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?

Pyrrhic Victories?

Against all the odds the PM has legislated to impose a price on carbon (a task attempted without success by four previous political leaders).  This was a considerable achievement.  However, the Opposition leader has 'pledged in blood' (!) to repeal this legislation as soon as he achieves office.

In the meantime the PM has had to give up on her plan to maintain off-shore processing of asylum-seekers arriving here by boat, after the High Court ruled this processing illegal.  The Opposition refused to support new legislation to empower executive government to maintain off-shore processing, even though they support off-shore processing  too.  Not sure who failed here.


We will have to wait to see the repercussions of the actions of the PM and the Opposition leader his week.


But if the Opposition is elected to government in 2013, it would appear that the PM's carbon pricing legislation will  be repealed, rendering today's achievement meaningless.    But an Opposition victory on this matter could prove to be messy and difficult to realise and will bring with it its own painful, political price.  Perhaps we will see new tax slogans appear, as the compensation for the costs of the clean energy legislation are withdrawn.


And could it be that, if the Opposition comes to government, it too may have to embrace some sort of 'Malaysian solution' as the only off-shore processing option available to them to stop the boats in the face of the inevitable court challenges to Nauru?


Pyrrhic victories all round this week, except for the asylum-seekers, of course.

Reality show?

What's going on?

The Australian media keep spruiking talk of a leadership challenge to the PM based entirely on reports from the Opposition.

There is turmoil on the global markets, where in Europe, Merkel and Sarkozy are  engaged in a grim danse macabre and in the USA dysfunctional politics threatens to tip their country into recession.  A case of politicians turning difficult economic conditions into catastrophe.

Meanwhile our politicians are obsessed with a manufactured 'crisis' about a small number of asylum-seekers  coming here by boat. This hokey-pokey is just part of

                 the growing tendency on both sides of politics to put the Left
                 policy in, and take the Right policy out, the Left policy in until
                 voters shake us all about. Then do a quick opinion poll and
                 turn around, and that’s what it’s all about!  See here

Cognitive dissonance

How can it be that there is so little confidence in Australia at the moment, when most Western countries would be more than happy to be in our  economic shoes?     Does it have anything to do with the way media is busy constructing politics and society as a sort of tv reality show, full of strife and with misery to come?  The preoccupation with gloom and doom seems particularly unreal to one who has seen Australia survive many truly difficult times in the past century and who has just returned from Europe, where there really are considerable economic problems to worry about.

Carbon tax

Rod Burgess believes we have three positions on tackling climate change :

     Labor's hybrid 50/50 capitalist-socialist scheme, 

     the rationalist-socialist policy offered by the Coalition, 

     and the romantic-socialist position of the Greens. 

Read more...