Category Archives: Australia

Keane on Election 2010

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A corker of an article in today’s Crikey from Bearnard Keane on the dismal state of politics in Australia. He starts off with…

Yes, this election is rubbish, and it represents the lowest point in policy debate since, probably, 1980.

Yes it’s boring, and visionless, and run by two parties that are entirely risk-averse and who have turned their backs on so much achieved by previous generations of leaders. Parties for whom a key campaign strategy is to explain to voters that they have no intention of carrying out reforms they have long insisted were crucial.

But bad luck – it’s your fault. Politicians, and the media, and the business community all share responsibility for this dire state of affairs, but it’s voters themselves who have ultimately brought this about.

Read the entire article on the Crikey website: This is all your fault.

Update: I should have probably posted earlier about the equally if not more worthy of note piece by Grogs Gamut on the media in this election: waste and mismanagement – the media.

Teh Scary Wind Turbines

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Adam Morton has a piece in The Age today on some of the political goings on around wind farms in Victoria: You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Well worth a read.

The article mentions the recent findings of the National Health and Medical Research Council research into Wind Turbines and Health. A helpful pushback to some of the random anecdotal claims going around.

The Public Statement presents the current evidence relating potential health impacts of wind turbines on people living in close proximity. The Statement concludes that there is currently no published scientific evidence to positively link wind turbines with adverse health effects.

And also reminded me of a recent tweet from Hepburn Wind highlighting recent analysis done to overcome the need for illumination and red flashing lights on wind turbines: Wind farm switches off lights

Feature on Bob Brown in The Age

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An interestingly timed feature on Bob Brown by Michael Gordon in The Age: Coming in from the wilderness. Worth a read. Quite a positive piece. It concludes with a focus on current events…

Brown agrees, and insists the Greens will work constructively with whoever wins the election to achieve good results and advance an agenda that includes introducing a carbon tax, better funding for mental health, a national dental scheme and a permanent solution for forest protection. Brown says he has worked with Julia Gillard on industrial relations and youth issues and found her ”matter-of-fact, plain-speaking and does what she says she will do”, but he isn’t expecting too much to change.

”Everybody with a progressive bone in their body raised a glass at the news of our first female prime minister, but that’s where that ends,” he says. ”Politically it doesn’t change the dynamic at all. There’s no way that we’re going to get a green Gillard government any more than a green Rudd government or a green Howard government. That’s why we’re here.”

Property Bubble to Burst?

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Leon Gettler in The Age on bubbles, in particular the property bubble in Australia: Predicting when the property bubble will pop is bad for your mental health

Yale economist Robert Shiller says asset bubbles can be diagnosed the same way one would diagnose mental illness. Bubble symptoms include sharp increases in the price of an asset considerably higher than its underlying value; great public excitement; media frenzy; stories of people earning lots, causing envy among those who aren’t; growing interest in the asset class among the public where, for example, taxi drivers start talking to you about shares or property investments, and ”new-era” theories to justify unprecedented price increases.

Bubbles tipped to burst this year include China, gold, US Treasury bonds and, according to the Melbourne-based Land Values Research Group, Australian property.

NAPLAN Testing

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An opinion piece by Trevor Diogenes (of Lowbottom High Diaries) in today’s Crikey: NAPLAN tests and My School: one size doesn’t fit all

Teaching to the test is what education authorities increasingly require of teachers. It already happens in Year 12 where students are coached to reproduce the answers that the assessors expect. If students learn anything in Year 12, it is that competition is king in the world they are about to enter. They will also understand that they are expected to conform. At which point students would have every right to feel betrayed by their teachers who, up until this final year, have sought to open the minds of their charges to the infinite possibilities of learning.

Parents have every right to know how their child’s school is performing in relation to other schools. The only problem is that the information is based on flawed data since it is largely derived from the results of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) diagnostic testing. NAPLAN is a version of those ghastly tests that students have been made to submit to since the 1960s. You know the kind of thing: brain teasers about relative velocities and the like. Horrible. And of very limited educational value.

The article is in the free section at Crikey, so probably best just to read the whole thing.

Greens’ Interim Carbon Tax Proposal

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The Greens have put forward an interim (two year) carbon tax proposal in place of the CPRS (apparently based on a suggestion by Garnaut). Seems like this proposal ma do a reasonable job of buying some time to work towards a better long term proposal (hopefully improving rather than further worsening the targets, compensation, offsets, other dodginess). Not sure Fielding would every support it though (perhaps one Lib senator may). Rudd has said he’ll consider it, as you’d expect – need to see how strong the disconnect between words and action is (a force that is usually strong with this one!)

Update: Christine Milne in The Australian – Interim carbon price preferable to time-wasting political stunt