On a couple of reports on tonight’s tv news, I saw a citizen of Mumbai being interviewed who demanded the Indian government go to war with Pakistan. That set me to wondering what such a war - and God forbid one is launched - would solve. War, increasingly, has lost its (perhaps always somewhat illusory) ability to resolve conflict after intensifying it. Read more »
Julie Bishop’s been copping it from unnamed “senior Liberals” for her poor performance as shadow Treasurer, who’ve helpfully implied Malcolm Turnbull shares their worries, and suggested a few names to replace her (Dutton, Robb, Hockey). Read more »
Piers Akerman Saturday, November 29, 2008 at 08:18pm:
The involvement of Britons among the terrorists responsible for the murders of more than 150 people in Mumbai last week signals another milestone in the march of multiculturalism and the failure of Western and democratised nations to deal with Islamists.
Read more »
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Here’s some photos from my Friday night excursion to West End - heading from the bus stop to Sling where I was meeting some friends for cocktails.
If you’d like to see a high res image, please click on the photos then click on ‘full view’ once you’re inside the gallery. Read more »
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
The Mumbai terror attacks are horrendous and to be roundly and loudly condemned. But, as with all events of this nature (particularly those which involve attacks on Westerners), inevitably there’s been a rush to inscribe their significance within a political frame - the prime candidate being the war on terror. Andrew Bolt can stand as representative here: Read more »
As far as I understand it, Thabo Mbeki’s exit from office was not directly attributable to his reprehensible policies on AIDS. But, on their own, they are sufficient grounds to disgrace his legacy. The New York Times reports on an epidemiological study by researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health of the human cost of those policies.
As Mark mentioned, the CPD hosted the third ‘Common Ground’ forum, this one on climate change. It was an ecumenical gathering with plenty of shiny suits (Slater Gordon lawyers sponsored), hipster urban types, young professionals, and plenty of the interested public. Read more »
No doubt because Malcolm Turnbull has demonstrated his stunning grasp of economics yet again by claiming that the Commonwealth budget going into deficit is some sort of yardstick of economic failure, there’s been an immense amount of commentary on Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan’s willingness to utter the word “deficit”. The latest instalment in the saga is documented by Peter Martin here - Rudd’s conceded that Australia may have to sustain a “temporary deficit”. Read more »
Julia Gillard is certainly capable of a sophisticated negotiating strategy, and it’s been interesting to observe that the process of formulating the legislation to implement Forward With Fairness and replace WorkChoices - while managed largely behind closed doors - was accompanied over the year by a fair bit of crowing from business that they’d extracted more concessions than in the two documents released before last year’s election. Read more »
I awoke to Fran Kelly struggling to elicit Richard Denniss’ point about an emissions cap acting as an implicit floor this morning. (see media release [pdf]) Even asking him the same set of questions twice didn’t seem to help. You need to unpack the underlying assumptions of the debate as it’s being conducted in Australia over to understand the beauty of The Australia Institute’s formulation. Read more »
Film studios to become ‘police, judge, executioner’: Australia’s third largest ISP is being sued by several film studios and the Seven Network for enabling copyright infringement by failing to prevent its users from downloading pirated movies and TV shows. Read more »
The Herald Sun decides to mock a bereaved son for paraphrasing song lyrics in a tribute to his dead mother, just because that son happens to be a convicted murderer. Would any other person who used a line from a song or poem in a death notice be accused of “ripping off” the artist? Read more »
45 years old today. Tigtog has a link rich and interesting post commemorating the anniversary at Hoyden.
Sunday colour funnies are back!
As Kim has already referenced Possum’s witty and thorough rejoinder to statistician-at-large Dr. Andrew Bolt, it falls to me to offer this puerile and fantastical one, in cartoon form.
Over the fold…Beavis and Butt-Head do Australia:
Possum takes on Andrew Bolt on the topic of his distorted and inflammatory misuse of statistics:
Andrew Bolt has been banging on about Africans again- Sudanese and Somalian born Africans in particular and their crime rates compared to the Victorian population as a whole. It stems back to some arsehattery about how Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon might have produced statistics that Bolt found misleading on the issue of Sudanese migrant crime rates in Victoria last year – stats that she gave in response to a Kevin Andrews spiel about the same.
Read more »
David Hicks will finally be able to get on with his life. The AFP has stated that there will be no new control order sought when the current one expires on December. Finally, Hicks’ abuse at the hands of two legal systems appears to be over. Here’s hoping that he can make a go of it. Read more »
This morning the Queensland Liberal-National Party’s latest television advertisement hit the airwaves, jostling for our attention with Amber Higlett’s early news show on Channel Nine. The ad can also be viewed here. Read more »
I’m no climatologist, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen storms with as much force as we’ve now experienced in Brisbane and South East Queensland three times in four days, most recently about an hour ago, and with another one also accompanied by severe hail and dangerous winds apparently on the way yet again later on tonight. Read more »
He was probably one of the most referenced names in the 2008 US election. But he deliberately chose not to comment on the linking of his name with Obama and “domestic terrorism”. Now Bill Ayers has given an interview to Salon. Read more »
There are a couple of very interesting contributions today about the Obama experience online and where it goes to from here - from my QUT colleagues Axel Bruns at Gatewatching and Barry Saunders at ABC Opinion. Read more »
The darling of the libertarians, Ron Paul, (and to be fair there were some lefties who flirted with his candidacy too) has come out of the closet post-election as a New World Order conspiracy theorist - World Government is Obama’s secret agenda!
MB writes: The Search Foundation, working with Professor Frank Stilwell of Sydney University, has prepared a short statement on the global financial crisis and possible responses. Read more »
On Wednesday 19 November at 8:30pm (tonight if you are reading this today!) SBS will screen the documentary A well-founded fear. Malcolm Fraser:
Everyone should watch this documentary. It explains how harshly people seeking asylum have been treated and how Australian Governments have too often returned, what they regard as failed asylum seekers, to situations of very real danger. When will we again find our humanity?
Chris Sidoti: Read more »
A study, Assault On Our Future, [pdf] commissioned by the White Ribbon Foundation made a big splash on the news last night. The headline numbers were widely highlighted: Read more »
More on the instant revisionism from the Republican Noise Machine in the wake of Barack Obama and the Democrats’ victory - this time scatterplot and red state blue state rich state poor state make a graphic point about the claims that the Republicans’ loss was somehow artefactual. Read more »
Almost a year after the former Dear Leader lost the election and his seat of Bennelong, the ABC is “heavily promoting” (something of an understatement) The Howard Years. Will we never be quit of this man? Read more »
There’s a Galaxy and a Nielsen poll out this morning, both of which show Labor with a 55-45 lead on 2PP, and Kevin Rudd on better numbers than he enjoyed a year ago - and these are some of the last polls (Essential Research follows tonight) before the first anniversary of Labor’s election.
This is quite interesting: Read more »
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
As those folks who are my friends on Facebook are no doubt aware, I successfully defended my PhD thesis at my final seminar on Thursday in the Humanities Program at QUT. That’s a milestone I’m really happy to have reached, and in a post-thesis universe, one thing I can do is make some more time for reading fiction! Read more »
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Laura Carroll will be giving a a free public lecture on Jane Austen in Brisbane, at 7pm on Monday 17 November. It’s in the dining hall of Duchesne College, University of Queensland, St Lucia campus. Refreshments served after.
“Warming the imagination with scenes of the past”: Time-travel romances about Jane Austen. Read more »
The fiercely independent thinking RWDBs of the Australian media and blogosphere have been out and about reciting talking points from the discredited Republican Noise machine ever since Barack Obama won the Presidency last week. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Antipodean wingnuts take their wingnutty duties so seriously, but I’m sure that many are still firmly in the faith-based alternative universe, and thus allergic to facts. Read more »
It’s great to see CPD Fellow Ben Eltham writing a piece in the Courier-Mail today critiquing Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman’s crazy obsession with tunnels and roads - which, as far as I can tell, is about the only policy direction that gets the Council Libs (or LibNats?) excited. Go read a good analysis of the flaws and hubris of TransApex.
Governments spending money to stimulate the economy is all the rage nowadays. The Federal Government’s just done $10 billion of it. Obama is being urged to do it on a gargantuan scale. The Chinese have apparently promised 800 billion dollars of it over the next two years. Read more »
Remember all that McCain campaign rhetoric about how Obama’s August 2007 statement on the need for sporadic pursuits of Al Qaeda into Pakistan without prior diplomatic notice showed that he was an irresponsible loon who should never be commander-in-chief? (and a few Democrats sounded off as well before Obama won the primaries) Read more »
Newspoll has Labor on 55% 2PP (up 1 point, within the MOE). Kevin Rudd is on 62% (up 3) on the PPM to Malcolm Turnbull’s 22% (down 3).
Brendan Nelson peaked at 16%.
The Opposition Organ says:
But it remains substantially higher than his predecessor Brendan Nelson.
How substantial is substantial, I wonder? Read more »
Can this be right? Could the 1995 movie Clueless be partly at fault for the worldwide dissemination of “like” as an adverb, a quotative, a hedge and as a discourse particle in colloquial speech?
Well, the car industry plan has been announced. I haven’t had a chance to read the report yet, but it seems very much along the lines of what was suggested in the Bracks Review. Read more »
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
All good things eventually come to an end. And so has the fifth Labour government. They made a good run of it, but as a third term government hoping for a fourth, the odds were always against them. In the end, the mood for change was just too great. But looking at the final result - a likely National-ACT coalition - I’m wondering whether this was really the change people were looking for. Read more »
It was not without significance that Wayne Swan chose to release the Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook on Wednesday - the day the news cycle (and the attention of political junkies) was focused on the election of Barack Obama. Whether or not you think Swan’s timing was calculated, it’s significant in that the shape of Australian politics also morphed - although in a minor key compared to what were world-historical events in the United States. Read more »
New Zealand goes to the polls tomorrow - Saturday November 8. Read more »
I’ve written before about why I think that the “media narrative” masquerading as psephological analysis that there’s some sort of automatic fall in support for state Labor parties because of some putative desire among voters to have different parties governing at different levels. I suspect the proximate origin of this meme is actually the “wall to wall Labor” scare the Liberals ran in last year’s election. Read more »
Photo of the Obama event in Chicago courtesy of bcbeatty - licenced under Creative Commons. Read more »
Since we last looked at the Arctic ice coverage the equinox has been passed the sun has set and the sea is icing up again quite nicely considering the ice loss fell just short of the 2007 record. Read more »
The big note of caution should be that this data is drawn from exit polls which don’t take into account the very large early vote, and that exit polls have certain problems of validity and reliability. Read more »
Director of the Centre for Policy Development Miriam Lyons writes:
Barack Obama’s victory represents a watershed in American history, but it will also have ramifications around the world. Before I head out to celebrate I thought I’d just bash out a few quick notes on some of the policy implications for Australia of this momentous turnaround in the state of US politics:
Climate change Read more »
Gobama!
We seem to be getting a lot of 503 errors, which must mean either increased traffic on our server or the intertubes staggering under the weight of US election traffic generally.
But here’s a widget from MNBC which should enable anyone checking in here to get a sense of the latest results. You can mouse over each state to get the latest count: Read more »
I’d contemplated liveblogging the results, but then I thought I’d like to sit back and enjoy watching them! In any case, I suspect this will be the most liveblogged event in history, so there will no doubt be lots of places around the tubes where you can hit the refresh key all day, if that’s your thing! Links to good liveblogs solicited.
So please treat this thread as an open US election results thread. Read more »
Some US states which were influenced by the Progressive direct democracy movement in the early years of last century (which also saw direct elections to the US Senate and the beginnings of the presidential primary) have “propositions” as part of their electoral system - basically legislation or constitutional amendments which can be put on the ballot by direct voter iniative. Read more »
Excitement, or maybe nerves, is building:
I’ll admit it. I just can’t concentrate. How many times can I check 538, pollster, or real clear politics? Hundreds of times a day. I arrived at my office at 8AM with the best of intensions. It’s 10:50. I can’t get anything done. I don’t have any high hopes for tomorrow’s productivity either. Who else is an anxious wreck? Anyone calm?
Read more »
As Peter Wood notes, the Treasury modeling for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme contains some rather dodgy assumptions: as he puts it: “There is no way in hell that the international community could accept a 5% reduction from Australia that corresponds to a 550 ppm target, or 15% corresponding to a 510 ppm target. Read more »
It’s time to tear your attention from the Real Clear Politics coverage of the donkey versus elephant race, and post whatever you will (as long as it sufficiently complies with the comments policy) about the Melbourne Cup - what your tips are, what you’ll be wearing, where you’ll be partying and how, the social and cultural significance of the race, memorable past Cup Day stories, why the Irish, the Poms and/or the Aotearoans will be making jokes at Australia’s expense from tomorrow afternoon onwards - whatever!
I’m not really one for breakfast television, but I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who’s seen the new ABC2 Breakfast show, which debuts today. It will also be streamed online. With Virginia Trioli as one of the hosts (the other is Barrie Cassidy, filling in for Peter Lloyd - who’s got some legal problems), I’m not hopeful that it will provide much of an alternative to the rest of the press gallery trivial horse race agenda of the day coverage. Read more »
One of the minor notes of the political narrative last week was Julie Bishop’s half-hearted fessing up to publishing a book chapter containing numerous instances of plagiarism under her name, though (in a move quite reminiscent of the Howard government’s attitude towards ministerial accountability) she sought immediately to deflect responsibility onto the staffer who “dashed something together” for her in a spare moment, recycling and paraphrasing eight year old banal neo-liberal nostrums from the New Zealand Business Roundtable’s Roger Kerr. The news didn’t get any better as the week wore on for the editor of Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead, Peter Van Onselen, as it emerged that Brendan Nelson’s chapter had been ghosted by Tom Switzer, whose ruminations turned up in a column under his own name in The Spectator: Read more »
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
We’ve had almost a week now of the press gallery writing about the alleged effects of the bank guarantee deposit on managed funds. With lots of alarums… Commentators who were praising Kevin Rudd a couple of weeks ago for “decisive action” to address the financial crisis are now bemoaning “policy on the run”. Read more »
The Guardian’s Comment is Free website and Soundings magazine are organising a series of debates on the theme of After New Labour: Who owns the progressive future?. Some of the contributions are making it online. Read more »
Writing in Salon, Gary Kamiya describes the near hysteria to which “movement conservatives” are reduced in confronting a likely Obama victory:
…typical of the Limbaugh-inflected (or infected) movement as a whole is the apocalyptic attitude of right-wing columnist Mark Steyn, who thundered that an Obama victory “would be a ‘point of no return,’ the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America.”
Read more »
One of the longest bows I’ve seen drawn about the effects of the global financial crisis is this obituary (and not in elegiac style) for the 80s. And Gen X. Apparently because of Robert Zemeckis. And therefore Gordon Gekko. Read more »
