The latest Newspoll survey has Labor’s two-party lead down from 56-44 to 55-45, with Malcolm Turnbull enjoying a dead cat bounce on his personal ratings after the disaster of a fortnight ago. Turnbull’s approval rating is up six points to 31 per cent, while his disapproval is down three to 55 per cent. However, Turnbull continues to rate behind Peter Costello (36 per cent) and Joe Hockey (20 per cent) on the question of best person to lead the Liberal Party, with 16 per cent. What’s more, Essential Research finds 46 per cent believe the Liberals should find a new leader against only 29 per cent who want Turnbull remain. Essential Research otherwise shows a modest improvement for the Coalition, with Labor’s two-party lead down from 59-41 to 57-43. Also featured are questions on the “most important action” of the Rudd government so far (action on the global financial crisis leads a crowded field), opinions on the government’s income tax cuts (positive) and a somewhat obscure question on education policy.
699
One of the reasons that we should have a much less pro-Israel Middle East policy.
SO
Kind of explains why Israel is ranked with North Korea, Pakistan and Iran by Aussies in it’s favourability ratings. And they have plenty of wackos like that. I like the Orthodox newspapers that photoshop out any female politicians. It’s a very enlightened society they have over there.
[One of the reasons that we should have a much less pro-Israel Middle East policy.]
[I like the Orthodox newspapers that photoshop out any female politicians. It’s a very enlightened society they have over there.]
I don’t think we should judge a country based on its most extremist elements. Would we like Australia to be judged based only on the incoherent ramblings of Senator Foolding or Dennis Hood?
Moreover, the reason the orthodox Jews are protesting is because the local government in Jerusalem wants to set up a public car park, which these wackaloons think will just encourage people to drive their cars on Saturdays!
So in this instance the Government is taking a decision that is secular, but is facing a revolt by some Israelis that think the government shouldn’t do anything contrary to the Torah.
[It’s a very enlightened society they have over there.]
On the whole, it is, particularly given that they are under constant threat of attack. The Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are about 10% of the Jewish population, and even of them, only a minority behave like that. It’s wrong to generalise about them. Some are totally inward-looking and do nothing but study Torah all day. There are Haredi sects (Satmar and Neturei Karta) which regard Zionism as blasphemous and have meetings with the PLO.
698
I wonder how different thing would have been if the bill to introduce PR into the senate had got up in 1902.
[I wonder how different thing would have been if the bill to introduce PR into the senate had got up in 1902.]
Were parties other than Labor disciplined in 1902? My understanding was that only started in the early teens, members would vote all over the place.
The Israeli government steals land from Palestinians as well as many other human rights abuses perpetrated on the Palestinians by the Israelis.
[Were parties other than Labor disciplined in 1902? My understanding was that only started in the early teens, members would vote all over the place.]
The Protectionist and Free Trade Parties were less disciplined but almost all MPs were still elected under a party banner.
Dario @ 666
” ‘My totally rusted-on Tory sibling, far from delivering the expected rant, was quite (& quite vocally) impressed by how well Cuba had coped with 40+ years of the USA blockade.’
Has this sibling ever actually been there?”
To have been “impressed by how well Cuba had coped with 40+ years of the USA blockade”? Of course, and not just as a stop-over! Wouldn’t say it otherwise; not in our family.
We were brought up never to believe anything anyone else told us, until we’d “Checked the facts for yourself”; never to shoot our mouths off unless “You know what you’re talking about”- or we’d get shot down by the rest of the large family & friends. PreTV, we’d sit at the dinner table for hours, arguing, and the survivors all still argue. First time OH met my parents, I was chided for arguing with my father (about politics, I think; it usually was). I believe I did a pop-eyed “Huh? He started it.”
It would have meant that the Senate was more balanced because there would have been at least one conservative and one ALP senator in each state elected at every election. None of those near unanimities by one side.
Psephos
I’ll take your word for it about the % who are nutters. I’d read somewhere that 20% were ultra-Orthodox (as in the blotting-out-women newspapers catered to 20% of the population).
Even so, 10% of the population wanting women blotted off their newspapers is pretty frightening.
[To have been “impressed by how well Cuba had coped with 40+ years of the USA blockade”? Of course, and not just as a stop-over! Wouldn’t say it otherwise; not in our family.]
I only asked because my mum & sister spent some time over there, and were quite bummed by the abject poverty
UPDATE.
The following is the latest update on the PhoneGate scandal.
Malcolm Turnbull has just spoken to the father of the young English bush-walker, Jamie Neale, who, according to the father, “is the only teenager in the world who goes on a ten-mile trek and leaves his mobile phone”.
Mr Turnbull quoted reliable witnesses who said Mr Neale had been seen shortly beforehand in a Katoomba Chinese restaurant, giving his mobile phone to a man who looked suspiciously like the Prime Minister. Mr Neale is reported to have joked, “I’m going for a walk, but you can borrow my mobile to make your important call – if I don’t come back, ring my dad and tell him to keep my dinner warm!”
The Leader of the Opposition is now challenging the Prime Minister to come clean: “Mr Rudd…is this just another phone-call you failed to make? Who in their right mind would ever want to depend on you to be their phone-a-friend?”
As usual, Julie Bishop is looking into it.
END OF UPDATE.
I heard something that made me angry this morning. The Green’s scare campaign on nanoparticles and sunscreens.
Fair enough we do need better labelling laws, but the crud and scare is despicable.
The fact that sunscreens containing nanoparticles of zinc oxide or titanium dioxide are safer than others does not enter the equation, the fact that people may stop using the most effective sunscreens does not matter.
These nano nasties may do something – but the Greens have not figured out what. Even though they have been used for 20 years.
Instead they are scaring people into using sunscreens without nano-nasties that do cause an increase in breast cancer rates.
Rant over. 🙁
ru,
Where did you hear this. Any link?
It was on ABC 612 Brissy this morning. Lee Rhiannon has had this bee in her bonnet for yonks.
Is there any truth in the rumour that the BRITISH backpacker Jamie Neale was kidnapped by the Three Sisters and then enjoyed every moment of it for the next 12 days?
😉
Their concerns are legitimate but misplaced. As soon as you see the words “slathering”, “keeping the lights off” and “siding with industry”, you just know that the Luddite Party really is anti-technology, anti-progress and hysterical.
I’ve come to the conclusion that The Greens main interest in Climate Change is that it gives them an excuse to turn back the clock to the Dark Ages.
[“Consumers have a right to know if the sunscreen they are slathering on themselves and their kids contains nano ingredients,” Ms Rhiannon said. “The TGA and responsible ministers are keeping the lights off, siding with industry which doesn’t want the full story told.”]
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/sunscreen-health-alarm-20090712-dhfd.html
AC and Finns,
I’m interested to know if Turnbull’s interest was because the Chinese Restaurant was called The Dead Katoobma Bounce. Is Turnbull a Chinese spy with the code name of Hu Flung Dung?
[Their concerns are legitimate but misplaced. As soon as you see the words “slathering”, “keeping the lights off” and “siding with industry”, you just know that the Luddite Party really is anti-technology, anti-progress and hysterical.
I’ve come to the conclusion that The Greens main interest in Climate Change is that it gives them an excuse to turn back the clock to the Dark Age]
Congratulations on finally seeing the light – The Greens are their own worst enemy on Climate Change, and Alarmist claptrap will bite them on the bum big time – especially amongst those with young kids.
Expect the usual personal attacks on both myself and Diogenes from the usual subjects 🙂
I agree that we need better labelling laws, but Rhiannon’s psuedo-science scare ranks with a certain FF Senator. 🙁
Looks like the Chinese economy is improving and their stimulus package is working too:
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/chinas-economy-bounces-back-with-strong-growth-20090716-dmbu.html
I guess anyone who said “lets wait and see” in China is being sent to the re-education camp.
[Looks like the Chinese economy is improving and their stimulus package is working too:]
We discussed this on the previous page, these statistics are wrong because everyone knows stimulus packages don’t work.
If the Chinese are filling the Aussie rice bowls, she will not tolerate to be used a whipping boy by the Aussies whenever they feel like it for domestic political purposes, in particular by the MSM and the Coalitions.
[Saved! Chinese growth nudges 8% – As ordained by Party Central, China’s economic growth is now approaching the official target of 8 per cent after that unfortunate blip caused by the global slump and credit crunch in the six months to March.
The news will be greeted with quiet thanks in Australia where our economic and monetary policy is based to a large degree on a China rebound.
The 8 per cent target will be topped this quarter, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars in official stimulus cascading through the economy: that has sparked an enormous surge in the stockmarket which hit 13 month highs on several days this week and moved past the Japanese market in terms of value at the close on Wednesday.
Crikey reported earlier this week that iron ore exports surged 29 per cent in the first half of this year, with steel production running at near record levels in the past quarter of over 50 million tonnes a month with a record annual figure of over 550 million tonnes likely.]
http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/07/16/saved-chinese-growth-nudges-8/
[China’s retail sales in the first half year rose 15 percent to 5.87 trillion yuan ($860 billion) from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.
The growth rate was 3.7 percentage points higher than the same period last year.
Retail sales in June also rose 15 percent from May, said the NBS spokesman Li Xiaochao.
Real (inflation-adjusted) retail sales growth was recorded at 16.6 percent in the first half year.]
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-07/16/content_8435646.htm
ru,
Rhiannon has seen the free publicity ride that Fielding has received for being a buffoon and thinks she can do that too!
ShowsOn
Sorry I missed that page. Given the comparative performance of both Australia and China though, it really does make the US and European (and Liberal) responses to the GFC look quite stupid. Domestic political consequences aside, it is a tragedy that tens of millions of people in USA and Europe have now lost their jobs, some their homes, because of blind adherence to a failed economic ideology.
A propos several posts above, maybe the conservatives feel attacted not only to spanking but to other people’s poverty, especially if it is in Cuba?
A friend who went to Cuba several times discovered that highly-valued gifts were the things we would consider to be the ordinary, day-to-day objects of bathroom.
[Rhiannon has seen the free publicity ride that Fielding has received for being a buffoon and thinks she can do that too]
Rhiannon does have a valid point !!!!!!!
Aliens use nano-particles to teleport ’emselves, so Lee is just making sure that they never can invade us again.
🙂
This is not surprising.
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-business/rio-tinto-analysts-leave-china-20090716-dmob.html
That refusal in 1930 looks a strange one and sure its easy 80 years later to say this but that looked a good idea considering the way things looked in 1930.
Looks like Sir Robert Gibson went to the Turnbull school of economics, was Sir Gibson a paided up member of the Conservatives
The Finnigans (717).
Barnacle Bill said he thought he caught a glimpse of you at the earthquake epicentre. Was the incident down to any over-exuberant sexual frolicking on your part in the neighbourhood? If so, did the earth move for you?
have just read Sir Robert Gibson Bio and what makes that 1930 decision worst is he actually lived in Melbourne thought-out the crash of the 1890s
Rua that is why minor parties stay minor 😀
The Finns
I hope you are right.
The immediate domestic figures for China are good. It helps when the National Bureau of Statistics does what it is told. For balance, perhaps you should have mentioned what is happening to China’s export figures.
In terms of which approach is superior, the short term looks good for Plan A. But I suggest that the real question has yet to be answered: ‘When the Chinese have burned through their stimulus package, where will the demand come from?’ US official unemployment is about 10%. This masks another 10% who have either ceased participating, or who are working on an average of 3 days a week rather than 5 days a week. The unemployment figures also mask reductions in overtime, and reductions in take-home pay.
While the green shoots have been spotted yet again, it seems to me to be fairly doubtful that US demand will grow in time to take up the slack in the Chinese economy once their stimulus package has been used up.
GG (719)
[I’m interested to know if Turnbull’s interest was because the Chinese Restaurant was called The Dead Katoobma Bounce. Is Turnbull a Chinese spy with the code name of Hu Flung Dung?]
I’m told the nickname of the local meat supplier is the Catoomba Strangler.
Whilst I am confidence Australia can avoid recession has I predicted it would, I am not so sure America is in recovery mode for whilst bank profits look okay it is clear that China is starting to develop a large bubble on the back of American consumers, this is a worry for all bubbles look the same and I am starting to think with the American budget position which is very poor and China’s bubble things could get ugly.
Diogenes,
This morning I heard on the radio that the South Australian upper house reform is intended to reduce the number from 22 to 16 and the terms to 4 years.
However, it is the Government’s intention to have the entire LC up for election at each election. This will actually reduce the quota and make it easier for minor parties to be elected.
I think that is silly, I think only half the LC should be up for each election.
730
Had the 1902 proposal to introduce PR as the Senate election system then it would probably have been 14 ALP to 22 Nationalist and Country Party (or 15 to 21 depending on vacancy filling) rather that the 6 to 30 it was under the majority preferential system then in use.
A DD under PR would probably have resulted in a split close to 18 to 18.
Muskiemp @ 670 wrote:
That should really be paradigms rather than “prejudices”; paradigms, and the willing suspension of disbelief when accepting anything that fits their paradigms (ie uncritical acceptance) whether they be scientific, philosophical, religious, ideological, analytical … even musical etc.
Luckily, when I was still an undergrad in the early-mid 60s, THE “must read & discuss” book on uni campuses (& every uni party which, as an external student unable to make evening classes before 7.30, were where I caught up on campus “must knows”) was Tom Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and we argued long liquid hours over paradigms, probably one of the main reasons why student protests took off bigtime c1966.
Everyone I know who was part of that era recommends that book – hence the fairly new Wiki article. Those who became teachers (sec & Higher Ed) set the 1970 ed’s “Postscript” as compulsory reading, and the uni ones add Tony Becher & Paul Trowler: “Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Discipline”, Chapter 1 – no Wiki yet). Read those two chapters (about 2-3 hrs reading), then come back; read a few PB pages on any topic, and play: Spot the paradigms; spot the tribes. Until you read those chapters, you have no idea what eye-openers, powerful tools and “Crap detectors” they are.
Many, probably most people like certainty or, in more formal terms, “Have a low tolerance of ambiguity.” Once they accept something as right, they become “part of tribe” accepting that something as “tribal law”, and their “puzzle solution” framework (to quote Tom Kuhn) – the “paradigm” which any new information has to fit for them to accept it. Kuhn’s model is the Vatican & Italian scientists’ treatment of Galileo, until the last Pope admitted the Vatican got it wrong (c1991, from memory). But why?
In the matter of geocentric v heliocentric, the Holy See, Counter-Reformation & many scientists had gone out on limbs supporting geocentricity. What would be the consequences of admitting they were wrong at just that point in the Counter-Reformation? We now know (but only in the last decade or so; I think just before/after Tom K died) that Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s “Congregation” discussed the impact of accepting heliocentric theory and decided it would be a disastrous setback, so it went ahead with the condemnation of Copernican theory, knowing it was probably correct (some even accepted that it was correct). Everything that was done to Galileo and other dissenters was purely political – including continuing geocenticity’s Big Lie.
Included in Kuhn’s explanation of “paradigm” are the way scholarly & other communities operate. Becher & Trowler extend this to academic communities & sub-communities (tribes) and their control of their theoretical “territories” through control of publication of any other theory (conference & in print). There are numerous examples, in numerous disciplines, certainly in the last 20-25 years, of valid theory’s being completely blocked by tribes protecting their own theories (and egos). This happened in at least two cases in which I knew the theorists, one in change theory, one in particle physics, where supportive friends managed to ensure (1) the paper was printed by the publication of a different group in a discipline it only ‘sort of’ fitted, just to get it in print (2) the abstract was published as an advertisement in major international papers. Both “opened the floodgates” in their own disciplines. Nor are the only ones I know of. So the protection of status and territory are very important considerations, especially for status-seeking upward-mobiles and those ‘climbing the ladders’.
So you have to consider how much of people’s egos are tied up in their acceptance of paradigms or theories or tribal laws or religious beliefs etc. Often people internalise these to the extent of complete identification with them, becoming disciples and disseminators, much like evangelists; regarding any attack on their paradigms etc as a personal attack on themselves and those they follow, venerate etc. Often their reaction is what you’d expect if you did launch a personal attack.
It’s usually the nature of the retaliation which indictes whether you’re dealing with an open mind, or a closed one.
737
I believe that all bills in the SA parliament need to pass both houses (and be signed by the Governor) to become law. The ALP does not have a majority in the SALC. The question is whether or the Libs and the crossbenchers will support the bill for this referendum?
Ozpol Tragic @ 600
I agreed with most of your post, except for the bit about willows, not that it matters too much what anyone thinks because those babies are well and truly out of control.
More recent willow introductions have crossed with some of the existing stock and the seeds are now mostly fertile and go with the water and the wind. About the only chance for some sort of balance is some accidentally-introduced caterpillar or other that enjoys eating willow leaves.
On a somewhat distantly-related matter, I have seen the move to goat farming from sheep farming in the dry country and can see desertification coming along nicely.
But, horses for courses, as it were. About a year ago I heard an interesting program about goat herds being trucked from farm to farm to eat weeds. Turns out the goats stomachs can be accustomed to fairly toxic stuff and the goats will take on the woody weeds once acclimatised to the particular toxins.
It was a sort of biological control win-win.
[Rua that is why minor parties stay minor :D]
Glen – agree.
It is funny (peculiar not ha ha ) that the Greens chastise others for using “dodgy science” but they are happy to use it when it suits.
nano-technology = bad.
GM = bad
etc.
Wallies. 😛
NEWSFLASH! Adelaide United soccer team’s newest international recruit has swine flu.
So paradigms it is then. OzPol Tragic, your description fits exactly what I meant. Delete ‘prejudice and replace with ‘paradigms’ 😎
743
I hope all the people with all types of flu get better quickly but that is boring and sporty.
SO and Tom
I’m finding it very hard to even find the energy to read about why we would want to vote “Yes” so I’ll be voting “No”. Doesn’t Rann have something better to do with his time?
ruawake and other Queenslanders
I heard on Triple J today that you have had EIGHT politicians jailed in the last 20 years, and tomorrow Nuttall will also get a sorely needed trip to the Big House for a few years. That doesn’t include Joh, Russ Hinze or Terry Lewis.
What the hell is going on up there ❓
[What the hell is going on up there :?:]
A superior justice system? 😉
I don’t really know much about Peter Andrews. From the NSF website:
‘For well over 25 years, Peter has struggled against big business, the financial and legal sector, the scientific community, the academic community, local, state and federal government bureaucrats and virtually every other man and his dog!
As his cousin and helper, amongst other things, I have sadly seen him lose his family, his personal wealth, his beloved Tarwyn Park property, hundreds of thoroughbred horses who had incredible potential, as well as much of his credibility and some say, his part of his sanity.’
My passing comment on this is, if it works (in the financial as well as in the biodiversity sense), why aren’t farmers taking it up? Some agricultural sectors have adopted huge changes in the last couple of decades.
The following link appears to me to support the idea that it works in the biodiversity/river management sense:
http://www.nsfarming.com/news070604.htm
[I’m finding it very hard to even find the energy to read about why we would want to vote “Yes” so I’ll be voting “No”. ]
I am more inclined to vote YES at this stage, because I think 8 years is too long between elections. I think it is bad making it easier for minor parties to get elected, but on the other hand, at least they will come up for election every 4 years.
Reducing the number from 22 to 16 is OK with me as well, I don’t think we need 22.
An even better reform would be to make the Legislative Council the Adelaide City Council. All South Australians should have a chance to vote for the Adelaide City Council.
It means that the QLD ALP don’t have the police in their pocket or vice versa.