pathology_doc

ELECTRIC cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found.

Why am I not surprised? Rule One of Greens and technology - the first has no comprehension of the limitations (or the power) of the second.

An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.

129km a day over three years, or shorter drives over a longer time, would just about do it, but there's that annoying range limitation. Electrical energy is very difficult to store 'densely' - petrol is several orders of magnitude more efficient, and far quicker to recharge. I hear the recharge time for an electric is absurdly long (twenty to thirty minutes), totally unsuitable for long-distance driving. You'd be sitting idle for one hour out of three!

The British study, which is the first analysis of the full lifetime emissions of electric cars covering manufacturing, driving and disposal, undermines the case for tackling climate change by the rapid introduction of electric cars.

Assuming that the case for anthropogenic dominance is correct, which I am firmly convinced - given previous ice ages and warm cycles - that it is not. It may be an answer (or part thereof) to a separate and unarguable problem: the finite nature of hydrocarbon reserves at present rates of consumption. This presupposes that one has a significant reserve of non-fossil electrical power which can be relied upon for charging purposes (and yes, I am talking nuclear).

The Committee on Climate Change, the UK government watchdog, has called for the number of electric cars on Britain's roads to increase from a few hundred now to 1.7 million by 2020.

Pointless chasing after numbers plucked out of the air - the worst kind of government policy. This brings me back to what I said at the start, which is that starry-eyed environmentally-deluded bureaucrats (envirocrats???) simply don't understand how to develop or deliver technology.

Britain's Department for Transport is spending $66 million over the next year giving up to 8,600 buyers of electric cars a grant of $7700 towards the purchase price. Ministers are considering extending the scheme.

The DoT would do far better to spend the money ensuring that recharging infrastructure is in place, and that research funds are given for technology development to make that recharging fast (more in the order of three to five minutes) and safe (large currents have a tendency to cause fires if not properly controlled).

The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.

Provided you can get that energy from nuclear or other such sources, the cost to your precious CO₂ balance is a lot less, but it does highlight that these fucking morons are seeing everything in terms of CO₂ emissions and not even looking at the fossil fuel conservation aspect.

Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.

Again, the way to solve this is to do what France has done - or to develop more esoteric things like tidal and ocean-thermal, which are not sunlight and atmosphere dependent for their power source. There will always be tides, and there will always be a cold deep ocean beneath the warm upper surface. Temperature gradient = energy.

Greg Archer, director of Low CVP, said the industry should state the full lifecycle emissions of cars rather than just tailpipe emissions, to avoid misleading consumers. He said that drivers wanting to minimise emissions could be better off buying a small, efficient petrol or diesel car. “People have to match the technology to their particular needs,” he said.

The Times

I think Mr Archer is right - the whole "no carbon emissions" sales pitch is excellent for dragging in rich Greenbots with more money and desire for penitence than common sense (or understanding of anything even remotely resembling "science"), but there would appear to be hidden costs. Now those costs might be mitigated by a careful nationwide consideration of technology requirements, but without a lot of expensive research (and, I am happy to admit, road time) that range and time limitation is not going to go away - and there's going to be a glut of shiny new one-owner electric cars on the market, going cheap.

Lord I'm one, Lord I'm... shit, not even two hundred miles from home. Time for a recharge already? On a bright note, here's an excuse for Tim Horton's to put a store up every 150km on the Trans-Canada Highway with squillions of outdoor powerpoints.

"How do you take your coffee, sir?"

"With 1.21 GIGAWATTS, my son!"

WAYNE Swan will today move to reinvigorate the government's carbon tax sales pitch, unveiling Treasury modelling that predicts Australia's income will be $8000 a person higher by 2020, even with a $20 a tonne carbon price.

The Treasurer - in a major speech aimed at boosting the government's carbon tax plans and cutting down Tony Abbott's cost-of-living attacks - will release modelling that shows average annual growth in real national income per capita will be 1.1 per cent until 2050.

Modelling is only as accurate as the assumptions you feed into it. This government has made a botch job of everything since it's been elected, and hasn't even managed to deliver a surplus budget yet. This despite declaring, three years ago, its intent to keep the budget "in average surplus over the cycle."

The Treasurer will declare that national income will continue to increase under a carbon tax, telling the National Press Club: "This means a carbon price will only reduce growth in GNP per person by about one-tenth of one percentage point."

Carried by the mining sector and what's left of the manufacturing sector until both become uncompetitive, and maybe by the farming sector if the impact of this tax doesn't drive it to the wall.

The Treasurer will argue that carbon pricing is "the next crucial frontier" in economic reform, likening it to the abolition of tariffs and the introduction of compulsory superannuation.

Oh, so THAT'S what it's about. When things like this are said, I really have to doubt whether it's about saving the planet at all - or whether it ever was.

Arguing that as Treasurer, "I refuse to let this country become an old-world, high-polluting, technological backwater", Mr Swan will release the modelling showing real national income per capita will be 16 per cent higher than current levels by 2020, an increase of more than $8000.

This government has had since late 2007 to begin an extensive, integrated program of constructing every "renewable energy" option known to humanity, not to mention the option Britain is currently going for in order to slash CO2 emissions - nuclear power. What we should have seen is something on the scale of the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme (look it up). What we've got is... nothing like that.

By 2050, the increase is about 56 per cent, more than $30,000.

So unrealistic as to be unbelievable. This is a carrot dangled before the people they have browbeaten into fear and ignorance - a great big money carrot. It's a political bribe with no hope of realisation; because if they get it wrong (as they have got everything else wrong), just how much will thirty thousand Weimar Deutschmarks Australian dollars buy in 2050?

"That's before you take into account the long-term benefits of carbon pricing - like protecting tourism icons such as the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu, or the agricultural wealth of the Murray-Darling Basin," Mr Swan will say.

No point in protecting the Murray-Darling basin if you're going to bankrupt half the bloody farming sector!! As for the Reef or Kakadu - sorry, but service industries like tourism just DO NOT MAKE THAT MUCH MONEY. And much of that tourism is international tourism, which (funnily enough) creates heaps more of those "carbon emissions" Mr Swan and his fellow-travellers want to see reduced!

Although the numbers to be unveiled by Mr Swan relate to a carbon price of $20 a tonne, it is understood Treasury has modelled a range of figures and that the government is yet to make a final decision on the starting price.

A painless foot in the door - or wedge in the castle wall - that can be ramped up and up and up without the need to consult Parliament, is what I'm predicting. Our only hope, funnily enough, may be the rampant lunacy of the Greens - who (as with the ETS) will not come to the party unless the starting figure is set ruinously high, even for those who believe in this mad scheme.

Mr Swan's speech comes as the government's multi-party climate change committee enters its final weeks of deliberations on the shape of the carbon pricing package and before the imminent release of a Productivity Commission report into relative carbon prices overseas.

A sensible treasurer waits until after his Productivity Commission reports back, before shooting off his mouth. If the PC report sinks what he says, it will probably be quietly buried. Watch this space.

The modelling will show renewable energy is expected to soar under a carbon price. Renewable electricity sector generation (excluding hydro-electric power) is projected to be 1700 per cent larger by 2050.

WHAT? Just how the hell are they going to build all that with the manufacturing sector crippled by the penalty it needs to pay for the CO2 that is generated in the course of manufacturing the technology, IF it's built here, and the national debt spiralling into unheard-of depths if it's bought off the shelf? Note the exclusion of hydroelectric power - this is the price of political union with the Greens, to whom it is as much anathema as is nuclear, and who will have a large balance of power in the Senate in less than four weeks. I fear for my country.

Declaring that placing a price on carbon pollution is the "most cost-effective way to decouple economic growth from emissions growth", Mr Swan will confront the opposition's campaign against the carbon tax, arguing that "most of our most important reforms were once described as a potential disaster for our economy".

Oh, it will decouple it alright. Economic growth will go into a death-spiral while emissions will continue to rise, because there is no hope in hell they can provide enough solar and wind to run the country (especially with all the people they're letting in - they expect to have an extra ten million by then) and they will have to fall back on coal and gas. It's either that, or go nuclear.

"But in time they reaped big dividends for the country, helping secure two decades of uninterrupted economic growth," he will say.

This is NOT the same thing, and they bloody well know it's not. The other economic reforms of which they speak did not cut to the fundamental heart of the thing which makes our civilisation what it is - electrical power. Strangle electricity and you strangle civilisation - it's that simple. Most of the people who are publicly in favour of this are wealthy enough to keep their heads above water without affecting their standard of living. "Bugger the rest of you, I'm all right thanks, Jack." Well I'm certainly all right, but I know quite a few people who are NOT going to be, and I don't want to see them "buggered". Sure, they're going to give a lot of it back as "compensation", but how do you "compensate" a pensioner who dies of heat-stroke because they know their "compensation" cheque won't arrive in time to pay the electricity bill, and elect not to use the air conditioner in high summer (40-plus degrees CELSIUS for days on end)? I'm not kidding - this happens EVERY FUCKING YEAR in Australia, to the point where emergency departments trot out treatment protocols, and it's only going to happen more often now.

The Treasurer will argue that tax reform opened up opportunities for businesses to take advantage of China's boom and that the superannuation guarantee had achieved a rise in national savings and retirement incomes, setting a platform for dealing with the global financial crisis and the pressures of an ageing population.

I'll say it again - THIS IS NOT THE SAME THING. Also, Swan's and Rudd's way of dealing with the GFC was to play class politics and shove money into the pockets of people who spent it on foreign goods when they spent it at all, preferring in many cases to do the sensible thing and clear some of their debts - something neither Swan nor Rudd seems to understand is a good idea.

"The Liberal Party knows direct-action policies cannot entrench fundamental economic and behavioural changes, but they don't care," Mr Swan will say.

For "behavioural changes" read "we will make electricity so fucking expensive that candles will be a gateway drug to dynamo-powered torches."

In Sydney yesterday, Tony Abbott moved to exploit a Galaxy poll showing 73 per cent of voters believed they would take a hip-pocket hit from the carbon tax, 58 per cent opposed the move and 64 per cent believed Julia Gillard should call an early election to seek a mandate to introduce it.

And rightly he should, because the people polled at least, and possibly the population of which they are claimed to be representative, are fucking furious that the PM swore up and down upon every little hair on her head that she would NOT do what she is doing now, and that any attempt by Tony Abbott to claim that she would was "fearmongering."

I guess that makes it a fully justified fear, then.

"It is pretty obvious a lot of people in our community feel badly ripped off by this government. In particular, they feel badly ripped off by this government's attempt to sneak a carbon tax through a parliament that has no mandate for it," the Opposition Leader said.

This, I believe, is correct. Trouble is, Gillard knew that a Carbon Tax would sink her at the last election: she BARELY sneaked through, and that only with the help of some highly interesting fellow travellers, plus one doctrinaire fanatic whose boss (Bob Brown, the leader of the Greens) is possibly the reason she has elected/been obliged to backflip. Why? Because loss of Greens support means automatic loss of government, and a thrashing at the polls that will put Labor out on its arse for at least two terms and possibly three (which is approximately how much time it will take the Liberal/National coalition to fix the damage done).

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet cited weekend rallies in favour of carbon pricing, support from senior economists, eminent Australians and climate change adviser Ross Garnaut as evidence of support for carbon pricing.

None of these "eminent Australians" is a climate scientist or an engineer, as far as I know. That makes Mr Combet's call an appeal to authority, which is an automatic sign of a lost argument.

"I know the Galaxy poll of course is suggesting people have a considerable degree of concerns about the issue," Mr Combet said. "The government understands those concerns."

Just what the hell do we have to do to make him acknowledge what that poll is telling him? It's telling him that the Australian people think HIS PLAN SUCKS, and maybe we should prepare a plate to print that in 72-point type, affix it to a baseball bat and (metaphorically) apply it to his head over and over again until he gets the message.

He said Mr Abbott's claims were "absurd, unsubstantiated and ridiculous".

Oh - does he mean like the claim that Mr Abbott made before the election - you know, that the Labor Government would introduce a carbon tax if it got back into office? If that's "absurd, unsubstantiated and ridiculous", I'll take Abbott over Combet (or any of these Labor/Green muppets) any day. His predecessor Penny Wong's first act as Climate Change Minister should have been to walk out of the Senate and into the Lower House chamber and slam Kevin Rudd's head repeatedly into the dais until he agreed to nuclear power, and her second act should have been to fire the bureaucrats and administrators from her department and replace them with engineers and industrial chemists. Likewise Combet with Gillard, although she's got the excuse that she's pretty much the Greens' puppet until she develops the moral backbone to do the needful, break the coalition with them and go to the polls all over again (with the grim expectation that she WILL lose).

If she does that, she should wait until after the new Greens senators take their seats and have had time to nail their colours to the mast (you will find those colours a combination of green with a strong tinge of red). Then she should ask for a double dissolution which will wipe them out and take the albatross off Labor's neck when it (one day) returns to power.

One thing is for certain - at the next election, Labor is going to take a hiding. And even if it's not a full senate election, the sitting Green members who are there now (and vulnerable at the next half-senate poll) are probably for the high jump. After that, we might get someone sane like Martin Ferguson in charge of the Labor Party - at that point, and with most of the thumb-sucking special snowflakes cleaned out, Labor might be prepared to rethink its ideological opposition to nuclear power and help the Coalition push it through over the heads of the screaming, fanatical "Greens".

Just how much in the way of hydro, tidal, ocean-thermal and nuclear power could have been bought for the $150bn worth of deficit spending the Rudd/Gillard Labor Government has done since November 2007? And how many Australians (including immigrants, refugees, etc) could have been employed on those projects? THAT is how you build national wealth and "decrease carbon emissions" along the way - not by shuffling money around and making atmospheric CO2 levels an end in themselves (if they are even an end anymore). THAT is something the Chinese and the Indians understand perfectly, which is (among other reasons) why the Chinese built the Three Gorges system and the Indians wanted to buy our uranium to feed their power reactors. Mind you, the Chinese are also building coal-fired power stations at a rate which will match Australia's entire output every YEAR - or to put it in perspective, if Australia reverted back to pre-European conditions TOMORROW and stayed that way, the "accomplishment" in "emissions reduction" would be wiped out in twelve months; certainly less than twenty-four.

George Monbiot says what needs saying about Fukushima. Bold emphasis above the line is mine, as is italic commentary within the artice. (The source article has multiple links which I have not reproduced here.)

Let us begin:

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You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, way beyond the worst fears of the designers, and yet the worst did not happen.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

Something that is sorely lacking here in Australia, at least from official sources and most favoured by the media.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Note this - an entirely nuclear energy grid is less environmentally 'impacting' than an all-renewable grid. It is also far more predictable in terms of the power it produces.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

Try "the tougher the task of construction" too, and the higher the cost, the more steel that needs to be smelted, etc. etc. If you're a CO₂ phobic, this needs to be factored into the equation.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

Let alone the large print which says ARE YOU COMPLETELY FUCKING DERANGED?

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources.

Surely this also applies to Northern Europe, Scandinavia, a goodly portion of Canada, the former Soviet Union, etc.

It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

The more remote you are, the more small-scale your operation (and, it seems, the better your output) and the more that storage batteries make sense.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

Which is why I see the Deep Greens as the ultimate misanthropes - and quite possibly traitors to human civilisation.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Shale gas, meanwhile, has its own problems - it apparently leaves large holes in the ground that are no longer pressure-packed, with interesting results. Coal remains an excellent fuel because it is cheap and because the technology to use it is easily designed, constructed and maintained even by a relatively poor and technologically unsophisticated nation.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

---

Dear Green fucktards:

Show me a limitless, continuous source of energy without risk and I will gladly give up nuclear and most fossil fuels (until such limitless source is miniaturised for motor vehicles and the smallest aircraft).

Until then, what we have is the best we've got to keep civilisation going and prevent starvation and horror with deaths on the scale of billions. If you want that on your heads, if you're prepared to go to your graves with that on your conscience (because you will go to your graves if you bring this about, I can promise you that), please have the honesty to say so before ejaculating any more of the diseased intellectual cum you have so far splattered across the face of the world.

If your "Departments of Climate Change" were staffed with and commanded by engineers and physicists instead of ponzi-scheme-addicted bureaucrats and unreasoning, power-mad political fanatics, I might be more inclined to believe that you actually had the ultimate good of humankind in mind. Until then, kindly go fuck yourselves sideways with the most destructive objects you can imagine.

No love,

Me.

1. An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery in Iran has pleaded to be allowed to hug her children, in a letter attributed to her released by human rights activists in London. Muslim immigrants to the West, please note - either leave shit like this at the door or turn around and go back where you came from. We don't want it here. If this is your culture, fuck your culture. That having been said, those Muslims coming in who do leave their homeland's cultural baggage at the door shouldn't have to deal with shit like this:

2. A US church plans to publicly burn copies of the Koran on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The announcement, from Florida's Dove World Outreach Centre, has prompted threats from Islamic groups and warnings the move will trigger a rise in hate crimes. Dove World Outreach Centre? More like a pack of vultures to me. No better IMNSHO than the stone-age savages who passed the death sentence on that Iranian woman.

3. Say you're a Brazilian soccer player who's just murdered his porn-star girlfriend and you're looking for a way to hide the body. Why not turn to Man's best friend? Among the macabre details divulged by police: they believe Bruno was in a home near Belo Horizonte home with Samudio last month at the time of her murder, and that her body was later cut into pieces, some of which were fed to Rottweiler dogs kept at the house in a bid to cover the murder. A wise man once said "Murder will out" - and here it has. This strengthens all the prejudices I've ever had about testosterone-overloaded men who keep testosterone-overloaded dogs.

4. Headline: WORLD'S OLDEST MAN LIVES IN JA... wait:

A home visit by Tokyo officials to a local resident to congratulate him on his 111th birthday instead led to a police search that uncovered his three-decade-old skeleton.

New headline: ZOMBIE EMBARKS ON THIRTY-YEAR WELFARE-FRAUD RAMPAGE.

5. What a waste: A British teen girl who fell seven floors from the window of a Spanish hotel on a schoolies week celebration has died of her injuries. Grace Ford, 17, plunged 30m when trying to climb out of the window of a male friend's room in an apartment where visitors were not allowed, UK newspaper the Telegraph reported. Apparently they thought the window was a conduit that led to another part of the building. Please note that "drug-induced coma" almost certainly means "sedated in intensive care" in this context, but she must have been pretty hammered in the first place to make a stupid mistake like this. The saddest part of all is that she died of complications - she seems to have survived the fall itself. Nevertheless, it's why I disapprove strongly of end-of-year debauches by school leavers, something which has become pretty much institutionalised here in Australia in the event known as "schoolies week".

Debating the Greens could chop them down to size.

The author of this article used to work for former Prime Minister John Howard, so his opinions need to be taken with an appropriately sized grain of salt. My comments, as always, in bold - and then a reversion below the line for the final discussion, to save your poor bold-blasted eyeballs. Let us begin...
( Cut for friendspage friendliness )

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All in all, I have to admit this article wasn't what it seemed to promise. Its author started off talking about the Greens and couldn't resist veering off into a general discussion of Coalition vs. Labor politics. The Greens were shunted off to the sidelines (which is where I think they belong).

Having (cautiously and with some qualifications) sung Julia Gillard's praises, I now proceed to take apart someone who is nominally "on my side". I'd like to think he is, but I'm dreadfully concerned that he's got a gun pointed at his own foot.

Here's the source; my comments in bold.

Australians deserve more than a factional puppet show in government, writes Senator Cory Bernardi.
It is like the longest and most painful episode of The Thunderbirds ever.

The crises are just as contrived, the characters are equally wooden and occasionally the strings are visible.

Um... no. The crises contrived by the Rudd Government to justify doing this, that and the other crazy, stupid thing were certainly contrived. The main character was certainly wooden, but had he had half Jeff Tracy's brains and common sense, we'd not be in this situation.

But last week we had a rare glimpse at the faceless factional fixers who are actually pulling the strings of the lead players.
After two years of government lurching from one faux war to another, the Labor warlords made Kevin Rudd their target. One can understand their anxiety and willingness to despatch a Prime Minister in a brutal display of their factional power.

Um, no. It was more like a brutal display of "Holy fuck, this guy is incompetent and out of control, and we are careering towards electoral annihilation and the ruin of the country."

After all, Mr Rudd refused to recognise their greatness through ministerial preferment. Some of these powerful figures were left languishing on the backbench or in junior portfolios - positions considered beneath their undoubted talents.

Don't belittle your opponents. They may be ruthless, they may be fumbling the ball, but they're not that stupid or that selfish.

Kevin Rudd survived while he had the public confidence but, as the mal-administration of the Labor Government became increasingly evident, the ruthless Labor machine kicked into gear.

And so it should have. Kevin Rudd had the public's confidence for far longer than he deserved, and it's mostly due to Labor-friendly political commentators and a refusal of previous Opposition Leaders to take him seriously to task.

Now was the time for payback under the guise of giving the Party a shot at winning the next election. Drafting a willing accomplice in Julia Gillard, the unprecedented betrayal of a first-term Prime Minister began.

Betrayal? Please, that's how the Westminster System works. The precedents are Hawke/Keating and (in Britain) Asquith/Lloyd-George.

When the factional forces combined against him, Rudd had less than a dozen supporters and decided not to contest the leadership in order to avoid further humiliation.

A vain, narcissistic and fragile mind that couldn't stand losing. That much I agree with. He did not want to risk defeat in a double-dissolution election over the Emission Trading Scheme. He did not put candidates up in two by-elections which were contested in the wake of "Climategate", in case his candidates were butchered and made his polls look bad - a critical error in that by contesting them and winning them, he might have had the numbers to force the ETS through. Instead they were contested by raving lunatics who dribbled on about the suspension of democracy being necessary to cope with climate change, and cybernetic appreciations of connections to Greater Gaia and the like - who were systematically slaughtered at the polls as they deserved, and did the climate-change position far more damage than a thousand "skeptics".

Now the process of redefining history has commenced in an attempt to distance Julia Gillard from her predecessor. It should make for an interesting display

After two years of being the 2IC in the Rudd ‘kitchen cabinet’, Gillard claims the Government had lost its way.

She stated nothing more or less than the truth.

After two years of defending senseless programs and waste, she wants us to believe it had nothing to do with her. The spin doctors expect us to forget that Gillard was responsible for the greatest and most expensive mismanagement of a government program in history - the rorted Building the Education Revolution - where billions of taxpayer dollars were wasted.

I think we'll see evidence of Kevin Rudd's involvement in that plan in a BIG way. I'm suspending judgement on that one.

After years of defending, deploying and denying the failures of this Government, we are now expected to believe that Julia Gillard was not a part of the problem.

History will be the judge of that. I am the last person on Earth who will defend the way Kevin Rudd ran his show - he was a minor megalomaniac who wouldn't take no for an answer; it was his way or the highway, and no questions asked. It MIGHT be proven in the long run that his colleagues tried and tried to argue him out of courses and were loyal to a fault. Until then, judgement should be reserved.

I agree with Ms Gillard that the Government has lost its way. I agree that the policy failures and their negative impacts on our nation are too many to list. I agree that their few achievements are modest and mostly spin, but I cannot accept her playing Pontius Pilate and washing her hands of the decisions she made.

Hmm. Maybe, maybe not. Ultimately it was Rudd's show, but I think we're going to have to wait until he's out of Parliament for the full truth to emerge. Given his reputation for being foul-mouthed, abusive and tyrannical, I can understand why Ministers might have been more concerned with trying to run their portfolios as best they could. I still think Julia Gillard's got a lot to answer for, but she made a better Acting Prime Minister than Rudd ever made Prime Minister, and she may do a better job with a lot of the load off her plate. I suspect with three portfolios to run and the Big Chair to fill whenever Rudd was out of the country or on leave, she was simply overloaded.

Ms Gillard's ascension to the leadership of the Labor Party is a desperate attempt to hide the failures of this Government under the political corpse of Kevin Rudd.

There's no hiding the failures; the question is whether you're willing to concede the Government the possibility of rectifying them. I am. If Senator Bernardi is not, and generalises this belief to the entire electorate, he's on the cusp of a major political error that could lose his party the election.

It is a muscle flexing exercise by the hidden men of Labor who have demonstrated once again who really pulls the strings.

The Australian Labor Party was formed to be the political representation of the unions. Imagine Kevin Rudd allowed to run riot and do more of the damage he's already done this country. We should be glad they took him out and replaced him with someone who, whatever her failings, doesn't share his.

The Australian people deserve more from their government than a puppet show and instinctively know that changing the lead puppet will never change the flawed factional culture of the Labor Party.

It won't change the culture, no. But it will change something abysmal to something possibly salvageable. If Julia Gillard's got half the balls (metaphorical ones) I credit her with, she'll make some real changes. I'll say it again - I despised Rudd, and I would not have been willing to bear the thought of another three years under his governance. With Gillard, we have the beginnings of a reasonable alternative to the Coalition. So long as prominent Coalition senators like Mr Bernardi indulge in paranoid fantasies about hidden, faceless puppetmasters, that alternative will seem increasingly more reasonable.

Senator Cory Bernardi is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition and a Senator for South Australia. This article is courtesy of his personal blog which can be found at http://www.corybernardi.com.

Senator Bernardi, if I recall correctly, did a lot of good work opposing the insanity of the ETS. Unfortunately I think he's gone off the rails here. I hope the rest of his party doesn't follow suit - although even if it is that flawed, it would have been better than three more years under Kevin Rudd. Julia Gillard has shown the second most priceless gift a politician can have - knowledge of when (and more importantly how) to compromise. She's also shown signs of the most important gift, one I've only ever seen in one other Labor politician (Bob Hawke, former Prime Minister) - the ability to sell a viewpoint your audience disagrees with in a way that doesn't insult or demonise them.

There are those who believe that immigration should be curbed because of serious concerns about lack of supporting infrastructure and the inevitable sprawl of suburbia. Because much of that immigration is of people who do not have white skin, English as a first language or Christian faith, these critics (who quite often are on the more conservative* side of politics) have been decried as racists hiding behind a cloak of legitimate concern. Prime Minister Gillard has stated their position bluntly: "It's all very well to talk of a 'big Australia' but when you talk to the people of Western Sydney and Western Melbourne, they're going to say 'but where are you going to put all these extra people?'"


* Conservative politicans in Australia are more in the British mould (thus corresponding more to the centre-right) than the American (far-right creationist-fundamentalist Republican). Please do not confuse the two. We have a few of the latter, most notably Steve Fielding, but even they are well to the left of the worst the United States has to offer. I would like to see "Conservative" removed from its present usage. Most of those who claim the title in the US are, from my perspective, actually extremist-reactionaries. True conservatives move forward when they are convinced that progress is warranted and safe. As I see it, a true conservative would not indefinitely oppose gay marriage on principle even if they had started out doing so, and might happily have voted for Barack Obama had he been four to eight years older and more experienced.

Conservatives do not refuse to change their minds. Only reactionaries do that.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been enjoying (??) a steady slide in his popularity ever since late last November, when his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was defeated, his moment in the Copenhagen limelight turned to failure, and Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition Leader.

Since then, things have steadily got worse for him - and everything he's tried to do to deflect attention from the previous failure has gone into an even faster tail-spin.

Now it looks as though his days, possibly even his hours, are numbered.

If this happens, the likely successor is Julia Gillard (deputy PM). That would make her Australia's first female Prime Minister. Things to bear in mind:

1) She will not be an elected Prime Minister.

2) She must be judged on her competence, not on her gender. Unfortunately for her, the "Building the Education Revolution" program over which she presides as Education Minister has been far from stellar; with reports of gross mismanagement, total failures of consultation with expressed wishes of the schools being overridden, and horrific fiscal waste to the tune of FIVE BILLION DOLLARS. I have no problem with a female Prime Minister per se. I have a lot of problems with this particular woman as Prime Minister.

3) The next election is due no later than April; the best she can hope for is to be regarded as a stable caretaker. Essentially everything this government has done is going to have to be overhauled, and possibly undone and redone, before the Labor Party can regard itself as fit to govern beyond then.

10:19pm - according to the news sources, it's all over bar the shouting. From the ABC, the Government broadcaster:

One senior party source said: "This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base within the party and now his only faction - Newspoll - has deserted him. He is gone."

His only faction - Newspoll. Says it all about the man. This is what happens when you're driven by the polls rather than by conviction. Even Whitlam - sacked in disgrace by the Governor General and then slaughtered at the polls by the electorate - had conviction. He who lives by the popularity poll will die by the popularity poll - metaphorically speaking, anyway.

ETA 24 June, 10:15.
Rudd is out. Good riddance to you, sir. You have besmirched the reputation of this fine nation for long enough.

Congratulations to Julia Gillard on a clean kill, elected unopposed. Prime Minister Gillard, you have approximately six months and not more than nine* to begin the undoing of Rudd's damage and start governing this country the way it ought to be governed. Show that you can be a principled leader, and not merely a poll-driven narcissist like the pretender you just toppled, and the country might give you another chance.

Congratulations also to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, without whom Rudd would never have entered his curious self-driven death spiral. Your job - to provide an effective opposition and pull the government up on its shortcomings - has been done well, but your other job (getting into government) might just have got a hell of a lot harder. If you can win against a resurgent Julia Gillard come the next election, you'll deserve the position.


* = Not a threat, but a constitutional and electoral reality. The next election MUST be called by then.

CONTROVERSY over Education Minister Julia Gillard's Building the Education Revolution program has been growing for many months.

Pearson's in truly fine form here and makes a good argument which I wanted to share. My comments are in bold.

Debate has centred on whether the sheer scale of the $16 billion program was a justified economic stimulus response to the financial crisis. The debate between the neo-Keynesians and the neo-liberals about the benefits of stimuli in the face of such crises was not as pronounced in this country as in the US, where the Republicans have indulged in a Coolidge-esque insistence that creative destruction is part and parcel of capitalism and threatened firms should be allowed to fail. No matter that the Troubled Asset Relief Program rescue package was instituted by former president George W. Bush; the Republicans insist bailouts are for socialists.

Some degree of 'stimulus' was definitely necessary. The true question revolves around how much was appropriate and on what the money should have been spent. As far as the US is concerned, the Republicans need to get slapped about a bit - they're never going to be a viable party if they don't, and that imperils democracy.

I can say little of worth in relation to the debate about governmental intervention via stimulus spending. There is legitimate debate to be had about whether "timely, targeted, temporary" should not turn into too much, too long, but it is not this facet of the BER with which I am concerned.

Nor should he be. This is so subjective that I'm not prepared to hold any criticism of the Government over this facet any more than Pearson is. Pearson's an Aboriginal Rights campaigner (NOT an activist, please note; they are different in my mind); I'm a pathologist. Neither of us is an economist.

The second focus of the BER debate is the rorting and waste in the administration of the program. A project of this size supervised by bureaucrats was always going to turn into a pig trough. But although this dimension is important, there is a third issue: the question of the education reform value of the BER.

The rorting and waste have been horrific, and deserve close scrutiny. It's a travesty that the inquiry set up by the Government did not include this rorting among its terms of reference. Smells to high heaven.

There will be little, if any, education value from this colossal investment. The program has been inaccurately and unfortunately named. It should have been called the Building Revolution Program or the Construction Employment Program. It is wrong to place this investment in the nation's education accounts because it will not yield educational reform.

Pearson is right - this is the greatest issue of all. And no, it will not lead to a single child being better educated, especially not the ones who need it most.

For those concerned with supporting national investment in education reform, it would be a shame if the public ends up thinking "we've done the big educational investments" of this era.

It seems a particular policy idea and a particular political consideration came together to form the basis of the BER.

The policy idea is that investment in physical facilities can be a decisive contributor to school reform. In Britain, Tony Blair developed a program for the comprehensive overhaul of failing schools where the facilities were dilapidated and substandard. The thinking was that ghetto schools could not be helped with education reform as long as they felt and looked like ghetto schools.

The policy idea has merit. There is a strong case for failing schools in Australia to receive investment in their physical facilities. Students from distressed communities need to study in schools that transcend their backgrounds and neighbourhoods; schools that tell them they are worthy of backing and that there are high hopes for their future.

Agree completely.

With the kind of money available under the BER, the country's most disadvantaged schools requiring large capital investments could have found the solution they needed. Alas, $16bn later and these neediest schools still don't have the comprehensive infrastructure they require.

Agree. Utter fail.

This is because the policy idea was met with a political consideration. The BER was not premised on the principle of need. Electorally wedged by the Howard government over the private-public debate, and the drift from public to private schools by the aspirational lower middle classes, federal Labor's response has been to move from a sectarian to an ecumenical approach. Kevin Rudd made Labor's shift clear on his election in 2007. He underscored Labor's pledge to fund education regardless of the choice made by parents about public or private education: "We are blind to these matters because we want the best government schools in the world and the best non-government schools in the world - we want a world-class education system while preserving parental choice."

Fine words, but look how it turned out. What they have invested in is bloated, overpriced infrastructure which in some cases is substandard and in many cases isn't what the schools in question either needed or wanted.

The federal Labor government does not want to alienate the legions of aspirational families who have drifted to the private system. It does not want to open itself up to the kind of accusation recently made by Tony Abbott: "You just can't trust these people. They don't like private education. They will, after the election, if they're re-elected, as sure as night follows day, they will try to cut private schools funding."

This means there is no willingness to discriminate between public and private schools when it comes to federal government investment. And the problem is that needs-based funding automatically invokes the public-private dichotomy, even though there are needy private schools as well.

So the BER sought to spread the largesse across public and private schools regardless of need.

Again, fail.

A program that was large enough to provide a revolutionary change in the circumstances of the neediest schools ended up having more limited effect across the full range of schools.

Schools requiring new facilities have surely benefited from the program, but schools also have ended up with facilities without any strong rationale.

Frankly, the most privileged schools have ended up with a windfall they didn't need and should not have received.

I completely agree, and I'm very pro-private-school.

While controversy rages on the first two dimensions of the BER policy - its role in economic stimulus and its administration - there is near silence on this third dimension. The federal opposition has no interest in championing an educational investment policy based on need, and the Rudd government does not want to expose itself to the electoral accusation it is the party of public schools.

I would disagree with the first statement of that last sentence as a statement of absolute truth, but there's certainly every indication that the Opposition has failed to attack Labor on this point.

While the position of the conservatives is understandable at the level of politics, it is highly unfortunate from a policy viewpoint. They should consider at least two arguments against their approach.

First, why spend public funds in redundant ways? The most privileged schools do not need this kind of government spending.

I agree completely. Alas, we'll never know what John Howard might have done in the same circumstances. I suspect, however, that he would not have seen private schools as targets for a specific economy-stimulating public works package. There's a very well-to-do private school here in town that I was surprised to see having received funds.

Second, focused investment in revolutionising Australia's neediest schools will benefit all Australians. Failing schools are a cost to the whole country, not the least to liberals and conservatives. Lifting the productivity of young Australians whose fate is to end up in our neediest schools is an interest shared by everybody. Why make the defence of privileged schools the singular priority?

I wouldn't make it so, and I think it would be a mistake to generalise the Opposition's policy as being embraced by all its supporters or even all its MPs and Senators. Pearson has a very good article in Quarterly Essay on the importance of education for indigenous Australians, which I might comment on if I've got time, but the gist of it - I haven't had time to do more than skim it yet - seems to be that the best education an indigenous Australian can receive is the same education that his white private-school-attending fellow Australians in uptown Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide (for example) get. The Rudd Government, obsessed with "apologising" for past mistakes, has IMO blown its chance to give that to them on a platter.

When the Government puts its hand out for my vote and claims it spent sixteen billion on education, I'll know it's lying its arse off.

Noel Pearson is director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.

The creature you elected to 'end the culture of fear and suppression under Howard' has plans for you.

Australia came under fire today from the United States for its proposed internet filtering system, which, if implemented, would be the strictest of any democracy.

A US state department official said that it had raised concerns with Australia over the plans, which are to be voted on by its parliament.

"We remain committed to advancing the free flow of information, which we view as vital to economic prosperity and preserving open societies globally," Michael Tran, a state department spokesman told the Associated Press.

"We don't discuss the details of specific diplomatic exchanges, but I can say that we have raised our concerns on this matter with Australian officials."

Internet companies Google and Yahoo have already condemned the proposal as a heavy-handed measure that could restrict access to legal information.

Australia's communications minister, Stephen Conroy, said the filter would block access to sites that include child pornography, sexual violence and detailed instructions in crime or drug use. The list of banned sites could be updated based on public complaints. But he declined to say what the US had told Australia.

National censorship of overseas sites is becoming a trade issue. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, told the Guardian last week :"Since services and information are our most successful exports, if regulations in China effectively prevent us from being competitive, then they are a trade barrier."

Many countries – including the UK – use filtering systems to limit access to outlawed material: in the UK the independent Internet Watch Foundation lists sites internet service providers (ISPs) are asked to block. The list is secret, and frequently updated. In Germany and Canada ISPs use similar blocking systems; in Italy gambling sites are blocked.

But critics say that the Australian plan, which has been proposed repeatedly over the past five years, exceeds what is necessary and strays into matters of free speech.

"Our primary concern is that the scope of content to be filtered is too wide," Google wrote in its submission to the Australian government, suggesting that the filter – which would be mandatory and state-controlled – would slow browsing speeds.

The company said it already had its own filter to block child pornography.

"Some limits, like child pornography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available and we agree," Google said. "But moving to a mandatory ISP-level filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information."

Lucinda Barlow of Google Australia told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the proposal raised the possibility of banning politically and socially controversial material and went beyond filters used in Germany, Canada and Italy. Other critics say the filtering would put Australia in the same censorship league as China.

Yahoo said the filter would block many sites with controversial content such as euthanasia discussion forums and gay and lesbian forums that discuss sexual experiences. Yet it would not block peer-to-peer file-sharing, nor prevent predators approaching children in chat programs or social networking sites.

Conroy said his department would take the comments from Google and Yahoo into consideration before sending a proposal to parliament later this year.

The US State Department sided with Google in its row with China over censorship when in January the search engine company complained that its systems had been hacked into in what it implied was an attack all but government-sanctioned by China. Last week Google moved its search systems to the Chinese island dependency of Hong Kong. The communist government responded by blocking searches from the mainland for forbidden topics such as the pro-democracy movement.

David Vaile of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales said China and Australia had markedly different approaches to restricting the Internet.

"China's filter is explicitly about discouraging access to and discussion of certain clearly political topics," he said, while Australia's filter would focus on specifically restricted material.

While some critics of Australia's filter have said it puts the nation in the same censorship league as China, Vaile pointed out that the freedom-of-speech argument used by American companies follows a legal tradition that other countries do not necessarily share.

Yahoo and Google are accustomed to the protections of the First Amendment of the US constitution,which guarantees freedom of speech and elevates it to a very high legal status, Vaile said.

"In Australia there is no equivalent," he said. "There is no law that says you've got free speech. Having a lack of any legal protection for free speech for any effective restraint on [filters] is something that's worrying."

This is not about stopping paedophiles and never has been, because it simply won't work for that purpose. Yet anyone who objects is being treated as a paedophiles' friend.

Rudd must go, as must every one of the sockpuppets who form his Cabinet.

ORGANISATIONS which campaigned for the Rudd Government's election in 2007 are among those given hundreds of thousands of dollars from Australia's foreign aid budget.

Under new rules announced in 2009, Ausaid can now fund education and awareness campaigns in Australia.

Labor-friendly organisations are big winners from the $1.3 million handed out so far.

The ACTU has collected $147,000 for a campaign to educate workers on the Rudd Government's international development aid program.

Another $150,000 has gone to the Oaktree Foundation, founded by former young Australian of the Year Hugh Evans, for 1000 young people to travel the country educating the public about poverty alleviation and the UN's Millennium Development Goals.

The foundation was part of the 2007 Make Poverty History campaign and during that year's election Mr Evans said it was planning a "full-scale" campaign urging people to support Labor's position on foreign aid.

Other winners include a program to bring Australian and Afghani youth together via the internet for an arts project showing they understand poverty and a rickshaw ride for 400 from Queensland to Tasmania.

Under the new rules, 10 per cent of Ausaid's Australian NGO Co-operation Program's budget can be spent in Australia on awareness campaigns.

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop said the foreign aid budget should be used to improve the lives of people in developing countries.

"Australians are generous and want to support other nations, but they expect their funds to be spent efficiently in support of less fortunate people around the world," she said.

The Government did not respond to a request for comment.

The ACTU is the Australian Council of Trade Unions. What it's doing with $147,000 of money that could do a lot of good in the Third World, I have no idea. Why someone shouldn't be strung up by their gonads and flogged senseless with wet noodles for this, I also have no idea. But as with the building business, it looks fishy.