Where is Abbott on Internet censorship?
Vocal concern by Liberals changed the Liberal leader and blocked the ETS in the senate. I think we should all make sure that the Liberal party knows what we think of the ALPs Internet censorship legislation. May I suggest that you call or email the office of Tony Abbott and tell him that you oppose the ALPs mandatory Internet filter. I called and emailed his electoral office.
Parliamentary Office (Canberra):-
Tel: (02) 6277 4022
Email: Tony.Abbott.MP@aph.gov.au
Electoral Office (Manly):-
Tel: (02) 9977 6411
http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/Pages/contact.aspx
Australia still in recession
Never listen to media economists. Today the ABS released the national accounts which show that the GDP/person shrank by 0.4%. However, the media economists will simply repeat the headline figure of 0.2% GDP growth.
Of course, it is GDP/person that matters, not just GDP.
In the last five quarters, GDP/person has been -0.4%, -1.4%, 0%, 0%, -0.4%… which seems to indicate that we are still not out of recession. Or perhaps (if you count 0% as positive) that we could be facing a double-dip recession.
I’m not trying to be pessimistic here. Australia is still performing relatively well compared to the rest of the world and I don’t expect the economy to fall apart. But what we are seeing now is the hangover from the stimulus party. About a year ago the government borrowed from overseas to throw around a lot of money. One consequence was a slightly higher rate of personal consumption earlier this year. Another consequence is that the Australia dollar has appreciated, leading to lower net exports. In the September quarter, net exports declined by $5 billion, which reduced economic growth by 1.6 percentage points.
In other worrying news, private investment also continues to detract from growth (this time by 0.2 percentage points). The strongest contributor to growth was an increase in private non-farm inventories (adding 1.1 percentage points to growth) and government investment (adding 0.3 percentage points).
Another look at anarchy
Anarchy has a bad rap. When people hear the word they generally think of angry kids wearing black and burning cars. Or of people running wild in the streets, fighting and looting. But that isn’t anarchy, it is chaos. The difference is important.
Some people claim that anarchy would lead to chaos. Perhaps. That is a discussion worth having. But first people need to recognise that anarchy is not defined as chaos.
Anarchy is the radical extension of classical liberal thought. Liberals believe that people should generally be allowed to control their own lives, with limited government involvement. More radical libertarians believe the government should get out of everything, except police, courts and army. Anarchists simply take it one further and ask why the free market couldn’t supply security and arbitration services, so that the government could disappear entirely.
This is a reasonable question.
Is the government truly the ‘paramount’ owner of land in Australia?
This is a post I found on the Peter Spencer support group at Agmates and the Author has agreed to its cross posting here. An interesting discussion has ensued over there and I am sure that some of you might become interested in getting involved. (Note the links he has given.)
By Alex Davidson
I often hear my betters sagely telling me that I don’t really have a leg to stand on over concerns that the government is taking something that doesn’t belong to it when it imposes controls upon the use of private land, because, they say, the government is really the ‘paramount owner’ of all land in Australia, and it is only through the government’s good grace that any of us have any ownership rights at all.
When I first came across this idea some years ago, I was quite shocked. So that means we are living in some sort of defacto communist society, not one based upon private property rights and freedom, as I had naively assumed?
Since then I have come to the conclusion that the whole concept of the government as paramount owner is a lot like an urban myth, repeated over and over again by collectivists, environmental fundamentalists, some judges, and the big government crowd, in the hope that it will eventually stick and be accepted as common law, if it isn’t already.
What I haven’t found is a reasoned argument to support it. Instead, it appears that the first claims of Australian governments to ‘own’ land in Australia are merely that – claims – and do not withstand the true test of ownership as arising from homesteading or contractual exchange. (For more on this point, see here, here, and here.)
Furthermore, whenever I go to publications on Australian property law, I invariably find they are written by authors who seem very sympathetic to the ideas of Marx & Proudhon in regard to property. Where are those who argue that property and ownership do not arise from government, and that taking property without consent is theft?
Snowball Earth
For a different kind of hockey stick check out this article:-
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=3553
An extract:-
I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that.
So what does it tell us about, say, the past 500 years? (the youngest datum is age=0.0951409 (thousand years before present) — perhaps younger snow doesn’t work so well?)
The charts in this article make for an interesting narrative.
p.s. the title of my post is dedicated to Graeme Bird. 
Thursday is the new Tuesday
The SMH reports that the cheapest day for petrol has now shifted to Thursday. No big deal – supply and demand – as people changed their habits to benefit from cheap Tuesday prices, it was inevitable. Which makes this reaction somewhat laughable:
Motoring body NRMA wants oil companies and servos explain why the cheapest day to buy fuel has quietly changed from Wednesday to Thursday during the past three weeks.
It’s the first change to the weekly price cycle since 2004, when it moved from Tuesday to Wednesday.
What planet are these people on?
It means motorists are continuing to miss out on cheaper prices, NRMA president Wendy Machin said.
The latest shift comes as the Federal Government urged for petrol prices to be investigated.
“Something untoward is happening with the weekly price cycle,” Ms Machin said.
Changing price cycle to match demand would be considered common sense to most people… but when it comes to petrol, it’s something untoward.
Mea culpa
You were right and I was wrong.
Not all of you. But people like Joe Cambria, Kirk Fletcher, Sinclair Davidson, Jim Fryar, Tim Andrews and Michael Sutcliffe were right all along. You warned me about the ALP. You said the days of Hawke/Keating/Walsh were over. I didn’t listen. Mea culpa, mea culpa.
Before the last 2007 election I suggested that Rudd would be a dull but safe Prime Minister who wouldn’t do much, and so would be fairly harmless. And there were people like Tanner and Emerson in the background to keep the party sane. These weren’t particularly high expectations… but they have turned out to be a massive over-estimate of the quality of the Rudd government. He has been a huge disappointment.
Fisking the Guardian on climate change
When the plogosphere (political blogosphere) was first kicking off in Australia (nearly 10 years ago) one common method of expression was the “fisking” where you include somebody else’s article and intersperse it with your own response. That seems to have gone out of fashion… but being the retro sort of guy I am I thought I’d bring back the fisk in response to the recent “common editorial” coordinated by the Guardian and published in 56 newspapers in 45 countries.
Saving the world on a shoestring budget
Worried about your carbon footprint? Want to save the planet on a shoestring budget? What to do?
You could vote for the ETS at the next election. Apparently it will reduce your emissions by 5%. Or if you have an average size Australian carbon footprint apparently you could fork out A$6.15 per annum and buy the equivalent 5% of offsets from PopOffsets. Or if you seriously want to save the planet from man made CO2 then elliminate 100% of your footprint for just A$123 per annum.
How do they do it? This is what their website says:-
PopOffsets is unique – the first project in the world that, simply and transparently, enables individuals and organizations to offset their carbon footprint by funding the unmet need for family planning and the removal of the many barriers to women who want smaller families.
Our project recognizes the intrinsic links between increasing CO2 emissions, climate change and the world’s ever-growing population.
Research is indicating that providing a currently unmet need for family planning is the lowest cost way of reducing CO2 emissions and climate change – possibly less than one third of the cost of other technological fixes – without any environmental downsides.
Irrespective of AGW and carbon emissions this is a charity that I could readily support. Donating contraceptives to poor women in poor nations seems like a genereous thing to do whichever way you dice it.
Higgins & Bradfield by-elections
The Liberals have won comfortably in both the Melbourne-based Higgins and Sydney-based Bradfield by-elections, getting over 50% of the primary vote.
The Labor Party didn’t run in either electorate, so it was the Green Party that was the major opposition. In Higgins (Melbourne) the Greens picked the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-capitalist, anti-internet, anti-sex campaigner crazy Clive Hamilton… who managed to pick up a respectable 35%. I hope that a lot of that is a protest, or simply an anti-Liberal vote, because it’s scary to think that 35% of voters want us to be poorer.
Of the minor parties, the best performances came from the Sex Party (3.4%, 3.5%) and the Democratic Labour Party (2.1%, 3.9%). The Democrats (remember them?) got 2.4% in Higgins, One Nation did poorly (0.3%, 0.6%) and surprisingly Family First didn’t run. In Bradfield the Christian Democrats got 3.4% of the vote spit between 9 candidates, including the donkey vote.
Interestingly, there were three climate change specific parties. The climate skeptics got 1.7% and 1.8%, which was quite good considering they didn’t get their party registered in time and so had to run as independents. The climate change alarmists got 1.1% (Bradfield), and the nuclear energy mob got 1% (Bradfield).
The Liberal Democrats got 0.4% 0.5% (Higgins) and 0.7% 0.8% (Bradfield). It doesn’t look like much, but it is an improvement on the 2007 federal election. For instance, in 2007 the LDP got 0.1% in Wentworth (Sydney), 0.1% in Bennelong (Sydney), and 0.1% in La Trobe (Melbourne). At this rate of improvement, they’ll be in power in 10 years.
Should children work?
An interesting story.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/03/2761400.htm?section=justin
Quarry owner Dirk Karreman is appealing against a directive from a mining inspector that bans his grandson from using equipment at the Redlands operations on Brisbane’s bayside.
Lawyers for Mr Karreman told the court nine-year-old Dane Karreman operated the loader efficiently and safely, that he had done so on weekends and had more than 500 hours of experience.
Lawyers for the State Government say it is an unnecessary risk.
My father had me and my siblings working on construction sites from about that age. I think it was good for us. On the farm we were driving tractors at quite a young age also. Risky perhaps but better than sitting on your hands.
Up the Jolly Roger
Ahoy there me matey. Some lily-livered sprogs be joinin the great grand political game.
http://apcmag.com/Content.aspx?id=4521
But shiver me timbers! Them membership fees will quickly send em to Davy Jones’ Locker.
Dance with Chance.
I’m currently reading a book with the above title, as I’m profoundly interested in trying to figure out the interplay of luck/chance and the amount of control we do really have in life. It’s not much I think.
While reading it I came across an interesting statistic, which appears very timely seeing the politicians are interested in factors like prediction and control at present.
Japan has the highest rate of cigarette consumption in the Western world (big countries). In fact the place just billows so much cigarette smoke that one day the IPCC may well suggest an ETS of Japanese smoking obsession. ☺
Japan has also close to the highest if not the highest big western country longevity rates in the world too.
Statisticians find it awfully hard to find an answer to this glaring anomaly. Of course the possible answer could be diet related. However if that’s the case then smoking may not necessarily be the leading cause of death in the West that we’re often told it is. I’m just throwing this up, as I don’t really know and it is in no way a suggestion that anyone should take up the habit. This is particularly so since big stats doesn’t necessarily lead to individual fortune
Japan’s longevity and very high per capita smoking offers an interesting insight that lots of things are really non-linear. This is possibly food for thought as a large number of politicians try to peddle a huge government redistribution money grab under the pretext of saving the planet.
Things are usually not so simple.
A Long Day in Politics
They say a week can be a long time in politics, and this past week has certainly showed that pretty well. But there’s more to life than the Liberal leadership, so here’s a roundup of items you might have missed:
- Honduras finally had their elections – with a big voter turnout. Conservative Porfirio Lobo is the new president.
- Over in the US, Republican Huckabee has found himself in an awkward position. It seems as Governor, he granted clemency to Maurice Clemmons some nine years ago, who most recently just shot and killed four coppers. This will no doubt damage his future bid for the presidency.
- Will the Reserve Bank increase interest rates today? If so, by how much? Place your bets! [Update: Yes they did, to 3.75%]
- In other news, Bernie Fraser says that Australia must adopt a fairer, more progressive tax system.
- The UN is digging in over the Climategate whistleblower scandal, declaring, “The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report”
- And speaking of climate… that brings us back to the Liberals. The Punch has a live blog of the unfolding saga. Turnbull is still insisting he’ll win.
UPDATE: Abbott wins by 1 vote
UPDATE 2:
So much for Hockey having the numbers – he was out in first round. First round was:
Hockey – 23
Turnbull – 26
Abbott – 35
Second round was Abbott 42, Turnbull 41
The partyroom vote to oppose the ETS in the senate was much clearer with a clear majority opposed: 54-29
Roger Douglas to speak at LDP conference
From the LDP website:-
Sir Roger Douglas, the origin of Rogernomics and New Zealand’s champion of free markets, will be the keynote speaker at the LDP National Conference on 24 January 2010, at the Balmain Leagues Club in Sydney. The conference is open to members, supporters and the media.
This event should be of much interest to LDP members and followers. As New Zealand finance minister during the 80s Roger Douglas slashed tariffs and opened up the New Zealand economy. In many ways he was to New Zealand what Ronald Reagan was to the USA.
Liberal leader
The showdown for Liberal leader will happen on Tuesday. At the moment it is a fight between Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, though Joe Hockey also might join the mix. Kevin Andrews might have another go too.
Some other potential leaders aren’t putting their hands up this time around. One option that I quite like is Andrew Robb. Other names sometimes thrown around for future leader include Julie Bishop, Peter Dutton and Christopher Pyne.
So what do you think, dear reader? (Note: click on the poll below to take you to the poll main page, then vote. You can choose more than one option, but you can only vote once.)
| Who should lead the Liberal Party? | |
| Malcolm Turnbull | |
| Tony Abbott | |
| Joe Hockey | |
| Kevin Andrews | |
| Andrew Robb | |
| Julie Bishop | |
| Peter Dutton | |
| Christopher Pyne | |
| pollcode.com free polls | |
Liberal party compromise
For political junkies the talk of the last week has been about the Liberal party split on whether or not to support the ALP’s Emissions Trading System (ETS). On one side is Turnbull/Hockey/Pyne and the moderate wing of the party who support an ETS… and on the other side is Abbott/Robb/Minchin and the conservative wing of the party who are desperately trying to stop the legislation from passing.
It’s difficult to see a good outcome for the Liberals.
Abbott has said he will challenge for the leadership on Tuesday. Turnbull responded by throwing a hand grenade into the party, insulting the anti-ETS crowd and insisting that people back him or the Liberals will be destroyed. If Turnbull wins then we are stuck with bad climate policy, angry conservatives deserting the party (which is probably good for the LDP), and a divided parliamentary party with prominent figures on the backbench. But if he loses and quits politics then the Liberals could potentially face a Wentworth by-election (which they may well lose), angry moderates, lots of Turnbull quotes to use in the next election, another unhappy ex-leader, and then we may still get stuck with the ETS anyway.
Delaying the vote until February won’t fix the problem. That just means that the debate goes on for another three months and then the Liberals face the same problem again.
The best compromise might be for the Liberals to consider backing a carbon tax, linked to tax cuts and with a McKitrick clause. This would allow the party to unambiguously oppose all types of ETS, it would be a better policy with a wide range of support from economists and some green groups, the associated tax cuts and McKitrick clause should help to placate some conservatives, and the the moderates can be happy that the party is going to “do something”.
Turnbull and Hockey are unlikely to support this position, but Abbott has shown some interest in the idea of a carbon tax.
Climategate
Obviously the leaked emails from East Anglia University are quite topical. I don’t have much to say here at the moment that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. And I’m really just putting this up so those that want to comment on the issue have a space to do so. However I’ve had plenty to say about it in comments at the John Quiggin blog. So if you want to know my view then take a look.
Here is one interesting twist on how the leak might have occured:-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/23/the-.crutape-letters%C2%AE-an-alternate-explanation/
Attention Whore
Attention Whore
by Andrew Russell
It turns out that my last post was indeed convenient!
Video Game Blog Kotaku has recently revealed (via http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/11/atkinson-to-appeal-modern-warfare-2-ma15-classification/) that South Australian Attorney General and arch nemesis to all video game lovers in Australia, Michael Atkinson (member for Croydon) is going to appeal the MA15+ rating for the video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ and attempt to ‘persuade’ the OFLC to refuse the game classification; essentially asking for the game to be banned.
I am not interested in Modern Warfare 2, however I believe several things about this game make Atkinson’s move rather significant.
- Modern Warfare 2 is an extremely critically acclaimed game which many video game fans have been anticipating for a long time.
- The game has had an extraordinary amount of advertising and media coverage; on the first day of the game’s release the game made US$310 million in the US and UK alone. This makes Modern Warfare 2 the largest entertainment launch in history.
- The game was released on November 10. The game cleared the OFLC’s procedures and bureaucracy a rather long time ago.
Thus, Atkinson is attacking a game which has already been released and had spent a very significant amount of time being classified. He could have checked out this game’s content (and then go to the press to launch a moral panic) when it was being ran through the OFLC. Doing this is well within his powers.
But he didn’t.
Why?
-
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