Former property developer Basil Walker is seeking an injuction against all Labour Party MPs preventing the scheme being passed into law before this year’s election.

Mr Walker said he was acting in the interests of the people of New Zealand.

“I’ve taken the action because someone had to. This Government is trying to force this on the people and someone had to stand up and say that there is no evidence to support it,” he said yesterday.

It’s not clear on what legal basis this court case could be successful, but nevertheless it might give publicity to the cause. Here in Australia, I know of no constitutional power which gives the Commonwealth government the right to regulate air (carbon). It is interesting that in the Australian government advertising for the future emissions trading scheme, carbon is referred to as a pollutant - which given that carbon is one of the building blocks for life on earth, to claim it is a pollutant is nonsense.

The Australian constitution does not give the Commonwealth any direct power to regulate environmental affairs. It can only do so via commercial and/or external laws, or the like, under the Constitution. This means that challenging environmental issues on legal grounds is difficult. A government only need prove that it has signed an international treaty for instance, which happens to deal with an environmental issue, for it to be constitutional.

When it comes to environmental affairs, the Commonwealth has few legal checks and balances in place to regulate and challenge what it does. One may though challenge the Commonwealth’s assertion that carbon is a pollutant, through various truth in advertising regulations. But when it comes to the Constitution, there are few avenues that will likely lead to success.

On the other hand though, there may be a basis for someone taking legal action against an organisation for supposedly inducing climate change. Of course the link between carbon and the changing climate would have to be established in court and this may very well work in skeptics favour.

Legal researcher Dr Joseph Smith has been analysing scientific evidence for the effects of global warming and the legal basis for court action.

The work has been sponsored by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Dr Smith believes scientific evidence linking climate change to pollution is now sound enough to make a civil case against businesses and governments.

If it was shown in court that business had no impact on the climate from their carbon emissions, then they may have a legal basis challenging a Commonwealth carbon tax and any associated regulation that increases liability costs or bankruptcy.

Patriotism is undeniably part of the Olympics, and I’d never want it to be otherwise. But the nation for which the athlete is competing should never overwhelm the individual. There is a point at which sporting nationalism becomes odious, a point never better captured than by John Stockton when he was in Barcelona with the USA’s basketball ‘dream team’. Asked why the team were staying outside of the athlete’s village, Stockton famously replied: “The Olympic spirit is about beating people, not about living with them.”

The spirit, of course, is about both those things. The majority of United States athletes, indeed all athletes, tend to rebuff the media’s invitations to indulge in international slanging matches. Australia’s Rob Bell, who won bronze in the C1 slalom behind Britain’s David Florence, knocked back a question about what this meant for the rivalry between the two countries by saying simply “What rivalry?” Five minutes later, vaguely repelled by the press pack’s attempts to stir things up, he whispered to his two fellow medallists, “Let’s get the hell out of here”.

Spot the diplomat. I get the feeling, now the British are winning Olympic medals, that this British attitude might change over time. I think the author may have alluded to this very possibility:

In part, the top nations’ obsession with their position in the table can be justified as a means of processing the sheer number of medals they win. But the necessary emphasis on quantity seems to rob the Games of much of what makes them so enjoyable. Britain, like most other countries, has never had to deal with the prospect of winning 20 or more golds, and so it has the luxury of making individual heroes of the winners it does have.

Ah yes only a few countries lack the luxuries that losing affords.

The mystery of the half-filled stands at many events at the 2008 Olympic Games has been solved, according to Chinese internet users, who say it is the result of a policy to prevent the gathering of large and possibly uncontrollable crowds.

Then the rent-a-crowds. Anyone who watched the triathlon would have seen them in their droves waving Chinese flags. Do Chinese leaders really think the world is so gullable?

Lower-ranking Chinese officials hastily bused in paid “volunteers” to populate the stands in Beijing, appreciating the embarrassment caused by leaving them half-empty, but public relations remain a matter of indifference to most guardians of public order.

Then there is the cost - over $40 billion spent on the Olympics, for a country where half the people do not have access to clean drinking water.

For all its export might, China is still a poor, largely agrarian country with perhaps 700m farmers and 150m migrant workers. The size of its economy is huge but, measured by wealth per head, it ranks 109th in the world, comparable with Swaziland or Morocco.

It appears the whole Chinese Olympic propaganda message is coming undone, not that NBC or Channel 7 are going to mention the problems of course.

In his letter to Buckingham Palace, Mr Lindeberg mentioned the audit prepared by Sydney QC David Rofe, and The Sunday Telegraph and The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the Heiner affair.

The audit details 68 unresolved alleged prima facie criminal charges which Rofe QC believes are capable of being brought against current and former public officials in respect of their handling of the Heiner matter.

Mr Lindeberg referred to reports in this column that Prime Minister Rudd and former Governor of Queensland Ms Bryce were among the officials associated with alleged prima facie charges by the audit.

He told the Queen that documents including the Rofe audit, an application for review and the statement of concern sent by a number of legal figures to then Queensland Premier Beattie and current Premier Anna Bligh, were lodged with the Queensland Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee, in an application for a review under the Queensland Crime and Misconduct Act. The PCMC is investigating the matter.

Ms Bryce sought a report on the Heiner affair from Premier Beattie in 2003, received it, but neither she nor Mr Beattie ever made it public.

Well I have no idea as to truthfulness of the claims, but the complete lack of media coverage is in stark contrast to a previous political episode:

The treatment of Ms Bryce is in stark contrast to the very public populist witch hunt launched after it was alleged former Governor-General Peter Hollingworth had failed to act and had participated in a cover-up when allegations of sexual abuse were made against church officers while he was Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane.

Then Premier Beattie made public a private Anglican Church report into abuse by tabling it in the Queensland Parliament before Mr Hollingworth resigned as Governor-General.

The then Opposition leader Simon Crean had made the point that you cannot have people in authority who have covered up for child sex abuse and failed to act.

The allegations of prima facie criminal conduct made against Ms Bryce and several other senior Queensland politicians and judicial officers echo the point made by Mr Crean: they were made aware of allegations and failed to act.

The Governor-General’s office must now demonstrate that it is conducting a thorough examination of the matters raised by Mr Lindeberg but it is impossible to see how it can come to any conclusion before Ms Bryce is due to take up her new appointment.

On a day when it was revealed that the IOC was encouraging the Beijing organizing committee to start filling their empty venues with factory workers or whatever, it looked like a rent-a-crowd had been rounded up to sit in the seats down the lines and in the outfield to see China’s first go at a baseball game.

There was no atmosphere whatsoever as the crowd mostly just sat out there not knowing what the heck they were watching. Meanwhile, behind the plate, the seats were all reserved for IOC members and VIPs, etc. and nobody showed up to fill any of them.

Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce told a Senate inquiry this week: “FuelWatch is dead … just forget about it. It’s all over.”

Enough said on that issue. Now the real hypocrites are standing up:

The Greens, with five senators, yesterday urged motorists to instead embrace walking trails and bicycles.

Let them be the first and we shall be the last.

Tuesday, Wang Wei, the BOCOG secretary general, reiterated the claim but stumbled somewhat when it came to explaining why there were still yawning gaps in the stands.

“I think due to the weather conditions, as well the hot and humid weather and the rains. As for the previous Olympic Games, the first couple of days, there were not many spectators that show up,” he said.

Wang then declared: “As from today, we will get more spectators into the stadium.”

It seemed a reckless claim until he explained that if organizers find “there are too many empty seats, they will organize some cheerleaders who are volunteers (to sit in them). But if people will come over for these empty seats, then they will stand up and go and let the ticket holders have their seats.”

With the number of volunteers around the various Olympic venues, Wang undoubtedly can put an end to the empty seat phenomena, but the problem is the optics.

All the volunteer cheerleaders wear yellow shirts and they easily will be spotted for the “rent-a-crowd” they are.

The rice is steaming!

….the Chinese and Olympic flags blew dramatically in a breeze that did not exist anywhere else in the suffocating National Stadium.

Turns out, they were powered by special devices in the flagpoles.

And besides the media, communication and protest censorship, there was this:

Television coverage of the opening ceremony revealed that thousands of the spectators in the stands were in fact police and soldiers, while official cheerleaders stood in the aisles choreographing the applause.

The same could be said of the crowds at the Olympic venues, where family members and the international public have been severely restricted in favour of Chinese rent-a-crowds and members of the Chinese Communist Party, the IOC and other ‘big wigs’:

TV vision also showed the bored CHINESE crowds in the stand at the finish line apparently dozing off even when the cyclists were going past. On a light note there was a large screen near the finish line which flashed “CHEER & CLAP” when the cyclists went past, didn’t seem to work.

 How contrived can you get? Well now get ready for a bit of lip -synching:

A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synched “Ode to the Motherland,” a ceremony official said.

A member of China’s ruling Politburo asked for the last-minute change to match one girl’s face with another’s voice, the ceremony’s chief music director, Chen Qigang, said in an interview with Beijing Radio.

“The audience will understand that it’s in the national interest,” Chen said in a video of the interview posted online Sunday night.

I also couldn’t help notice that the children dressed in traditional costumes for the opening ceremony, to represent the diversity of China, all looked Han Chinese. Maybe I am being a bit picky, but I don’t think so. Seems that Chinese home cooking is also extending to the sporting events:

AUSTRALIAN shooter Russell Mark says two Chinese judges awarded hits to a Chinese shooter after he had clearly missed targets in the final of the men’s double trap.

The shooter, Hu Binyan Hu,  went on to win a bronze medal.

Mark - who finished fifth - said he believed the two Chinese referees were pressured by the home crowd and that he and fellow shooters were stunned by the decisions.

Hu Binyuan appeared to miss at least one - possibly three - of the clay targets but was awarded full points before a bemused crowd at the Beijing Shooting Range.

And of course the now famous child, ah…I mean regulation age gymnasts:

They say she is 16, but even when she pulls herself up to her full height at the start of a routine you have to suspend all common sense to believe it.

At 4ft 6in and weighing just four-and-a-half stones, the gymnast seems more like a child yet to be weaned off cartoons than a fully-fledged teenager.

But little Deng Linlin holds a passport that says she was born on April 21, 1992, and is 16 years old, which entitles her to compete as an Olympic gymnast. She looks more like 13 to me. Some of her team-mates appear even younger….

The Chengdu Sports Bureau in Sichuan listed He Kexin, the uneven bars specialist, as being born on January 1, 1994. That would make her 14 - two years under the competition limit.

In November 2007, a Chinese official introduced He Kexin as a 13-year-old, while the New York Times reported that both He Kexin and her team-mate Jiang Yuyuan (who is only 4ft 7in and five stones) may still be 14. A list of competitors’ birth dates from the Zhejiang Province sports administration said she was not yet 15.

The China Daily, the official English language mouthpiece of the government, stated He Kexin was 14 on their website. The state-run CCTV network recorded team-mate Yang Yilan as 14 while the General Administration of Sport of China had her down as 15. Many of these references are now blocked.

A recent article in The Australian makes me think more and more that Costello and Nelson have established a tacit agreement on the leadership:

Costello and the incumbent Liberal leader had a telephone discussion on Tuesday morning, the day Nelson left for his 10-day overseas tour. At the end of the conversation Nelson was confident he would not be challenged by Costello and that Costello would counter-challenge anyone else who did, a direct message to Treasury spokesman Turnbull, who will take over from Nelson if Costello leaves parliament.

And in case you need a list of reasons as to why Costello would be a good leader (despite being a Republican):

Costello’s experience poses a potential threat to the Rudd Government’s confidence, which is vulnerable because of its inability to shrug off the mentality of the 24-hour news cycle and the imperative to announce new things; its hyper-sensitivity to criticism; and its insecurity about managing the economy. Instead of behaving like a confident, popular new government with a clear mandate and overwhelming public support for its cultural agenda and climate change policy, Labor has jumped in fright at the mere suggestion Costello may be changing his mind. It is out of proportion to the continuing positive public response to the Rudd Government and general assumption that Kevin Rudd will not be a oncer as Prime Minister.

The Copenhagen Consensus Centre co-ordinated by Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg has ranked the pursuit of deep cuts in emissions by countries such as Australia and Europe as one of the least-effective ways of advancing global welfare.

The findings contradict the analysis by Ross Garnaut and Nicholas Stern, who argue that the high cost of mitigating greenhouse gases now is much less than the risk of inaction on climate change.

In prioritising how best to spend $75billion over the next four years to deliver the greatest good to mankind, a panel of eight economists, including five Nobel laureates, did not feature any climate change spending among their 13 priority projects.

The highest priority was to supplement the diet of children in developing countries with vitamin A and zinc, followed by a successful negotiation of the stalled Doha Round of trade talks, which would deliver between $6-$8trillion a year by 2100.

The 13 priorities would deliver between $20 and $30 of value for every dollar invested, compared with 90c for the mitigation of greenhouse gases, because of the high cost of cutting emissions now and the limited impact such reductions would have.

And critics counter with the following lines:

“The level of risk we confront is a greater level of risk than virtually any other area,”

“There are a whole lot of moral and ethical considerations that need to influence that process as well. It’s not just a technical exercise.”

Well risk is a combination of probability and consequence. By that measure the risk of human induced climate change being a problem is low - probability of the world warming due to human induced carbon emissions is low (no evidence has ever been established to link the two) and the overall consequences are mostly unkown, despite what the doomsayers pretend.

The list of issues ranked by the economists are not risks, but are actually happening - probability is 100 per cent and consequences are known and they are not good. And if this is not just a technical exercise, where then is the moral imperative to spend billions on a future global risk that has a low probability of occuring as oppossed to current problems affecting people now.