During the election campaign, LP will be cross-posting selected items from the Centre for Policy Development’s discussion of policy issues, Thinking Points. Readers may also be interested in the CPD’s upcoming collection of policy ideas and priorities for the next term, More Than Luck.

Ben Eltham – CPD Fellow – asks what really happened now that climate change bills are dead in the water on both sides of the Pacific.

Published in ABC’s The Drum Unleashed on 29 July 2010.

Who killed the climate bills?

John F. Kennedy, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, once said that “victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan.”

Not so climate change legislation, which has now failed in both the US Congress and the Australian Senate. Read more »

Some related news stories:

• Afghan, Pakistani Reactions at Odds Over Leaked US Documents

The website known for publishing leaked materials from governments and other organizations has posted online part of more than 90,000 documents it says are secret U.S. military files about the Afghan war. Some of the leaked documents suggest the American military suspects Pakistan’s spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, of helping militants.

The website WikiLeaks posted documents that cover the period between January 2004 and December 2009.

Read more »

Those of you who’ve been wondering why any court would impose the sorts of absolutely ludicrous fines we’ve been seeing in internet “piracy” cases, penalties obscenely out of whack with the punishments for pretty much every other sort of crime, will be relieved to see a US judge returning some sanity to the process:

Judge Nancy Gertner knows that Joel Tenenbaum did it. Tenenbaum, the second US target of the RIAA’s five-year litigation campaign to complete a trial, eventually admitted his music-sharing liability on the stand—and Judge Gertner issued a directed verdict against him. But when the jury returned a $675,000 damage award, they went too far. Way too far.

In fact, according to Gertner, they trampled the Constitution’s “Due Process” clause. In a ruling today, the judge slashed the $675,000 award by a factor of 10, to $67,500. Read more »

Two short bits of news out of the US:

• Judge overturns moratorium on deepwater drilling at behest of the oil companies that have no idea how to fix it if something goes wrong; and
• Texas Republican Party announces platform to criminalise gay marriage, ban oral and anal sex, outlaw strip clubs and pornography. (Seriously – not just refuse to recognise gay marriage, but send people to jail for it.)

There’s something very rotten in the Deep South. Read more »

* A plague of locusts is due to hit Australia in time for the next federal election according to Bloomberg:
"Locusts are expected to hatch from August to October in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia states, according to the commission. The first-generation spring hatching alone could occur over a total area of 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres), the commission's Adriaansen said."
Read more »