Andrew Bolt: Kevin Rudd hasn’t appeared on Australia’s biggest and best political chat show … more than once in two years. He refused to come on again, what’s his problem? Are you asking him too many pointed questions or is he trying to blackmail you into dropping the one or two conservatives you dare have on?Negotiations? Negotiations? Tell him to sit his ass down and answer the questions! Kevin Rudd is a grown man, and, I might add for the benefit of any newcomers, the Prime Minister of this country, a position he achieved with not some little effort. Time to suck it up, Kevin, and do what men do.
Barrie Cassidy: Andrew, Andrew, we’re in negotiations, please don’t disturb those negotiations … [chuckling from panel]
Monday, February 8, 2010
Man-Up, Kev
Insiders had an interesting snippet this last Sunday:
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Doing A Chantelois
You gotta admit, Chantelois is a great name. It has all sorts of mystique about it, and it rolls off the tongue easily.
But also, I think we’re on the verge of a new verb: “to Chantelois”. Meaning, to repeatedly and ostentatiously appear in the media, making a big show of how private everything is. Most usually, accompanied by a neatly posed photograph, after a visit to the salon.
It Begins
All those hysterical complaints about World Government are just poppycock:
How long, for example, will it be before the mandatory energy assessments have a box at the bottom which says PASS/FAIL? And what will you have to do to your property to get the PASS mark, and thus be able to continue to sell it? Spend $100,000? Bribe the assessor? And future Governments, desperate to look like Climate Warriors, may well tweak the criteria for a Pass, to make it harder to achieve.
And so people will simply knock their houses down and sell the land. But then the Government will start demanding soil analysis. And how long before the assessments need to be conducted according to an international standard? Your home will be judged against criteria which do not apply in Australia.
Fast-forward 100 years and let’s see if we have World Government or not. If some unelected boffin in Denmark can dictate how long you can run your air-conditioner during an Adelaide heatwave, then it’s World Government folks.
As usual, whenever the Government makes something mandatory, or dishes out public money, the carpetbaggers and spivs appear as if by magic.
Still, the “energy efficiency expert” sector, if such a thing can be said to exist (yet), should take heed of what happened to the insulation industry once the Government decided to create an artificial demand and throw around other peoples’ money. The country was awash with badly-trained hacks, who undercut the professionals with decades of experience, and poor installations resulted in several houses burning down and some installers losing their lives. And the extra insulation had to come from overseas because there wasn’t enough manufacturing capacity locally. And the entire industry will probably collapse soon, because it won’t be able to survive the end of the Government subsidy. So well done, Kevin. Climate fixed.
Beware Governments who want to help your industry, or use it to solve Climate Change.
All Australian homes will have to undergo a mandatory energy-efficiency assessment — costing up to $1500 per property — before they can be sold or rented under new laws to tackle carbon emissions.If you think this is the full extent to which Governments will dictate how people conduct their affairs to solve Climate Change, then you simply have not been paying attention.
How long, for example, will it be before the mandatory energy assessments have a box at the bottom which says PASS/FAIL? And what will you have to do to your property to get the PASS mark, and thus be able to continue to sell it? Spend $100,000? Bribe the assessor? And future Governments, desperate to look like Climate Warriors, may well tweak the criteria for a Pass, to make it harder to achieve.
And so people will simply knock their houses down and sell the land. But then the Government will start demanding soil analysis. And how long before the assessments need to be conducted according to an international standard? Your home will be judged against criteria which do not apply in Australia.
Fast-forward 100 years and let’s see if we have World Government or not. If some unelected boffin in Denmark can dictate how long you can run your air-conditioner during an Adelaide heatwave, then it’s World Government folks.
As usual, whenever the Government makes something mandatory, or dishes out public money, the carpetbaggers and spivs appear as if by magic.
Energy efficiency expert Arthur Grammatopoulos, of Helica Architecture, said rating properties could cost up to $1500 per house.Of course not. Which is why the “energy efficiency experts” will probably form a new lobbying association soon, and start demanding the Government give them funds to train a lot more assessors. And the Government will hand it over, so you’ll have to pay for them to be trained through your taxes and then pay for them to do the job out of your own pocket. And the assessing will be done badly, anyway, because the people doing the training will only be in it to get the Government money. And what will the affect be on the climate? S-F-A.
“I think this is a positive move for the industry but the question has to be asked, will there be enough experts to cope with demand when the law is introduced?” he said.
Still, the “energy efficiency expert” sector, if such a thing can be said to exist (yet), should take heed of what happened to the insulation industry once the Government decided to create an artificial demand and throw around other peoples’ money. The country was awash with badly-trained hacks, who undercut the professionals with decades of experience, and poor installations resulted in several houses burning down and some installers losing their lives. And the extra insulation had to come from overseas because there wasn’t enough manufacturing capacity locally. And the entire industry will probably collapse soon, because it won’t be able to survive the end of the Government subsidy. So well done, Kevin. Climate fixed.
Beware Governments who want to help your industry, or use it to solve Climate Change.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Begging Bowl
The Advertiser has done a brilliant [rolls eyes] bit of journalism by sending one of its hacks out pretending to be a down-and-outer, to see how much lucre he could hoover up from gullible punters. He managed more than $100 in an hour, therefore concluding that these parasites are earning more than plumbers. Of course, the journalist didn’t experience the full homeless-and-destitute experience: he wasn’t beaten up, didn’t have to perform any sex acts for $10 and didn’t have a chronic health condition and/or mental illness. But you get the point.
Of course, now the next logical experiment is to see how much cash flows from gullible punters to a bunch of real shysters. Meaning, the climate change industry.
So maybe they should set up a conservative Climate-Change-Is-Crap think tank (called, say, “Climate Solutions Institute”), and a pseudo-scientific We’re-Rooned research centre (“Earth Climate Forum”), and see how much money they can collect.
My guess is, the Climate Solutions Institute will get $20,000 from an oil company, but only because they took “climate solutions” literally and it was just a bit of guilt money they don’t care how is spent, and $75,000 from some nutty millionaire. Nobody else will give it money because conservatives think everything should have a proper business model and not rely on charity.
The Earth Climate Forum will get $2,700,000 from the Federal Government to write a few reports, $750,000 from the State Government to consult for local agencies on how they can turn their computers off overnight to save carbon emissions, and a total of $1,100,000 from a posse of nutty millionaires. One of whom, of course, will win the Inaugural Earth Climate Forum medal.
Of course, now the next logical experiment is to see how much cash flows from gullible punters to a bunch of real shysters. Meaning, the climate change industry.
So maybe they should set up a conservative Climate-Change-Is-Crap think tank (called, say, “Climate Solutions Institute”), and a pseudo-scientific We’re-Rooned research centre (“Earth Climate Forum”), and see how much money they can collect.
My guess is, the Climate Solutions Institute will get $20,000 from an oil company, but only because they took “climate solutions” literally and it was just a bit of guilt money they don’t care how is spent, and $75,000 from some nutty millionaire. Nobody else will give it money because conservatives think everything should have a proper business model and not rely on charity.
The Earth Climate Forum will get $2,700,000 from the Federal Government to write a few reports, $750,000 from the State Government to consult for local agencies on how they can turn their computers off overnight to save carbon emissions, and a total of $1,100,000 from a posse of nutty millionaires. One of whom, of course, will win the Inaugural Earth Climate Forum medal.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Critical Analysis
Finally, someone in the Australian media (well, Crikey anyway), has applied some critical thought and in-depth analysis to somebody’s response to Climate Change.
Of course, they’ve applied their immense brains to the Climate Change policy of the Federal Liberal opposition, who very probably won’t be in government any time soon to implement it, and utterly ignored the Climate Change policy of the Labor Government itself, which will affect some 22 million people and affect the climate not one jot.
It’s a start, I suppose.
Of course, they’ve applied their immense brains to the Climate Change policy of the Federal Liberal opposition, who very probably won’t be in government any time soon to implement it, and utterly ignored the Climate Change policy of the Labor Government itself, which will affect some 22 million people and affect the climate not one jot.
It’s a start, I suppose.
Censor This
I had not even the time to turn the blowtorch of my rapier wit to the attempts by South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson to “censor the Internet” by making people who write political comments on websites publish their name and postcode during election campaigns when the whole thing had collapsed, with Mike promising to cancel the whole thing.
This fracas is fascinating for a variety of reasons.
1. The law was intended, cynicism aside for a moment, to align the law and practice that dictates letters written to the newspaper during an election campaign, with the comments that appear anonymously on the Internet, especially the website of the newspaper itself. “What,” they say, “is the difference?” Seems fair enough. Especially when you consider that many of the comments that appear on AdelaideNow, for example, are toxic and abusive, and Twitter is awash with abuse also. So from the Government’s point of view, the Internet is a sewer, and it’s not a bad thing for comments to be cleaned up so we can have a sensible debate, since comments would be limited to sincere comment and not just pointless invective.
The problem with this is that it clearly intimidates people to speak their mind in the only public forum available to them. SA is a small state and a relatively large number of people work for, or do business with, the public service. And those people would not want to leave a trail of critical comment all over the Internet. So who’s left who can comment with impunity?
And remember that political parties now keep databases of electors, with their opinions annotated. If you’ve ever written to the newspaper expressing a view you have been recorded. When the local MP lobs at your doorstep, he/she most likely knows who you vote for and what your hot-button issues are.
2. Michael Atkinson got himself into even more trouble by “exposing” a name that regularly appears on AdelaideNow as being fictional, and being a front for the Liberal Party. He could not have been more wrong: it was a real person, using his real name, and who really lives in Mr Atkinson’s electorate, and was duly on the front page of The Advertiser the next morning.
He explained this by saying that he looks at the electoral rolls so he knows who he represents. This is very likely to be untrue. Most likely, the ALP boffins that trawl the Internet collating names and opinions, to be entered into their elector database, kept coming across the man’s name, and couldn’t find it on the rolls (since he wasn’t enrolled), so they assumed it was fake. So instead they put his name on some sort of Liberal Party Stooge database, from which Mr Atkinson picked a name he could use as part of his argument, and unfortunately, he just happened to pick one that was real.
Are we expected to believe that Mr Atkinson can reconcile a list of his constituents with screen-names on the Internet, and pluck names out of the air when required? There is no doubt there is a huge amount of organisation behind this seemingly innocuous event.
3. The Liberals and minor parties were in on it. None of them had the gumption to realise that if the South Australian Labor party wanted to do something to the statute books, it was probably poisonous. Especially when the Attorney’s last attempt to fix the electoral laws was to beautify the suburbs by banning those pesky road-side signs, which they were all opposed to.
And even when it was all going pear-shaped, Vickie Chapman made an attempt to justify their support, then later started a riff on how they were all shamefully deceived. And yet the media attention is on Atkinson, who had to cravenly apologise and promise to repeal it all later, which makes him look like a goose, but an honourable goose. So where were the Liberals? They should have smelt the blood in the water and been out in the media first, apologising for their lack of judgement and promising to repeal it if they win Government. Then Atkinson would not have been able to promise it later that day without looking like a copycat. Or he would have had to defend it. Either way, he’d be wedged, and badly. But instead Atkinson looks like the winner, and most likely the ALP will make a big song and dance about repealing it after the election. They will turn the embarrassment into a victory.
4. We’ve discovered something about the ALP. They have quite the glass jaw. If people kick up enough of a stink, they will roll over. It took only a few hours for the Attorney to change his mind after sustained attacks on the Internet. So why’s he creating laws that can be undone just when there’s a little fuss? He should know enough about things to realise that these storms blow over. People have been accepting more and more government control for years, and they always complain, but always end up swallowing it. And Internet bloggers have notoriously short attention-spans. Look at that adorable cat, it meows when Beyoncé is singing. And who gives a crap what they think anyway? Nobody reads it. Of this I am acutely aware.
On ABC 891 radio this morning, Matthew Abraham asked Mr Atkinson at what time he got a call from the Premier asking him to fix the problem. Atkinson was able to hit this full-toss straight to the boundary by denying he had received such a call and stated he had worked it out for himself. But Abraham didn’t do the obvious follow-ups: Had his office received any communication from the Premier’s office? Was some variety of bollocking involved? Was any mention made that attacking the local media might not be the best strategy to sell an idea with an election in the offing?
And later on Twitter, the Premier posted: “AG has listened. So no debate will be stifled.” That’s right, this is the Attorney-General’s baby, and the Premier was just helpfully passing the information on.
5. There are some unanswered questions about the political attitude to anonymous blogging. The assumption is that printed letters must contain the author’s names, and therefore so should the Internet. But who says the printed letters must contain the names? Maybe that’s the reform that is required. Newspapers are required to collect and publish the names of election-related letters. But what if they were only required to collect the names, but leave the names out of the paper? It would fulfil the spirit of the thing, but allow people to speak absolutely freely.
The other is that it’s a bit rich for politicians, who are public figures of their own choosing, to complain about the public, whose money they spend, commenting on them, and hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet. They get to hide behind Parliamentary Privilege. They can say what they like without consequences. But the rest of us have to nail our names to everything and perhaps risk a relationship we have with the government generally. So why have Parliamentary Privilege? Politicians love to enact laws on the “If you haven’t done anything wrong you haven’t got anything to worry about” principle (especially when it involves taking a picture of you driving a bit quick down a hill), so it would be interesting to have this principle applied to the politicians themselves. What, we might ask, are you planning to say in Parliament you wouldn’t say in public?
Today Mr Atkinson is fending off calls for him to quit, or be sacked. That shouldn’t be too hard, since the entire Parliament was behind the thing in the first place. But I think he needs to go, one way or the other. He is the architect of so much of what the Government does that is completely contrary to the way South Australians want to be governed. Hopefully the burghers of Croydon will have the bottle to get rid of him.
This fracas is fascinating for a variety of reasons.
1. The law was intended, cynicism aside for a moment, to align the law and practice that dictates letters written to the newspaper during an election campaign, with the comments that appear anonymously on the Internet, especially the website of the newspaper itself. “What,” they say, “is the difference?” Seems fair enough. Especially when you consider that many of the comments that appear on AdelaideNow, for example, are toxic and abusive, and Twitter is awash with abuse also. So from the Government’s point of view, the Internet is a sewer, and it’s not a bad thing for comments to be cleaned up so we can have a sensible debate, since comments would be limited to sincere comment and not just pointless invective.
The problem with this is that it clearly intimidates people to speak their mind in the only public forum available to them. SA is a small state and a relatively large number of people work for, or do business with, the public service. And those people would not want to leave a trail of critical comment all over the Internet. So who’s left who can comment with impunity?
And remember that political parties now keep databases of electors, with their opinions annotated. If you’ve ever written to the newspaper expressing a view you have been recorded. When the local MP lobs at your doorstep, he/she most likely knows who you vote for and what your hot-button issues are.
2. Michael Atkinson got himself into even more trouble by “exposing” a name that regularly appears on AdelaideNow as being fictional, and being a front for the Liberal Party. He could not have been more wrong: it was a real person, using his real name, and who really lives in Mr Atkinson’s electorate, and was duly on the front page of The Advertiser the next morning.
He explained this by saying that he looks at the electoral rolls so he knows who he represents. This is very likely to be untrue. Most likely, the ALP boffins that trawl the Internet collating names and opinions, to be entered into their elector database, kept coming across the man’s name, and couldn’t find it on the rolls (since he wasn’t enrolled), so they assumed it was fake. So instead they put his name on some sort of Liberal Party Stooge database, from which Mr Atkinson picked a name he could use as part of his argument, and unfortunately, he just happened to pick one that was real.
Are we expected to believe that Mr Atkinson can reconcile a list of his constituents with screen-names on the Internet, and pluck names out of the air when required? There is no doubt there is a huge amount of organisation behind this seemingly innocuous event.
3. The Liberals and minor parties were in on it. None of them had the gumption to realise that if the South Australian Labor party wanted to do something to the statute books, it was probably poisonous. Especially when the Attorney’s last attempt to fix the electoral laws was to beautify the suburbs by banning those pesky road-side signs, which they were all opposed to.
And even when it was all going pear-shaped, Vickie Chapman made an attempt to justify their support, then later started a riff on how they were all shamefully deceived. And yet the media attention is on Atkinson, who had to cravenly apologise and promise to repeal it all later, which makes him look like a goose, but an honourable goose. So where were the Liberals? They should have smelt the blood in the water and been out in the media first, apologising for their lack of judgement and promising to repeal it if they win Government. Then Atkinson would not have been able to promise it later that day without looking like a copycat. Or he would have had to defend it. Either way, he’d be wedged, and badly. But instead Atkinson looks like the winner, and most likely the ALP will make a big song and dance about repealing it after the election. They will turn the embarrassment into a victory.
4. We’ve discovered something about the ALP. They have quite the glass jaw. If people kick up enough of a stink, they will roll over. It took only a few hours for the Attorney to change his mind after sustained attacks on the Internet. So why’s he creating laws that can be undone just when there’s a little fuss? He should know enough about things to realise that these storms blow over. People have been accepting more and more government control for years, and they always complain, but always end up swallowing it. And Internet bloggers have notoriously short attention-spans. Look at that adorable cat, it meows when Beyoncé is singing. And who gives a crap what they think anyway? Nobody reads it. Of this I am acutely aware.
On ABC 891 radio this morning, Matthew Abraham asked Mr Atkinson at what time he got a call from the Premier asking him to fix the problem. Atkinson was able to hit this full-toss straight to the boundary by denying he had received such a call and stated he had worked it out for himself. But Abraham didn’t do the obvious follow-ups: Had his office received any communication from the Premier’s office? Was some variety of bollocking involved? Was any mention made that attacking the local media might not be the best strategy to sell an idea with an election in the offing?
And later on Twitter, the Premier posted: “AG has listened. So no debate will be stifled.” That’s right, this is the Attorney-General’s baby, and the Premier was just helpfully passing the information on.
5. There are some unanswered questions about the political attitude to anonymous blogging. The assumption is that printed letters must contain the author’s names, and therefore so should the Internet. But who says the printed letters must contain the names? Maybe that’s the reform that is required. Newspapers are required to collect and publish the names of election-related letters. But what if they were only required to collect the names, but leave the names out of the paper? It would fulfil the spirit of the thing, but allow people to speak absolutely freely.
The other is that it’s a bit rich for politicians, who are public figures of their own choosing, to complain about the public, whose money they spend, commenting on them, and hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet. They get to hide behind Parliamentary Privilege. They can say what they like without consequences. But the rest of us have to nail our names to everything and perhaps risk a relationship we have with the government generally. So why have Parliamentary Privilege? Politicians love to enact laws on the “If you haven’t done anything wrong you haven’t got anything to worry about” principle (especially when it involves taking a picture of you driving a bit quick down a hill), so it would be interesting to have this principle applied to the politicians themselves. What, we might ask, are you planning to say in Parliament you wouldn’t say in public?
Today Mr Atkinson is fending off calls for him to quit, or be sacked. That shouldn’t be too hard, since the entire Parliament was behind the thing in the first place. But I think he needs to go, one way or the other. He is the architect of so much of what the Government does that is completely contrary to the way South Australians want to be governed. Hopefully the burghers of Croydon will have the bottle to get rid of him.
Pwned!
Climate Skeptic squashes environmentalism in three sentences:
What Do The World’s 25 Dirtiest Cities Have In Common? They are all poor. Think on that, environmentalists, when you argue that limiting CO2 emissions should trump economic growth.
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