The parliamentary year has ended with a striking result from Newspoll: Labor leads 59-41, up from 55-45 last fortnight, with Kevin Rudd leading Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister 66 per cent (up three) to 19 per cent (down two). Kevin Rudd’s approval rating of 70 per cent is one point shy of his previous best from April, while Malcolm Turnbull’s approval and disapproval have both gone five points in the wrong direction, to 47 per cent and 32 per cent (The Australian offers a graphic and a nifty preferred prime minister tracker showing figures back to early 2006). Nonetheless, the leadership ratings suggest voting intention would have been even worse for the Coalition if Brendan Nelson was still leader. Turnbull’s approval rating is still seven points higher than Nelson’s best result, and the 47 per cent gap on preferred prime minister is roughly equal to what Nelson managed when Rudd’s approval was in the mid-50s. Elsewhere:
• Essential Research also has Labor leading 59-41, up from 58-42 last week. Also featured are questions on the performance of Julie Bishop as Shadow Treasurer, the relative popularity of Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop and “global terrorism and international unrest”.
• The Australian Parliamentary Library has published a paper providing statistical details from every election since federation, along with a precis detailing the circumstances of each election.
• Sky News, Foxtel and Austar have announced that a public and political affairs television network called A-APAN, along the lines of the American C-SPAN, will be launched on January 20 next year. It will feature coverage of parliament and committee proceedings, industry meetings, and congressional and parliamentary coverage from the United States and the United Kingdom. It will be available on pay TV and digital free-to-air, the latter initially only in Sydney.
• Colin Barnett says the proposal for fixed terms in Western Australia will feature “a mechanism if there is some catastrophic behaviour of a government that you might be able to bring on a poll”. It will also provide for flexibility in the announcement of a date in either February or March, rather than fixing a precise date.
• Antony Green has weighed in on the recent criticism of New South Wales’ system of fixed four-year terms.
[Of course, but how long have people believed all people are born equal? Only fairly recently, and only in some parts of the world. Nearly everyone believed in inherent inequalities between races until the 19th century, and between the genders even more recently.]
Just because people BELIEVE it, doesn’t make it true.
I can’t understand how you can oppose universal human rights, yet support liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is a system of government derived from the former. The reason people think democracy is worth it is because they think people are born with rights that they aren’t given from the state.
Thinking that rights are given to people by the State is just dangerous. It makes it hard for us to criticise Islamic governments, or thugs like Mugabe.
[Anyway, fun though this is, I must go and do some work now.]
Carefully vanishing in that manner, it meant your post was moderated. 😀
Firstly, that means that there is no-one alive today who did so.
Secondly, I am having trouble finding the section of the constitution that says that Parliament is the sole expression of the will of the people. Perhaps you could point it out? The covering clauses (not voted on AFAIK) state that laws made under the Constitution shall be binding on the courts, but then we are back to the problem of deciding what is a law under the constitution.
If the will of the people in establishing parliament in the 1890s legitimates modern parliaments, then likewise the will of the people in the (distant) past legitimates common law and concepts of individual rights that go back to Magna Carta. You can trace some back to the Roman republic or Greek democracy. People didn’t vote in the 1890s to extinguish their rights. They reasonably expected them to continue. Philosophically this is silly. Most of the principles established to justify modern parliamentary democracy presupposed the rule of law and individual personal and property rights. i.e. the former is based on the latter.
In the referendums in the 1890`s (because of the lack of a year 0 the WA referendum in 1900 is included in that) not all colonies gave women the vote.
The constitution says the Queen has various powers and in the note on the end of the schedule it specifies the current Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/general/constitution/schedule.htm
[The constitution says the Queen has various powers]
Sure, but the Queen also has a lot of reserve powers that aren’t specified in the constitution.
Sure she can’t do things that the constitution says she can’t do, but it assumes that she can do a lot of things that the constitution doesn’t mention, like sack the P.M. for instance.
Apparently Lionel Murphy had a habit of identifying implied rights in our constitution simply because he felt it was a document that implied the existence of a democratic state.
But I guess assuming that Australia is and should always be a democracy would count for some as judicial activism.
Senator X goes from fool to nutter…wants to change ETS to one based on emmissions intensity , otherwise no ETS in 2010 wait till maybe 2012 Business will just luv that X proposal You achieve your emmission intensity targets , but via economic growth you actualy increase your CO2 emmissions Dr X is th supreme Peter principal
Interesting article on Parliament and Rights here:
http://www.safecom.org.au/billofrights.htm
Ron
What does he mean by intensity?
[What does he mean by intensity?]
I think it means amount of pollution divided by economic value of the goods produced
So if you produce a lot of pollution but don’t produce much (or employ many people) then you will face harsher penalties for the opposite scenario.
Damn Libs! Put em in power and unemployment skyrockets.
WA up .7
There should be intensity and overall targets.
X is just silly. There are ETS schemes being developed around the world. One of the advantages in having something similar to everyone else is that if the credits are obtained the same way you can trade them, making them much more valuable. If we wind up with something obscure and unnque we can forget international carbon trading schemes, which will make the whole sector less viable. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Lest we forget the original european ETS gave out a lot of “carry-over” permits to existing industry so that the carbon credits wound up worthless. The market collapsed. We can’t just wrap this up in sophistry to appease industry. We either do it (ETS) or not.
Well others hav interpreted diferent to me Uni trained peolle here may disagree , but to a layman my view of it seems like some sort of maths proportion of emissions to production unit So Oil would be highly classified , and so it would hav a higher intensity proportion
…but I tink if you hav economic growth and increased say oil production or downstream economic activity , th Co2 emmissions in total would still increase VS putting Co2 emmissions targets as a Cap on directly , and then gradualy reducing it and permits which guarantee C02 reductions
So, far arguments sake, intensity is how much emissions you’re producing per dollar of GDP/revenue/some other monetary measure?
All Labor has to do is introduce the ETS they want to parliament and watch the opposition and X take the political heat for not passing it. CC deniers true to their word.
Ron
Sorry I may have misunderstood your previous comment. Intensity can mean either intensity of emissions produced per unit of energy (varies by fuel type) or intensity of carbon emissions produced per value of product created (eg sky high for aluminium).
The main thing is to protect the integrity of an overall ETS market scheme at the macro level, then you can adjust the way costs are passed on to end consumers at the micro level on a case by case basis. If an industry is high intensity (lotsof carbon emissions) but low value, then it will pay proportionately more. Frankly one of the effects of an ETS should be to drive inefficient (low value/high carbon emission intensity) industries to either change or die. They are the problem.
[If an industry is high intensity (lotsof carbon emissions) but low value, then it will pay proportionately more. Frankly one of the effects of an ETS should be to drive inefficient (low value/high carbon emission intensity) industries to either change or die. They are the problem.]
Agree. Theoretically, emissions trading is set up to seek the most cost-effective manner to reduce emissions. Introducing intensity to the argument just muddies the waters – mind you, perhaps that’s what Mr X is trying to do.
Senator Xenophon will never just agree to something. Every key piece of legislation he will have some bright idea of how it can be improved. This is because he needs the publicity and the perception he is fighting for the interests of the public.
Yo ho ho , maybe my interpretation is not descrptive so perhaps I should simply say th calc proportion I saw does not provide for decreasing overall emmissions , and so i’m suggesting its no good anyway So thats where I’m suggesting Mr X has got it wrong
(fact i’m interpreting this maths formuli may decrease intensity levels but still hav higher emmissions via growth as its linked per unit is reely a secondary point)
I hope they raise the price of carbon to the point where nuclear power becomes economical…
At the risk of creating a flame war, Glen’s comment is one possible outcome. At an ETS market price for carbon of around $30 per tonne wind power starts to beat brown coal on price, especially in areas with a high wind climate like here in SA. But in areas without a lot of wind, you don’t have to raise the price much more before nuclear starts beating brown coal. High grade black coal in Qld is still hard to beat on price.
As for “Clean coal” technology, even if it works (still not proven) the cost may be greater than $30/tonne, meaning that it may price low grade coal out of the market anyway. I don’t see how some of the brown coal plants in Latrobe valley can survive in the long term with any realistic carbon ETS and carbon price.
[I hope they raise the price of carbon to the point where nuclear power becomes economical…]
Me too!
Because safe Nuclear Power plants are readily available and because we have 40% of known reserves of Uranium and because clean coal is a myth and because renewables alone cannot reduce our carbon emissions enough, nuclear energy will have to become an option especially if the ETS destroy’s the stranglehold coal has on us because it is a cheap source of energy…no longer with an ETS.
And that’s the problem with the ETS. It seeks the lowest cost abatement, not the best.
How true is this statement – ” More people are looking for bad news than good.
http://business.smh.com.au/business/go-figure-the-jobs-market-20081211-6wb0.html
[And that’s the problem with the ETS. It seeks the lowest cost abatement, not the best.]
But BEST may not be availble for 50 years (fusion power?).
So we should go with what we do have, and that includes nuclear (fission) power.
I don’t understand why so many people are still against it. If Obama wants to adopt an anti-oil policy, he will have to go really, really, really pro-nuclear.
I hope Ziggy’s paying you Glen.
Don’t you get embarrassed by that sort of stuff?
How cheap was Chernobyl?
It’s cheap when you don’t factor the cost to the environment.
Unfortunately for the nuclear industry, whether we call it an ETS or whatever, it’s the value of the environment that’s going up and pricing dirty power out of the equation.
Nuclear is dirty power.
Glen
Your statement that renewables alone canot reduce our carbon emisisons enough is unproven. A combination of wind and base load solar might get us there. I don’t know.
Nevertheless, you have a point about nuclear power. 3rd generation nuclear plants such as those in France, Germany, Sweden and Finland have been operating safely for 25 years now. People judging nuclear power by 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl is a bit like judging car reliability by a 1960s Morris Minor.
And because nuclear power is so cheap and safe and there are no problems with pollution of any kind at any stage of the production cycle and we are so good at storing the waste safely and securely and how can you possible make piles of money out of free stuff anyway and everyone has forgotten nuclear winter now they are so busy worrying about global warming and I’d better turn the sarcasm filter off before I get to the bit about boys, toys and penies…
Of course Glen I know you are crusing for a bite. Reel them in.
Gary
Im in a consulting/sales role for high end software
The amount of gloom and doom is incredible,but when you actually dig down to see what are the factors influencing such feelings,the only tangible “cause’ is the GFC
In most cases the rule of perception has overtaken the rule of reality.
I think the main offender is elementsof he MSM with ill concieved commentary,such as people saying we are “virtually” in recession.
As one commentator said on the ABC radio tis morn, The USA is more upbeat than Australia,yet the USA suffered the credit crunch ,not Australia.
Now now Glen and that nuke bit you lobbed in here , can you let me know if you agree with th IPPCC 4th Report that we hav CC , that CC is mainley human caused , and emmissions need reduction by about 25% by 2020 ?
I shoudl add that I am NOT pro-nuclear – I just agreed it is a possible option. But we are going to have to face it. If you had a lease type arrangement on nuclear fuel so that it was returned and none could be siphoned off for weapons, and safety engineering to teh highest standards, it is probably safer than coal. Its a bit of a standing joke amongst engineers that if you applied the same safety and environmental rules used for nuclear plants to coal fired power plants, you wouldn’t be allowed to build them. Coal power is not benign – apart from huge CO2 emissions it can emit carcinogens and cause acid rain if the coal was high in sulphur.
For those interested, read up on the safety and environmental safeguards applied to teh new nuclear reactor being built in Finland (Olikhuto IV). IMO it is very safe. Of course, nuclear weapons proliferation is still a huge political issue.
[How cheap was Chernobyl?]
Irrelevant. Chernobyl was caused by unauthorsied tests conducted by turning all of the reactor’s safety systems off.
[It’s cheap when you don’t factor the cost to the environment.]
What about the radiation put into the atmosphere by coal fired power stations? Does anyone consider that?
[Nuclear is dirty power.]
But it’s a different type of dirty that doesn’t cause global warming.
To be honest, I don’t think the issue with nuclear is the safety concerns. Its just that it would cost as much to implement as a combo of solar and wind, and would only reduce emissions marginally.
Its like buying Socrates’ 1960s Morris Minor for the price of a Ferrari.
[To be honest, I don’t think the issue with nuclear is the safety concerns. Its just that it would cost as much to implement as a combo of solar and wind, and would only reduce emissions marginally.]
I think nuclear offers more than that. It can supply base load – hundreds of megawatts – whereas wind can only do that with hundreds of towers.
Solar thermal offers more than photo-voltaic cells. Such installations can produce hundreds of megawatts – during the day.
1088 Shows
“different type of dirty”
Ah – I see…
I’m not an anti-nuclear ideologist, I just thought the ‘dumb as a box of rocks’ statement from Glen deserved an equally simplistic response.
Of course it’s more complicated than the collection of one liners discussion we have here. The idea that there’s a ‘cheap’ answer to a problematic system we’ve poured trillions into developing is more than a bit silly.
Natural gas, Glen natural gas.
if nuclear is so good
show me a nuclear car or bus even
nuclear never
GTG
but have a read all….
http://www.jape.org/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,26/func,fileinfo/id,71/
[Australia currently relies heavily on carbon-intensive fuel sources for its electricity needs. This dependence results in one of the world’s highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions of any nation (Marland et al., 2003), leading to global warming (Houghton et al., 2001). To ameliorate Australia’s carbon intensity from electricity, some have called for the development of nuclear-based electricity generation on the grounds that nuclear is a low-carbon form of energy.]
[if nuclear is so good
show me a nuclear car or bus even]
It is perfectly feasible to build a nuclear powered car. The longest range submarines are nuclear powered remember.
shows
dream on re a car
the safety concern alone makes it unfeasible
nuclear is so passe
[the safety concern alone makes it unfeasible]
You mean like the same saftey concern that stops us from driving coal fired cars?
[nuclear is so passe]
We will be using fusion in 50 years time. We haven’t even started exploiting nuclear.
shows
hydrogen tech has already delivered a bus,nuclear is still a “niche” energy source
in response to your coal fired riposte (btw there was a coal fired car [its called a train])
The only nuclear car I know of is the jetsons-there shall nuclea’rs ambition to be “mainstream” reside
ie fantasyland 🙂
[in response to your coal fired riposte (btw there was a coal fired car [its called a train])]
I don’t consider trains cars!
[The only nuclear car I know of is the jetsons-there shall nuclea’rs ambition to be “mainstream” reside]
I’m not disputing safety concerns. I am disputing the fact you consider it impossible to make.
Most objection to the use of nuclear is just because people are irrationally biased against it. Nuclear isn’t any less safe than hydrogen power, but creates a lot more power per gram.
Ziggy Switkowski, the chairman of ANSTO and a passionate advocate for domestic nuclear power in Australia, mentioned at a talk I attended recently that nuclear fusion is only 50-100 years away, and that fission, and all other forms of large-scale conventional energy generation, will eventually be redundant. So here are some things to think about with respect to plugging the 50-100 gap with a nuclear power industry. (Quoted text is taken from Ian Lowe’s Quarterly Essay Reaction Time, 2007):
(1) “The economics of nuclear power don’t stack up” … Referring to the 2006 Switkowski report Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia? commissioned by Howard, Lowe notes that “The most optimistic estimate it can produce is that nuclear would cost 20 per cent more than conventional power. This estimate is based on ambitious assumptions about the possible future level of government subsidy for nuclear power. The more realistic estimates in the report put the price of nuclear electricity at least 50 per cent higher than the present mix. Even these estimates do not include provision for insurance, since the commercial agencies are unwilling to cover the risks of the nuclear industry. So the public would effectively be the insurer, picking up the tab if anything goes wrong. This is the reason why many conservative observers are unsympathetic to the case for nuclear power: it simply does not make economic sense.”
(2) “Nuclear power is far too slow a response to the urgent problem of climate change. Even if there were political agreement today to build nuclear reactors, it would be at least ten years before the first such reactor could deliver electricity, while some have suggested that between fifteen and twenty-five years is a more realistic estimate.” Given that Rudd does not support a nuclear power industry, and that he’ll likely win the next election, the earliest start would be 2022, with the possibility of no start until 2037.
(3) “The third problem is that nuclear power is too dangerous. not only is there the risk of accidents such as Chernobyl, there is also an elevated risk of nuclear weapons proliferation or nuclear terrorism … The growing threat of terrorism makes the problem even more acute. The willingness of desperate people to engage in acts of gratuitous violence makes it imperative to protect all elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, including waste management, in military fashion.”
(4) “Nuclear power is not carbon-free. Significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy are used to mine and process uranium ores, enrich the fuel and build nuclear power stations.”
(5) “High-grade uranium ores are limited. On best estimates, known high grade ores could supply present demand for about fifty years. If we expanded the nuclear contribution to global electricity supply from the present level – about 15 per cent – to replace all coal-fired power stations, the high-grade resources would only last for about a decade. There are large deposits of lower-grade ores, but these require much more conventional energy for extraction and processing.”
(6) On the “renewables can’t provide baseload power” question, have a look at Fallacies 8 and 9 of Mark Diesendorf’s discussion of greenhouse solutions.