Setting sail for the South Seas
Piers Akerman – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (11:20 am)
After the final provisions are aboard, and New Zealand customs cleared, Van Diemen III (below) and her crew of five will be sailing from Opua in the Bay of Islands for Tonga on Thursday.
BITCH BITCH BITCH
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (05:23 am)
Four years ago, long before the bitch outrage currently consuming Australian media, the term was used without controversy. Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Rocco attracted no criticism, as correspondent Bunyip reports:
The artist’s theme is his own genius, and his conceit in this instance is to draw John Howard as a greyhound which competes as both Deputy Dawg and – how shocking! – Bush’s Bitch.
And we also had this, from Guy Rundle:
Rudd knuckles under for a clear loss, being Howard’s bitch.
“Bitch” seems to be all-purpose, non-gender specific and universally applicable. Here’s Ben Pobjie, in the taxpayer-funded version of Crikey:
The message was clear. Wayne Swan had made the GFC his bitch.
Bunyip concludes:
Given that Sophie Cunningham currently has the vapours at The Drum regarding the coarsening of political debate and the eruption of bitch-shouting geriatric extremists, I thought the term’s pedigree might be worth noting.
Quite.
WIKIJOE
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (05:21 am)
Parliamentary computers hacked! Joe Hildebrand – Australia’s funniest vegan – has the inside story.
NERDS UNHEARD
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (05:01 am)
It’s just so unfair:
[There is] a sense of growing frustration among Australian scientists that they are, like their peers in the US, not being heard at a political level; that their expertise is not being drawn on to inform policy decisions on complex scientific issues; and that, increasingly, in political, media and social spheres, they must endure personal and professional attacks from people who don’t like their scientific conclusions.
Perhaps these experts should be ignored, given the record examined by Philip Tetlock:
Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps.
The most generous conclusion Tetlock could draw was that some experts were less awful than others.
But they have expertise!
SAFETY OF THE GRAVE
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (04:59 am)
Attention, Indian friends. Please, for the love of God, do not fall for this:
South Australian Premier Mike Rann is using the lingering controversy of brutal attacks on Indian students in NSW and Victoria to promote Adelaide as the safest city in the nation for overseas students.
(Via Currency Lad)
THE POWER OF ONE … FINGER
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (04:26 am)
Sydney artist Igor Saktor signs off on Earth Hour 2011:
SLOWBAND
Tim Blair – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (04:24 am)
Back in January:
Prime Minister Julia Gillard says it would be unwise to delay the national broadband network to fund the flood recovery.
A couple of months later:
Federal government senators have extended by two-and-a-half years the deadline for completion of the country’s national broadband network in order to connect an extra million homes.
The company building the $36 billion system, NBN Co, now has until December 2020 to build the infrastructure across the vast continent, instead of the original June 2018 date.
A small Victorian paper was alert to this last year:
Ms Gillard told the Leader last week the introduction of broadband throughout Australia would take until the end of this decade.
UPDATE. The national hopeless mate does it again:
Australia’s controversial plan for a refugee processing centre in East Timor was effectively taken off the agenda before last night’s opening of the Bali ministerial summit, with senior officials making it clear the proposal would not form part of the final discussions.
Julia Gillard’s proposals never do.
UPDATE II. More hopelessness:
Households face an average electricity price rise of $200-$250 a year directly as a result of a carbon tax, according to Ross Garnaut …
Prof Garnaut predicted price rises caused by a carbon tax would be much smaller than the rises that have already hit households due to capital costs and higher gas and coal prices.
Well, that’s just fine then.
461 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S UNIFICATION TAX
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (05:58 pm)
Julia Gillard is bonding Liberals and Greens like atoms of carbon and oxygen:
Support for the Government’s carbon pricing scheme has fallen over the last 2 weeks. 34% now support the scheme and 51% are opposed.
Opinion has polarized among voters for the major parties. Support among Labor voters has increased from 55% to 63% while opposition from Coalition voters has increased from 73% to 80%. Support has fallen among Greens voters – 2 weeks ago they split 78% support/11% oppose compared to this week’s 56% support/24% oppose.
I credit Tim Flannery.
IS RAVING! IS RANTING!
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (12:23 pm)
Mungo MacCallum finds himself distressed by bitchy banners at last week’s anti-tax rally:
My mother used to have a homely saying for it: “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
If this adage is to be applied to the events of last week, it would appear that Tony Abbott is raving ratbag, a ranting bigot whose ignorance of science is matched only by his lack of manners.
You’ll notice the missing “a” between “is” and “raving” in the above paragraph. Just another example of the quality editing over at the Drum. MacCallum’s call for manners is a recent development, as we discover from a 2005 speechby Clive Hamilton:
I’m told that at this event last year Phillip Adams called the Prime Minister an arse-hole. Mr Howard seems to attract scatological epithets. In his book of a few months ago, Mungo MacCallum referred to him as “the unflushable turd” …
Sooner or later the unflushable turd gets flushed away. And I hope that there will not be too many more Public Education Days before we can celebrate the return of a pure white toilet bowl.
Tell me who Hamilton’s friends are, and I’ll tell you who Hamilton is. In the comments following a 2008 Crikey itemby Mungo on Kevin Rudd, this appeared:
That BITCH Julia is after his job!
Nice friends you’ve got there, Mungo.
(Via Currency Lad)
CRICKET FIRST, DUMB SYMBOLISM SECOND
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (12:19 pm)
Gotta have priorities:
Sri Lanka put off marking “Earth Hour” because it clashed with the cricket World Cup, an official said Sunday.
Sri Lanka had joined the WWF drive to switch off lights for an hour on Saturday to display its green credentials, but the day-night match between England and the home team forced a rethink.
Earth Hour was subsequently rescheduled using a tactic pioneered by Cate Blanchett. Meanwhile, proud Tweed Heads resident Tabitha N. sends word of her town’s Earth Hour success:
The results of Earth Hour are in with Byron Bay leading the way in reducing power consumption in northern New South Wales ...
The most dramatic drop was in Byron Bay, where energy consumption plunged by more than seven per cent compared to the same time the previous week.
Ballina came in second, saving 6.6 per cent.
Tweed Heads, however, recorded a point one per cent increase.
“It’s a good start,” emails Tab, “but Tweed Heads must try harder next time. Nothing less than a seven per cent increase will suffice.” In Canada, reader R. Black claims global victory:
Edmonton failed to post a drop in power usage during Saturday night’s Earth Hour.
Usage actually increased by 1.01% compared to the same time last week.
NO COMMENT
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (12:16 pm)
This Crikey piece used to have several comments attached to it. But they were very bad comments and now all the comments have gone away. In fact, the stealthily-updated post doesn’t even allow comments any more.
I wonder what could have happened.
UPDATE. This is what happened.
ATOMIC LIFESAVER
Tim Blair – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (12:14 pm)
Still scared of nuclear energy? Well, it just might be that you’re uninformed:
Coal, oil and even solar power all kill more people than the much maligned nuclear power …
For every terrawatt of energy produced coal kills 161 people. Oil costs 36 lives for the same amount of energy. Nuclear, however, causes only 0.04 deaths per terrawatt produced. To put it another way, for every person who dies as a result of nuclear power, 4,000 people die due to coal.
Also, government-funded Australian insulation scams are infinitely deadlier than Fukushima radiation.
(Via Instapundit)
On hypocrisy, the abuse of the Left and another balanced Q&A panel
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (06:44 am)
The Australian’s Cut and Paste is in excellent form today.
No clear leaders, no clear aims - and Obama’s war will achieve what?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (06:41 am)
With most Americans not quite realising it, their government haphazardly went to war on March 19 against Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Hostilities were barely acknowledged, covered with euphemism ("kinetic military action, particularly on the front-end") and without a clear goal. Two Obama administration principals were out of the country: the President in Chile and the Secretary of State in France. Members of congress, not consulted, responded angrily across the political spectrum. Some analysts discerned a precedent for militarily attacking Israel.
Perhaps Barack Obama will be lucky and Gaddafi will collapse quickly. But no one knows who the rebels are and the open-ended effort could well become protracted, costly, terroristic and politically unpopular. If so, Libya risks becoming Obama’s Iraq or worse if Islamists take over the country.
UPDATE
AP fact-checks Obama’s statements:
There may be less than meets the eye to President Barack Obama’s statements Monday night that NATO is taking over from the U.S. in Libya and that U.S. action is limited to defending people under attack there by Moammar Gadhafi’s forces.
In transferring command and control to NATO, the U.S. is turning the reins over to an organization dominated by the U.S., both militarily and politically. In essence, the U.S. runs the show that is taking over running the show.
And the rapid advance of rebels in recent days strongly suggests they are not merely benefiting from military aid in a defensive crouch, but rather using the multinational force in some fashion — coordinated or not — to advance an offensive.
This effectively means the Libyan rebels (whoever they are) fighting this civil war now has an air force supplied by the United States.
I’m not sure that this is the UN resolution authorising military action to save civilians intended, or what US taxpayers want.
The craziness of this is that neither NATO nor the US seems clear about who it is that they are actually fighting for:
Intelligence on the rebel forces battling Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has shown “flickers” of al Qaeda or Hezbollah presence but there is still no detailed picture of the emerging opposition, NATO’s top operations commander said on Tuesday.“We are examining very closely the content, composition, the personalities, who are the leaders of these opposition forces,” Admiral James Stavridis, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe and also commander of U.S. European Command, said during testimony at the U.S. Senate.
And rather than end civilian deaths, the UN intervention seems to be prolonging a deadly civil war that ebbs and flows:
Libyan government tanks and rockets pounded rebel forces into a panicked full retreat Tuesday after an hours long, back-and-forth battle that highlighted the superior might of Moammar Gadhafi’s forces, even hobbled by international airstrikes.
No such strikes were launched during the fighting in Bin Jawwad, where rebels attempting to march on Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte ended up turning around and fleeing east under overcast skies. Some fleeing rebels shouted, “Sarkozy, where are you?” — a reference to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the strongest supporters of international airstrikes…
Rebel forces had been on the brink of defeat by government forces before a U.N.-mandated no-fly zone and campaign of strikes by the U.S. and its allies helped them regain lost territory. It is unclear, however, if international support exists to deepen the air campaign and attack Gadhafi’s heavy weaponry enough to help the rebels make further advances. Some countries, including Russia, contend the airstrikes already have gone beyond the U.N. mandate of protecting civilians from attacks by Gadhafi.
Mates’ rates on the Reserve Bank board?
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (06:08 am)
Where are all those Howard haters who were so exercised by that regime’s alleged stifling of dissent? I haven’t seen many of them myself:
WAYNE Swan has terminated the Reserve Bank board memberships of two persistent government critics and courted controversy with their replacements.
The Treasurer yesterday appointed former prime minister Paul Keating’s principal economic adviser, John Edwards, and the executive vice-president of BG Group Australia, Catherine Tanna, to five-year terms on the Reserve Bank board.
They will replace Warwick McKibbin and Don McGauchie, both of whom publicly argued that the Labor government’s massive stimulus spending has made it more difficult for the Reserve Bank to manage interest rates… Professor McKibbin said he was disappointed not to have been given a third term and thought he had “done a good job”.
Ms Tanna is an unusual appointment because she is an active chief executive with no board experience beyond membership of BG’s subsidiary boards, and is effectively the Australian representative of an overseas-listed company.
By appointing her, the government has also departed from a long-standing tradition of having someone with knowledge of rural interests on the board, a move criticised by Nationals leader Warren Truss.
Both new appointees are, however, said to be non-political. That may well be true, but I’ve often found that when the media and insitutions describe someone as non-political, it’s because they share that person’s views.
Keating bayonets the survivors, starting with Robertson
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (06:00 am)
Paul Keating settles scores with the man likely to lead what’s left of the NSW Labor party:
Mr Keating is standing by a stinging letter he wrote to Mr Robertson in 2008, which said: “If the Labor Party’s stocks ever get so low as to require your services in its parliamentary leadership, it will itself have no future.”
He reaffirmed his stance on ABC 1’s 7.30.
“Were Robertson to be elected leader he would have no moral vantage point to lead from,” he said....
Mr Keating says party machinations have destroyed New South Wales Labor, which is why it suffered such a huge defeat at the election last weekend after 16 years in government.
“What’s gone wrong is that the Labor government of New South Wales had its moral authority torn away from it,” he said....
“The thing that characterises this group (former state secretary Karl Bitar, Mark Arbib, Robertson) is they believe in nothing. They’re not about policy, just about winning the next election, just about poll reading, winning the next election.”
One thing in Keating I both admire and abhor - like being attracted to what’s dangerous - is his excitement at hearing the sound of two heads being knocked together; his love of creative destruction, his rising to any dare, his defence through attack. Never ask this man if he stands by some criticism - unless you want him to go in even harder.
The problem with Richo is that he’s better than this
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (05:25 am)
Graham Richardson always prided himself on being the ruthless pragmatist - the “whatever-it-takes” clear-eyed rationalist.
Unfortunately the Labor fixer seems even now to confuse a keen eye for populism with a keen eye for truth. I say “unfortunately”, because he could be - should be - better than that,
His views on global warming, for instance, seem driven once again by that old-whatever-it-takes approach. Check where the votes are and go with that flow. I say that not simpy because his standard warmist position is one I diasgree with, but because it seems uninformed by any real study or special knowledge. He’s been lazy.
Which takes me to this piece by Richardson today, commenting on one of the reasons for Labor’s heavy defeat in NSW:
The commentariat, the elites and Treasury departments take for granted that privatising electricity is the right way to go. It is economically rational and therefore anyone who opposes privatisation is irrational. There are obviously millions of troglodyte irrationals out there because I have never seen a poll that showed even 40 per cent of voters ever liked the idea.
You don’t need a PhD in economics to work out that in private hands prices always go up.
Once again, all the hallmarks of Richardson’s style are there. There’s the appeal to the poll numbers as some arbiter of the truth, which leads Richardson to declare a position that is superficially popular - but contradicted by the evidence.
If Richardson did have a PdD in economics, or even the slightest appetite for research, he’d discover that, on the whole, businesses in private hands in a free but well-regulated market do indeed tend to be more efficient than government monopolies. In private hands, prices tend to go down, not up. Think your phones services would be as cheap, and the options as spectacular, if Telstra still ran the whole show as a government monopoly? Even wondered why East German cars never conquered the world, but West German ones did?
But let’s confine Richardson’s claim to just the power industry. Once again, the evidence suggests he is simply wrong - and in private hands, prices go down:
VICTORIAN consumers are paying less for electricity now than in the days when the state government owned and ran the power industry, undermining claims by unions in NSW that privatisation means higher prices.
A new report by Victoria’s utilities regulator shows power costs for some small businesses have fallen by more than 20 per cent since former premier Jeff Kennett sold off the industry in the mid-1990s....
The Essential Services Commission report found households in Victoria are paying between 3.1per cent and 6.2 per cent less for power than before privatisation, depending on the level of usage. For example, last year the average bill for a family consuming 6500kwh of electricity was $955, compared with $1018 in 1994-95, adjusted for inflation… .
A report last year by the Australian Energy Market Commission found the Victorian experience “shows that effective retail competition can deliver the efficiently priced, reliable and secure energy supply required by households and small business”.
In the course of their oversight duties, regulators also assemble data that allows comparisons of different utilities’ performance. In Australia this data shows privately owned poles and wires businesses are more efficient than their government-owned counterparts. A fortnight ago a report by the Australian Energy Regulator corroborated findings that had been published in work by former British regulator Stephen Littlechild and Australian consultant Bruce Mountain. According to the AER, depending on the measure used, the Victorian businesses spend between 20 per cent and 50 per cent less than their government-owned counterparts in NSW and Queensland in operating and maintaining their lines.
The private companies’ cost savings have not been at the expense of supply reliability. Though one-off events such as bushfires mean it is difficult to make short-term comparisons, across the long term, reliability in the Victorian, NSW and Queensland businesses has been similar. Regulatory control ensures the cost savings get passed back to consumers as lower prices, but the lack of savings in the government-owned businesses prevents such benefits.
The message for the NSW and Queensland governments is their electricity consumers would see lower prices if the state-owned poles and wires businesses were privatised. This would also allow debt retirement. In the case of NSW, sale of these businesses is likely to raise $15bn, approaching half the state’s present debt.
And today:
(Professor Ross Garnaut) cited state-owned network providers in Queensland and NSW that had significantly outspent their privately owned counterparts in Victoria. For government-owned network service providers there was an “unfortunate confluence” of incentives that may be leading to “gold plating” of network infrastructure.
Richardson is now a commentator, not a vote-harvester. This entails a greater responsibility to the truth if he wishes to lives up to the full potential of that privileged position.
His contributions to the debates on global warming and privatisation show that as a columnist, he’d still make a standard NSW Labor Right politician in the Hawker Britton mould.
Syria’s dictator now trembles
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (05:15 am)
The fall of the Syrian dictator would have a far bigger impact on the Middle East than the fall of Libya’s. For a start, Syria sponsors Hezbollah and arms Hamas:
Syria’s Cabinet resigned Tuesday to help quell a wave of popular fury that erupted more than a week ago and is now threatening President Bashar Assad’s 11-year rule in one of the most authoritarian and closed-off nations in the Middle East.
Assad, whose family has controlled Syria for four decades, is trying to calm the growing dissent with a string of concessions. He is expected to address the nation in the next 24 hours to lift emergency laws in place since 1963 and moving to annul other harsh restrictions on civil liberties and political freedoms.
More than 60 people have died since March 18 as security forces cracked down on protesters, Human Rights Watch said.
Behold the man
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (04:59 am)
One of fine things about Ricky Ponting’s captaincy has been his growth as a man - something we’ve all the privilege of watching:
Being captain of Australia has not only changed my life, it has also taught me the real significance of values, the true meaning of accountability, a deeper respect for mateship and an overwhelming feeling of national pride and responsibility.
It has also taught me to become a teacher, a trusted confidant and a better friend. You develop skills that you never thought you had, ensuring you provide your team with the best possible environment and direction to be successful. You learn to take criticism on board, you learn to give feedback in a way that your players respond to, and you learn to set an example in your everyday performance around the team.
Bali bye to Gillard’s centre
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (04:54 am)
When will the Gillard Government stop trailing its dead cat through one Asian meeting after another, embarrassing itself and wasting the time of others:
AUSTRALIA’S controversial plan for a refugee processing centre in East Timor was effectively taken off the agenda before last night’s opening of the Bali ministerial summit, with senior officials making it clear the proposal would not form part of the final discussions.
While Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Immigration Minister Chris Bowen met with counterparts last night to begin negotiations on a regional asylum-seeker framework, The Australian understands East Timor’s government has decided to reject the approach for a centre to house 4000 refugees.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, several senior officials intimately involved in the talks said the Timor proposal had not formed part of any of the official-level discussions that began yesterday, nor was there an expectation it would feature in future negotiations.
Asked if any reference to the Timor centre would be included in today’s official communique, one senior official told The Australian: “No.”
The omission is a snub to Canberra, which had framed Bali as the venue for discussing the idea, launched in July by Julia Gillard in an attempt to suppress as an election issue the surge of boatpeople arrivals.
Apparrently I was once saved by Geoff Clark and never noticed
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, March 30, 11 (04:45 am)
Former ATSIC leader Geoff Clark invents a rescue which he then peddles outside the court as an explanation for my invented “racism”:
Mr Clark later claimed outside court that he had once come to Bolt’s aid, preventing him from being beaten up, ‘’so maybe he thinks he owes me’’.
Unlike Clark, we will not comment outside the court on matters inside it, and I will not allow comments here on it, either.
It’s a refreshing sign of the respect that civil libertarians have for our courts that non of the prominent campaigners for freedom of speech has sought to influence the trial by expressing an opinion on whether I should be allowed to express my political views. I urge you also to refrain from commenting on this case on any of today’s threads.
Twice as many Greens oppose a carbon dioxide tax
Andrew Bolt – Tuesday, March 29, 11 (07:01 pm)
Tim Blair blames Tim Flannery:
Support for the Government’s carbon pricing scheme has fallen over the last 2 weeks. 34% now support the scheme and 51% are opposed.Opinion has polarized among voters for the major parties. Support among Labor voters has increased from 55% to 63% while opposition from Coalition voters has increased from 73% to 80%. Support has fallen among Greens voters – 2 weeks ago they split 78% support/11% oppose compared to this week’s 56% support/24% oppose.
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