Two debates have cropped up in the last week or so which touch upon resolving some of the hairy issues raised by climate change. The first is the global disaster unfolding that is the food crisis. Like the oil crisis, the food crisis has shown what happens when globalisation goes bad and instability in supply collides with growing demand. The second is the national issue of the Rudd Government's carbon capture and storage (CCS) dalliance. Read more »
Evaluating the 2020 Summit is a massive task which the Great Kevin has rightly decided cannot be guaranteed until the end of the year. It remains to be seen whether this is a Pizza Hut style deal where failure to deliver hot reasons will result in the delegates receiving their money back. Accordingly, Peregrine will devote two posts to the Summit. For openers, a brief look at perspectives of the Summit. Read more »
Much as I agree with Mr Andrew Bolt that free speech should be encouraged, I prefer not to have a torrent of that speech funnelled down my alternative media channels. That said, it has given me the opportunity to read his blog firsthand. Bolt has clearly set up his stall as chief prosecutor of the Great Kevin for crimes against statistics. Bolt's argument boils down to everything Rudd does is premised upon media management - i.e. it is spin - and hence it is of no consequence to the good governance of the nation. Read more »
Brendan Nelson made his alternative PM debut at the National Press Club yesterday. After plumbing the depths of opinion poll hell by becoming Brendan 007, he has adopted the very simple philosophy of trying to be himself. Nelson's natural personality is a blend of emotion and protection of self-interest, which may explain why he initially joined Labor but rose to be the Liberal leader. It also explains this off-the-cuff plea to define our values against terrorism. Read more »
Ricky Ponting's appalling series with the bat has culminated with a 2-0 defeat in the CUB final series and the punters are tearing into Punter faster than a Brett Lee yorker. One of their key complaints is that Lee was preferred in the closing stages of India's batting innings in Brisbane than almost-match winner James Hopes. The argument being pushed is that Ponting himself should hand in his captain's arm band before he is pushed. Read more »
Professor Garnaut's interim report on Australia's climate change position contains some stark assessments of our situation. The news is not good: in our fossil fuel-reliant global economy, economic growth is intrinsically linked to emissions growth. The explosion of activity in China and India has acclerated emissions onto a dangerous trajectory. Read more »
The curious beast known as the Indian Premier League (IPL), or according to the ICC, the 'good' barbarians, has entered a new stage. Its grand auction of talent has taken place and Mahendra Singh Dhoni has garnered top dollar, with Andrew Symonds a close second. The teams have faced a fascinating mix of imperatives, trying to build commercial franchises from scratch, with players having to provide all-round ability both on and off the field. Read more »
The Indian cricket team has done something remarkable. It has rendered Ricky Ponting irrelevant from the batting landscape. With the exception of his century in the Adelaide Test, Ponting has not registered a significant contribution in over two months, and the situation is starting to expose the weaknesses in the Australian team. Labouring under a back injury cannot be good for either his movement or his captaincy, and through the agency of Ishant Sharma and the ubiquitious Harbhajan Singh, India are exposing the lack of all-round contributors and defiant middle order batsmen. Read more »
Kevin Rudd's proposed Australia 2020 Summit has variously been described as a great innovation, yet another glorified talk fest and the ultimate in PR flummery. Which description one favours is as much about one's own personal prejudices as the exercise itself. The clear message from Rudd's symposium on the Australian condition is that unlike his predecessor, the new PM is willing to at least listen to alternative ideas and engage in reasoned debate. Read more »
California is perhaps the one last key contest of the primary season. Merged into the hyperbolically renamed 'super duper Tuesday', where twenty-two states pledge their delegates, it remains a pivotal state in determining the outcome of the race, particularly on the Democratic side. Read more »
The report that Kevin Rudd has earmarked the opening of Parliament on February 12 as the due season for an apology to the stolen generation has set off some predictable caterwauling from the self-styled conservative element about intergenerational guilt and false priorities. The faux argument about an apology being inextricably linked to compensation seems to be rebuffed by the conspicious lack of actions against state governments who have issued similar apologies for past mistreatment. Read more »
The good burghers of the Liberal party are going to stick their collective heads together and ponder where everything is going wrong. In a unique inversion of recent Liberal machinations, the Federal leadership in the person of Brendan Nelson is not invited. In explaining the omission of His Hairship, Victorian Liberal leader (and now senior budgie-smuggler following the post-election demise of Peter Debnam) Ted Bailleu said that Nelson had not been elected when the invitations went out. Read more »
Australia faces a Herculaean task to win the Third Test and become the side with the most Test wins in succession. As any all-conquering side such as the Melbourne Storm or Sydney Kings might tell you, winning a lot of games in succession only puts you closer to your next loss. Despite that somewhat gloomy axiom, Australia's dominance of the Test cricket scene has an inherent weakness. It relies on imposing its will on the opposition by a strategy of all-out attack. Read more »
This is a very belated post completing this blog's evaluation of the 2020 Summit, now fading into the rear view mirror of history. The Summit represents something of a lost opportunity, with dark suggestions that ideas were planted to endorse government proposals and that many of the ideas were not especially revolutionary. The whole thing in hindsight looks like a bunch of high-powered minds locked in a gilded cage, constrained by the tight timeframe and need to fit the results of their labours into the pre-packed report summaries. Read more »
There seems to be a strange disconnect in the political psyche: journalists and the people alike keep asking for policy, something to be done about the big issues of our time, whether that be climate change, the health system or education. Yet the most public attempt to gather these ideas and have a conversation about them, the upcoming 2020 Summit has been largely derided as a stunt, a cynical 'rubber-stamping' exercise and a replacement for the ordinary political process. Read more »
...or some other suitable hyperbole. This blog has been in hiatus for the last few weeks, having something of a holiday while the mother ship (alias Blogotariat) settles itself down after its problems with Russian hackers.more shortly
It appears that the most effective opposition to Kevin Rudd is coming from the grave. Not the graven undertaker like-manner of the Opposition Leader, but the political grave of one JW Howard and the physical one of one Joh Bjelke Petersen. Howard has lacerated Rudd's IR reforms and Iraq policy in one of his paid junket American conservative love-ins. Rudd turned up on Four Corners' Joh retrospective the other night in his former incarnation as 'Dr Death'. One of young Kev's coup de grace was the locking of a bunch of Joh-engrained civil servants in the basement until they dutifully resigned. Read more »
The wave of enthusiasm that swept Kevin Rudd to power creates a unique set of problems. There is an enormous sense of energy and movement about the government, with major milestones such as Australia's induction into the Kyoto Protocol's membership and the apology to the stolen generations already complete within the first hundred days. Such symbolic touchstones of policy formed one part of Rudd's appeal. The other was the promise to address those microeconomic 'kitchen table' issues such as interest rates, rent and grocery prices. Read more »
The Federal Liberal party is in a mess. Howard's failure to adhere to his own formula for departing, 'so long as it is in the best interests of the party', saw his leadership explode in the mighty supernova that was the 2007 election. Like many supernovae, the remnants of Howard's pull on the party have become a black hole, tearing the tenuous strands holding it together. Howard's legacy was to leave the party reliant on a motley brew of wedge politics and social conservatism. He ran hard lines on issues such as immigration, national security, climate change and reconciliation. Read more »
It is rather ironic that the Liberals have chosen to reheat the alleged links between Kevin Rudd and Brian Burke to assail the character of the PM. After much morning media theatre, Rudd's office released the full exchange. The worst one can say about it is that Rudd considered Burke's proposal for a dinner in his honour and then recanted on further reflection. This blog suspects that Rudd may have canvassed the idea of using Burke's influence among the Western Australian Labor party to turn members against Beazley. Read more »
The Democratic race has produced an extraordinary phenomenon. It effectively has two front runners in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both splitting roughly equal portions of the vote. Aided by the proportional distribution of most of the delegates, neither candidate has made a decisive break. The Republicans have helped too, by closing many of their primaries to independent voters. These independents largely throw in their lot to the inclusive candidacy of Obama. Read more »
The casual reader of yesterday's Australian might be alarmed to see that power costs are set to double under an emissions trading scheme. This is reminiscent of the same logic that the McCain - Lieberman energy bill co-sponsored by the perennial Republican candidate is set to cost American consumers several trillion dollars. Read more »
The aftermath of the Harbhajan Singh- Andrew Symonds clash continues to roll on. Now it has experienced even vice-regal and prime ministerial intervention, with both those leaders calling for more grace in accepting the umpire's decision and treating fellow players as human beings. Some of this talk of grace and courtesy has the air of a halycon day which never actually happened. Be that as it may, the current crop of Australian cricketers, who for some time appeared to get a very lenient deal from umpires for misconduct on-field, has actively employed 'mental disintegration' as a key tactic. Read more »
Heath Ledger's premature death is a tragedy for his family and for his many fans, colleagues and admirers of his work. Who knows what masterly performances he may have given us, with some acclaiming him to be a young Jack Nicholson. A further tragedy is the bizarre behaviour of the Westboro Baptist Church, who plan to picket Ledger's funeral on the basis that he was a 'fag-enabler' through his role in Brokeback Mountain. These petty-minded firebrands are making a mockery of the American ideals of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Read more »
It is now a truth universally acknowledged that the US Presidential election is a race in want of a frontrunner. The Republicans want to find someone who fits their base and electability conditions in the mould of Bush (the Younger), while the Democrats desire a latter-day (Bill) Clinton. The irony is that the very models themselves are the subject of widespread opprobrium. Read more »
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