Month: November 2009

Things that really matter

Posted by Chief Blogger – 21 November, 2009

Government spending is all about priorities, and according to Rudd spending $6 billion on pink batts and billions more on school halls parents don’t want is more important than national security:

…the planned acquisition (F-35) has slipped by at least two years, with the air force not due to get its first operational squadron until 2018-19 at the earliest.

The initial squadron could be trimmed to as few as 14 aircraft as Defence planners struggle to find further savings in the $27bn defence budget.

This typical of how ALP defence policy always works. Promise high deliver low.

Rudd’s just been top trumped

Posted by Chief Blogger – 20 November, 2009

Compared to what Telstra can do now at minimal cost, the purpose of Rudd’s future big government run broadband network is what exactly?

…provide a two-finger salute to the government in the process.

The idea was to spend $300 million to upgrade the HFC cable network Telstra owns in the capital cities. The original NBN was supposed to deliver minimum speeds of 12 Mbps. Telstra would upgrade the speeds available through the HFC – which passes a million homes in Melbourne – to 100 Mbps. Should the upgrade go well, they were warning, they could spend a total of less than $1 billion to deliver 100 Mbps to all the capitals.

The HFC upgrade and Telstra’s show of continuing defiance and aggression might have been a provocation too far, forcing the government to consider the impact of such an upgrade on the richest consumer markets and its implications for the original NBN.

Ultimately it revealed the ‘new’ NBN, with its own 100 Mbps capacity (and higher upload speeds), as well as a package of threatening and punitive new regulatory measures to ensure Telstra was finally brought to heel.

The purpose of Rudd’s own future network is to destory private enterprise and wealth – not provide faster connection speeds to users. While Telstra has not released the prices of their new service, given Telstra’s relatively low capital investment compared to Rudd’s $43 billion investment, the final prices are likely to be in – total terms – much lower than anything the NBN could offer customers.

More reasons

Posted by Chief Blogger – 20 November, 2009

Another reason why the UK should ditch the EU:

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has dropped out of the race to be European Council President – just as EU leaders meet to decide who to appoint.

But it seems unlikely that die hard lefties will shift their opinion. The EU has and continues to offer them a prime way to push their radical agenda away from electoral scrutiny. Daniel Hannan writes:

…an undemocratic appointment to an undemocratic post created by an undemocratic treaty.

Were does one sign up?

What if…

Posted by Chief Blogger – 20 November, 2009

…the world heated up by 6 degrees:

…(it) would have irreversible consequences, rendering large parts of the globe uninhabitable and destroying much of life on earth.

And what if the Earth collided with another planet? That wouldn’t be good either.

The study by Professor Corinne Le Quere, from the British Antarctic Survey and East Anglia University, is the most comprehensive so far of how economic changes and shifts in the way people used land over the past 50 years have affected CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Who says it is the most comprehensive, bestest, most awesome study ever in the entire history of the world? The East Anglia University press release, so dutifully repeated without question by the Daily Telegraph. Scared yet? Well get ready to burnrnrnrn!

The temperature rise was made public by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, when it was then only a worst-case scenario.

But according to Professor Le Quere it is now all but inevitable.

Great, so why waste valuable resources on an ETS when we could use those resources to adapt to the impending and inevitable burning? Funny how the study comes out right before the meeting in Copenhagen. Geee, I wonder if these lobbyists come scientists are trying to pressure anyone, or was it just by coincidence that study was completed at this time?

No, you wouldn’t want to do that…

Posted by Chief Blogger – 20 November, 2009

More bad ideas from the OECD:

THE OECD has urged the Rudd government to review its $48 billion infrastructure stimulus spending to make sure it delivers value for money.

Clearly they don’t have the intelligence of our Dear Leader Rudd. Speaking of intelligence:

KEVIN Rudd has seized on high temperatures across southeast Australia this week as proof of climate change and the need for the opposition to back his proposed carbon emissions trading system…But leading climatologist Blair Trewin, of the National Climate Centre, said the heatwave could not “definitively” be linked to climate change….

Daily weather occurances is not climate.

A classic line in the making

Posted by Chief Blogger – 19 November, 2009

From Piers Akerman and Rudd’s recent caving into a bunch of Sri Lankan illegal immigrants who refused to get off a Custom’s vessel – a bit of yes, no, yes, yeah, but no action from Rudd:

Rudd’s media friends are used to cleaning up after him but he has left too large a record in foreign affairs for all his mistakes to be swept under the carpet.

Even Paul Kelly wrote that Rudd is treating us all as ‘mugs’ if he expects us to believe that the Tamils were not given any special deals. PA again,

Last month, Rudd said he had come to an agreement with the Indonesian leader on the fate of the 78 people holding the Australian customs vessel hostage.

That agreement crumbled as the Sri Lankans refused to budge.

They won. Members of Rudd’s own staff were present when a sweetener was added to the deal guaranteeing the Sri Lankans a fast track to Australia ahead of other refugees, some vetted by the United Nations and awaiting resettlement from camps in Indonesia for up to five years.

Well Rudd has been arguing that his good intentions have been more important than outcomes. What are the state of his intentions now? Throw a bomb at SBY and then duck and cover. It is the first hard decision that Rudd has had to take personally since becoming PM and he has failed badly:

…former Howard government immigration minister Philip Ruddock said Mr Rudd had caved in under duress from the asylum-seekers by agreeing to fast-track the settlement of the 78 Sri Lankans.

“If you put this government under pressure, essentially our borders mean nothing,” he said. “One doesn’t welcome the circumstances in which we have responded to duress.”

Show me the evidence, then the $$$

Posted by Chief Blogger – 19 November, 2009

I always regarded Rudd’s apology to the ‘stolen’ generation as hollow. If children were really forcibly removed from their parents solely because of race and culture, then it seems a miss carriage of justice for no compensation to be offered by Rudd. For this reason I’ve maintain previously that Rudd does not really believe in the claims made by members of the ‘stolen’ generation. He was only looking for kudos with the chattering classes and victimology groups so as to distinguish himself from Howard. The latest from one of these activists:

Kevin Rudd’s apology this week to the forgotten Australians, those whose lives were scarred in institutional care, was a reminder that there is still unfinished business stemming from that first Government apology – to the stolen generations….

…a national tribunal to facilitate these claims, and assist people with a legitimate legal right in accessing compensation. The proposed tribunal would be a partnership between governments, churches, indigenous organisations and the stolen generations community, but would also be independent. The premise was that governments should stop tenaciously defending claims by the stolen generations and instead facilitate appropriate compensation in situations where it was merited.

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre will tomorrow release Restoring Identity: Final Report. It puts this option squarely back on the table.

Activists seek a national tribunal for two reasons. So far all attempts to obtain compensation through standard legal means have failed because clamants have been unable to prove they were in fact ‘stolen’.   A national tribunal can then dispense with standard legal practice and be politically manipulated to ensure the ‘right’ outcome. Devoid of evidence – bring on the cash!

Another gold medal performance

Posted by Chief Blogger – 18 November, 2009

From ‘your’ ABC:

The audit, by the Global Carbon Project, found carbon dioxide levels from human activities are increasing by about 2 per cent per year, or 1.3 tonnes of carbon per capita….

The 2008 assessment found the nation’s CO2 levels are continuing to rise and among developed nations Australia has the lead on a per capita basis.

“In the basket of developed countries, we compare with the US (its emissions are almost flat at the moment), countries like Canada, with the EU countries, and in almost all of those countries we exceed their emissions rate,” he said.

Should be cause of national celebration. And on other related matters:

Professor Terry Hughes and representatives of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies told a meeting at the Canberra parliament that the future of the reef, and a large chunk of Australia’s tourist industry, was under grave threat from rising sea temperatures.

Just a small increase in average temperatures could cause massive coral bleaching on the reef, he said….

To avoid permanently damaging the delicate balance of life on the reef, and give the world’s largest living organism a 50 per cent chance of survival, global carbon emissions must be cut by at least 25 per cent by 2020, he said.

Ramping up the fear factor. These claims have been made before only to have later been proven wrong. More recently from Chris de Freitas, associate professor in the School of Environment at Auckland University:

The Great Barrier Reef is in excellent health. No evidence exists for a trend of increasing water temperature, nor for damaging regional human impacts outside the immediate vicinity of developed resorts. The reef has withstood past global coolings and warmings of several degrees over many millennia.

And from p.608 of the Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change:

Australian scientists say that “the range in bleaching tolerances among corals inhabiting different thermal realms suggests that at least some coral symbioses have the ability to adapt to much higher temperatures than they currently experience in the central Great Barrier Reef,” citing the work of Coles and Brown (2003) and Riegl (1999, 2002). In addition, they note that “even within reefs there is a significant variability in bleaching susceptibility for many species (Edmunds, 1994; Marshall and Baird, 2000), suggesting some potential for a shift in thermal tolerance based on selective mortality (Glynn 2001et al., Jimenez et al., 2001)  and local population growth alone.”Above and beyond that, however, they say their results additionally suggest “a capacity for acclimatization or adaptation.”

Kill joys try to stop the party

Posted by Chief Blogger – 18 November, 2009

If the Republicans think they will get any traction from this little stunt, then they are pretty well mistaken:

FURIOUS republican campaigners have vowed to fight moves to create an Australian public holiday to celebrate the Queen’s diamond jubilee.

The day of commemoration would be shared with England and other nations where the Queen is head of state under a Bill tabled by a British MP.

No, no, no, you wouldn’t want to celebrate the nation’s sovereign, as duly elected by the people in 1999. I think the main stream are getting fed-up with the chattering classes telling them that they got it wrong in 1999.

Would not have happened to John Howard

Posted by Chief Blogger – 17 November, 2009

Rudd’s expertise in foreign affairs at work again:

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was expected to arrive early next week, but an Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman says it will not go ahead because of scheduling issues.

The Opposition says Australia’s relationship with Indonesia has been strained by the Government’s handling of a group of asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking.

Opposition Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Julie Bishop says Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is to blame.

Comes after Rudd was unable to secure a meeting with SBY at APEC. SBY has every right to feel angry at Rudd for dumping the ALP’s  illegal immigration problem on Indonesia. A problem of Rudd’s creation.