Aiming to follow up on his disastrous Q&A performance, Senator Steve Fielding elaborated on his views about asylum seeker policy this morning. At a doorstop interview he made an announcement about his “idea” for handling boat people. You can listen to the audio here (courtesy of 2UE’s Latika Bourke), but the essence of his reasoning seems to be:

• Boat people are jumping the queue;
• Each time we take a refugee who arrived by boat, we take one less person from overseas refugee camps;
• This is unfair to people at “the front of the queue” who have been waiting in camps for years; and
• We need to return the queue-jumpers to overseas camps and put them at “the back of the queue”.

There are all sorts of concerns one could raise with this, some of which were put to Fielding during the doorstop (e.g., cost, obligations under international law, etc.). Read more »

The announcement today by Kevin Rudd at the National Press Club was a big one. It took the “political narrative” by the scruff of the neck and yanked it well and truly to that of the Government’s choosing. If the Opposition opens up Question Time on Monday with questions about insulation they will look like they are lacking policy on either health or education. They will have to go after Rudd (and Roxon and Gillard). Anything else is to abandon the playing field to the ALP in the two areas that will go a big way to determining the election.  Read more »

Via The Oz, this fortnight’s Newpoll comes in with the primaries running 41/40 to the Coalition (a one point increase for both), washing out into a two party preferred of 52/48 for Labor – a one point gain to the Coalition. The Greens are on 9 (down 3), while the broad “Others” are on 10 (up 1). This comes from a sample of 1162, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 3% mark.

Whacking Day never quite arrived this poll for Rudd – although one could argue that Rudd has been getting whacked for 4 months now. I’d imagine Labor Party types are now regretting gifting Abbott a free ride over the Christmas period. Read more »

If the normal rules of the game applied, Rudd’s confessional moment on Insiders would have been a foolish move. Certainly much of the press find it incomprehensible, while the Murdoch press, rather pathetically, found it a vindication of their anti-government campaign. But in normal political times, to admit that things have been stuffed up, would be seen as dangerously conceding political ground.

But what political ground? The editorial in The Australian summed up the media’s problem. In crowing over Rudd’s admission of his policy failings, nowhere does it really say what they are. To read the editorial, it seems to be only a problem of process and that he has taken on too much at once. There is no real problem with what the government is doing, just the way it is doing it. Read more »

Not much of a building industry

The scale of the Rudd government's stimulus-funded building spree has become apparent in new figures showing a record $4 billion of public money was spent on non-residential construction in the three months to December - a remarkable 62 per cent jump on the three months before. Read more »

It's a tragedy that men have died installing government subsidized roof insulation and that some homeowners have had house fires as a result of faulty installation.
However banging on about ministerial responsibility and calling for Environment Minister Peter Garrett's resignation allows the real culprits off scot free.
It was those business owners who contracted with householders to install roof insulation (and sometimes then sub-contracted the work to unskilled individuals) who are responsible for the dangerous manner in which some of this insulation was laid down.
Their greedy desire to gain as many customers as they could, do as many jobs as humanly achievable in the least possible time with insulation material which gave them the biggest profit margin, which led to the deaths and housefires as surely as night follows day.
They cared for nothing except their own bank balances and should be publicly condemned. Read more »

From Scripps Institution of Oceanography, with thanks to Clarencegirl at North Coast Voices for her link:

Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, issued the following statement in response to a recent request to address claims recently made by climate change denialists:

1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun, which we also measure. Read more »

This morning we awoke to The Australian trumpeting the latest Newspoll with the headline: Rudd Hits a New Low. It is not until the 8th paragraph of the story that we find out the ALP had actually increased its lead from the previous Newspoll – going from 52-48 to 53-47. The story didn’t mention at all that both the ALP and Liberal Party primary votes had dropped 1%.

Now sure, it was not a great poll for Rudd. His net satisfaction rating is dropping – it is now at 10 (50% satisfied; 40% dissatisfied), and Abbott’s net satisfaction rating did hit a new high – 7 (44% satisfied; 37% dissatisfied). So we are at a point where more people are dissatisfied with Rudd than with Abbott. But on the preferred PM rating, it is still Rudd by the length of the straight – 55% to 27%. (And note, at the same time in 2007, the opposition leader, Rudd led Howard 47% to 37%! ) Read more »

To watch Turnbull give his speech for the ETS two days ago was to be reminded of a few things. First, unlike many on the current Coalition front bench, he can actually string a few sentences together to make an argument. His subtle knifing of Abbott’s climate change plan as basically a slush fund to buy off polluters was, as widely noted, more damning and to the point than what the government has achieved over the last few days.

But that coherence was also because Turnbull was doing what used to be a straightforward thing for a Liberal, simply articulating what big business wants. They want certainty, something roughly in line with current international practice and all dressed up with a nod to the ‘market’ to disguise all the industry subsidies the ETS actually entails. Read more »

If KRudd (or state governments) wanted to improve educational use of computers in schools (and kindergartens), and wanted to DECREASE the government spend on IT in schools, all he’d have to do is point schools to the pages where Google offers a near-enterprise-level service free of charge: Google Applications for Education and Google Apps for Kindergartens through Secondary.

Then, there’d be no need to fund laptops – just low-end "diskless" (actually a flash disk) netbooks and a means-tested basic internet connection (enough to be ok for google apps, wiki pages, etc, but a bit painful for music/video).

By near-enterprise-level, providing the school joins before July 2010, I mean things like fine-grained filtering of email, along with not just email, but the other goodies like word processing, website creation, team assignments (via groups), lesson plan creation, integration with other schools… Read more »

Coalition politicians talking about the price of ice cream in supermarkets and Ministers rote-learning the prices of household goods makes it all seem as though we are having a re-run of the GST debate. Michelle Grattan thinks the GST almost cost the 1998 election. If you listen to Howard, or his Chief of Staff talk about it, it will be clear the opposite was true. GST gave a government that was floundering around with no agenda, look as though it had one (why would Howard have introduced it otherwise? Principle?) What helped him, of course, was that Labor didn’t have much to say at the time either, so it leapt on the GST making out like it was the biggest upheaval since the industrial revolution. When it was finally introduced and was seen to be no big deal, the malaise in Howard’s government returned. Read more »

The nasty maternalistic state

Sole parents and the unemployed beware! Jenny Macklin is trying to take half your income away. From July in the NT, and 2011 for the rest of the country, she wants to implement the most drastic change to our social security system ever. And almost nobody knows about it. She is expecting support from the very conservative Opposition front bench to have the legislation passed quickly so she can impose these new measures as soon as possible despite almost universal opposition from a wide range of groups. Read more »

Now we know what Turnbull was talking about. By trailing the government on the ETS over the last two years, the Coalition had made sure that the argument over the ETS was essentially between the government and the Greens. The result was to make the government appear indecisive and unprincipled over an issue that, lacking any real domestic program, it desperately needed to give it a sense of purpose.

Now that the Coalition has decided to make an issue of the government’s plans, the debate has been transformed. Instead of arguing how decisive or indecisive the government is, it has now turned into a contest between either taxing the polluters, or taxing voters to pay the polluters. If Rudd can’t make hay of that, he should sack his advisors. Read more »

… and no, I won’t be posting a photo of Tony Abbott in any form of swimwear to answer that question. But it’s interesting to observe the blue thread that runs through all of Abbott’s pronouncements – a mindset that Father Knows Best. The answer to the question posed by Ben Eltham in New Matilda, writing on the Coalition’s climate change policy [see this post for LP discussion] – “have the Libs lost faith in the market?” – is surely that conservatives don’t necessarily have faith in it. The Howard government’s practice, in many respects, was as much conservative as neo-liberal, if not more – an increasingly large state, a dirigiste approach to doling out public money to corporations, all manner of attempted pro-family social engineering, and so forth. Read more »

Serving it up to the hyperconnected generation

I read The Dumbest Generation over Christmas, though it came out in 2008. It’s a very satisfying polemic, as well as thoroughly researched — to the extent that I’m competent to judge — and its author Mark Bauerlein is a cut above the average as stylist.

The title refers to American teenagers and young adults up to about 30, and the book is as provocative as the it suggests. Bauerlein presents four theses: Read more »