Thank God that's over!

The national parliamentary session has finally come to an end and it's goodbye to all that rancour, pettiness and negativity for a month or so.  Even the looming Silly Session appears attractive, when compared to the disappointing reality of this year's politics.  In other countries where voters have returned 'hung' parliaments (the UK, for example) politicians and the media have  managed to accept the consequences of the people's vote and to get on with their job in an adult, mature way.  Perhaps their more diverse media might even have conceded that the passage of over 250 pieces of legislation by a 'hung' government deserved some modest recognition, rather than today's depiction of the government's achievement as  'a political year riven by crisis... and that ends that way'. (The Australian).  It was left to an amateur blogger (Greg Jericho ) to attempt a more considered analysis of the political year's passage.  See here.

And it is to the public broadcaster that we have to turn to find an invaluable data-set with which to inform the debate on coal-seam-gas mining.  Using the tools that computerised data-mining provide the ABC has come up with an innovative web site (here) where multiple sources of information have been aggregated  to show in map form all 4000 sites, where coal-gas-seam mining currently occurs.  Interrogating the map allows readers to find information about all sites and has been prepared in anticipation of an expected expansion to 40,000 sites. 

Would that more journalists would follow this model!

Plumbing the depths

Can there be anything more unedifying than politicians haggling over which of their 'tough' policies would have prevented the latest tragic boat-people disaster, where desperate men, women and their children have lost their lives trying to get to Australia?