was a ‘crazy brave’ attempt to shake things up and respond to internal polling which was either showing the Coalition going backwards or, at best, failing to build on the momentum he’d displayed, in some measure, in public polls. There was some support for the view that it was polling driven in statements by Coalition MPs, and almost a week on, it’s certainly looking more and more like it was hardly considered policy which had been worked over for a long time, to put it charitably.
At any rate, as Possum observes, Labor’s lead in today’s poll is its best so far this year.
I think we can also see that Abbott’s parental leave announcement has been viewed very much through the prism of the parties’ images – which in themselves are composites of longstanding perceptions of party strengths and weaknesses, how the parties relate to social cleavages, and less long term assessments of competence and direction in office or in opposition. Policy tends to be mediated through this prism, rather than being an independent variable in its own right. In other words, few policy announcements – in and of themselves – are likely to be political game changers.
It’s useful, then, to counterpose two tables from Essential Report’s research [courtesy of Possum]:
As Possum also observes, the crunch is in the cross-tabs:
Among Labor voters, 61% supported the Government’s scheme and 15% supported the Opposition’s. However, only 37% of Coalition voters supported the Opposition’s scheme – 20% supported the Government scheme and 35% supported neither.
Continue reading ‘Coalition wedges itself on parental leave’
The National Health and Medical Research Council is apparently reviewing whether the prohibition on those undergoing IVF treatment selecting the sex of the (hopefully) resulting children should be retained. This guideline is part of “Ethical guidelines on the use of assisted reproductive technology in clinical practice and research”, a document last revised in 2007.
The ABC report quotes Professor Gab Kovacs as advocating an end to the ban; ACCESS Australia has, in the past, made submissions to the NHMRC on the guidelines suggesting that some of their members have requested the ban be removed, their 2004 submission makes the following claim:
There is no evidence to suggest that there is a significant preference for either sex where this (RM: deliberate sex selection) has been done in Australia or internationally.
This may well be the case with regards to IVF, and it may well be the case in Australia, at this particular moment in time. But it’s certainly not the case globally. Throughout parts of Asia, sex ratios at birth are highly skewed, with the relative scarcity of girls attracting the term “gendercide”.
As a society, I don’t think we’ve made any serious attempt to work through the potential societal consequences of allowing parents to choose the sex of their children. Is it a discussion that we should be having?
The Senate has passed, in a whisper, the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Torture Prohibition and Death Penalty Abolition) Bill 2009. The bill is largely symbolic, creating a new federal offence of torture (which is already a crime under any number of state and federal laws, including when committed overseas).
The more interesting provision is schedule 2, which bans the death penalty under any circumstances. Of course, the death penalty does not exist anywhere in Australia, so, again, it’s almost completely symbolic. What it does do is prevent a state government ever reintroducing the death penalty, and, thus, “ensure ongoing compliance with the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
Obviously, the removal of any possibility of the death penalty being reintroduced is a great thing. No longer will the temptation exist, however remote, for a desperate state Premier or Opposition Leader to float the possibility of changing the law.
However, one thing about the mechanism by which this has been done does bother me slightly. The force of this law, were it ever to be tested, relies on the existence of an international treaty Australia has signed, and the external affairs power of the Australian constitution. Are there any legal impediments to a future federal government signing, say, “The International Treaty on the Abolition of Rights for Teh Gayz” with whatever reactionary foreign government they can find, and then using the same external affairs power to pass federal laws to override relevant state legislation?
Yesterday, prompted by a link Paul Burns provided on my One day that shook the world thread, I did a Google search for reviews of Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky. Not surprisingly, many such reviews were on Trotskyist websites and all the Trotskyist reviews were scathing of Service’s book, including one on the Workers’ Liberty site.
However, what I also found is that the Workers’ Liberty group has broken with what it terms the “absolute anti-Zionist” orthodoxy in which much of the far left is mired, campaigns on the Israel/Palestine issue under the slogan “Israel-Palestine: Two Nations Two States!”, and displays some refreshingly clear and principled thinking about how the Left can best show practical solidarity with the Palestinian national struggle and with progressive and democratic Israelis. Their arguments against calls for a boycott of Israel make particularly interesting reading.
I don’t with to be seen to be endorsing the Workers’ Liberty line on Israel/Palestine chapter and verse. However, those on the Left, and particularly the revolutionary Left, who consider themselves anti-Zionists and may not have found my arguments from 2006 convincing, could do worse than to read and reflect on what Workers’ Liberty has to say.
ABC Chairman Maurice Newman made a few comments yesterday that may go a long way to explaining some of the pressures editors and producers at the public broadcaster may be under – specifically on the issue of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
This collective censorious approach succeeded in suppressing contrary views in the mainstream media, despite the fact that a growing number of distinguished scientists were challenging the conventional wisdom with alternative theories and peer reviewed research.
While claiming some of his best friends were journalists, Newman attacked the profession for uncritical group thinking on a range of issues (Enron, tech meltdown and the GFC) and further outing himself – with language that could only be described as that of climate skepticism.
Of course Newman is welcome to hold whatever views he wishes, that is not the issue.
As Friends of the ABC spokesperson Glenys Stradijot pointed out in a statement, “this looks like an attempt to influence ABC programming to be more favourable to global warming skepticism.
“Mr Newman needs to explain why he took the step of criticising the media’s coverage of global warming and why he addressed that criticism to ABC staff.”
Stradijot also alleged that Newman’s former position as chairman of the Center for Independent Studies (CIS) might be a factor in informing his world view on the subject.
A transcript of Newman’s interview and explanation with Brendan Trembath of the ABC can be found here.
Further reading: The inimitable Stilgherrian and Crikey’s Eric Beecher.
Writing in Crikey the other day, Eloise Keating suggested that “if Abbott wants to woo women, he should start with wages”:
Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985 — and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.
That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:
In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.
The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector. Continue reading ‘Coalition shows it doesn’t care about equal pay for women’
Tony Abbott’s performance in question time today, and the timing of his parental leave thought bubble more generally, suggest that his major imperative was to switch the topic of debate from health. That’s despite the Coalition running a very active scare campaign about hospital closures in the bush, but it’s probably because of the polling on Rudd’s initiative. I suspect also that it wouldn’t be going out too far on a limb to venture a modest prediction that that Labor might be headed for an uptick in the polls.
Some Coalition MPs have suggested that this plan came about so suddenly because Abbott had become privy to private party polling.
I strongly suspect that the Labor Party might have had a bit of a turnaround – perhaps related to the National Curriculum and health, and Abbott might be responding to that. It could also explain why he felt he had to release some ‘positive policy’. It could well be that his negativism has had an impact; I note that Labor Ministers have been reiterating the ‘Senate obstructionism’ line again this morning.
In short, on where the parties actually stand, one shouldn’t believe what one reads in The Australian.
Meanwhile, whether or not Abbott makes health a focus of his parliamentary attack, the Premiers continue to ponder the National Health and Hospitals Network. Kevin Rudd has wrought his own ambush, confident that there’s no political skin to be lost picking a fight with the states on this battleground. But that doesn’t mean that some of the Premiers haven’t been posing some good questions – interestingly, probably more from Kristina Kenneally than John Brumby.
And while the headline politics might have been the primary focus of media attention, some good work continues to be done on analysing the policy itself. I’ve posted some salient links over the fold. Continue reading ‘So, how about that hospitals plan?’
As noted, Abbott’s International Women’s Day announcement of a paid parental leave plan has created a lot of debate here on LP [read previous threads here]. And it’s attracted a lot of commentary in the wider blogosphere and media.
Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion has a handle on the politics:
So the Coalition’s strategy [of] messing with the system by throwing anything at the Rudd Government that comes to hand continues. It doesn’t matter about the contradictions –introducing a big tax when the promise is no new taxes—as it is about getting noticed and destabilisation with whatever-it-takes to oppose the Rudd Government on everything.
The strategy is to wedge Labor—’’supporting big business over working families” is the new talking point— and to win back female voters who have been deserting the Coalition.
Trevor Cook asks whether Abbott is really a Liberal. Meanwhile, in The Age, Leslie Cannold disputes the claim that parental leave is solely a women’s issue and Julia Perry in the SMH examines who should pay.
I’ve built on the arguments I made in a post here yesterday in a piece for The ABC’s The Drum Unleashed to nail the canard that Abbott’s plan is more ‘generous’ than Labor’s policy, and set out my reasons why it’s not something progressives should support.
Those of you interested in feed-in tariffs for solar energy might be interested in reading the multi-post discussion between George Monbiot and Jeremy Leggett on the merits of Britain’s feed-in solar scheme. In a nutshell, Monbiot takes a line that you might have heard from me – that solar panels on home roofs are a hugely expensive way to reduce carbon emissions and a distraction from more effective technology. Leggett takes the view that, with the market support of feed-in tariffs, costs will inevitably fall until solar becomes competitive in cost with grid electricity. The upshot – Leggett has accepted a 100£ bet with Monbiot that solar will achieve “grid parity” in Britain by 2013. Judging by the numbers on my favourite page on the internet, either grid electricity is going to skyrocket, or solar systems will have to crater in price, for Leggett to win his bet. Despite all the promises of radical cost reductions in solar panels, the real price of solar electricity is dropping by only a few percentage points a year.
Continue reading ‘Monbiot vs. the solar entrepreneur, with a bit of Rickover thrown in’
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