The latest Essential Research survey has Labor’s lead at 58-42 for the third successive week. Also included are leadership approval ratings (Kevin Rudd predictably little changed on a fortnight ago; Tony Abbott with mediocre ratings, which is much better than Turnbull had been doing); Copenhagen (important, but unlikely to reach agreement); and “Christmas spending”. We’ve also had a 400-sample of Western Australian voters from Westpoll (see right) which has federal Labor’s lead in the state at 53-47 (compared with 53-47 against in 2007). The West Australian takes this to mean Abbott “has largely proved a turn-off for WA voters”, but it might equally be to do with Westpoll’s low-sample volatility, which has seen the score go from 55-45 in February to 50-50 in May to 53-47 in December.
jv, don’t drink it! It’ll put you into a trance, where mediocrity will appear as a sort of paradise filled with golf courses and middle-aged men swinging jaguar keys and declaiming their loyalty to “centre-right” parties such as the ALP.
Diogenes
[you can discuss the merits of their case with them.]
That’s the key difference between the party supporter and the blind warrior (in all the parties). When it is impossible to have a genuine civil discussion you know it’s the latter category. The thing is not to waste energy by engaging those who will not genuinely discuss issues. That of course requires strong discipline, which I mostly do not possess. 🙂
Sorry triton still no answer to 2038
I suppose the fact that there is no answer may be why you are stumbling.
Diogenes #2017
Reading the last few posts just now (inc above), I recalled, very vividly, the parliamentary debate on John Gorton’s revamped censorship, and an interview with JG himself, in which he mentioned what would remain “classified” – bestiality, kiddy porn & mutilation were among those mentioned. I remember vividly because I’d not long before read as much as I could of Anthony Trollope’s notes on his Oz experiences & research (and he was IMO a typical Victorian busy-body gossip-monger) …
as well as the (much tamer) letters themselves. These were in line with (and probably regurgitated) much earlier reports -& a great deal of salacious gossip – that provide the background to Caroline Chisholm’s efforts to get young unmarried women to emigrate to Australia to save men (and other species) from themselves; thereby demonstrating that some people don’t need a form of communication – the Internet, or TV, or radio, or movies or paper & some form of written/ print communication – to enact the sort of behaviour proInternet-censorship advocates want blocked.
And geez, back when Gorton was PM, I got access to read it as a young post-grad student! In fact, I had clearance to read anything [sic!] (postgrads were considered intelligent mature adults) held in libraries & archives, here & in the UK – probably elsewhere, but, apart from the truly sickening record of what befell survivors of the wreck of Pelsart’s “Batavia” at the hands of the religious fanatic Cornelis, most of the resources were here & in UK. (BTW: there’s a translation of the official account on http://gutenberg.net.au/ausdisc/ausdisc1-06.html and Douglas Stewarts’ play Shipwreck. Other resources suggest the official account is very much a PG rated version of what actually happened).
Oh, just in case you think a person would need a vivid imagination to translate words into perversion, did I mention art works? And textbooks? There are really, really minutely described, well illustrated editions of Freud, many of them in undergrad libraries – which many secondary student can access.
If y’r want it, y’can find it without all that much effort.
To defend a microsm of the world we function in ,by wilfully ignore all the constructs laws etc that got and ENABLES such a thing as the internet is,
Disingenous at best
and pure Intellectual deficit syndrome at worst.
I see. So it’s a kind of creme de menthe.
Gusface:
[I suppose the fact that there is no answer may be why you are stumbling.]
You made a number of misrepresentations in 2038, but if you will be more specific I will attempt an answer if I haven’t addressed it already.
Psephos
Chinos are pants. Beige chinos are beige pants.
Inner Westie
[jv, don’t drink it! It’ll put you into a trance, where mediocrity will appear as a sort of paradise filled with golf courses and middle-aged men swinging jaguar keys and declaiming their loyalty to “centre-right” parties such as the ALP.]
Thanks for the tip – I’ll stick with my unadulterated pure strong long black with no sugar then, and preserve my independent values (and my liver too probably).
Morgan 59-41…
Geez, someone better tell Kev over in Hopenhagen to get a deal done, becasue he’s flatlining back home…
CF Morgan FTF, it looks just possible, MOE allowing, that some of the Green voters may have thought that Labor’s ETS was better than no ETS as per the Liberals, or a much higher targets, as per the Greens.
Australia 2013.
Santa gets the Conroy treatment after his website Hohohokids.com was placed on the blacklist after a complaint by Senator Fiskal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp19qiash2U
I plead guilty to wearing pants. None of them are beige.
Don’t go shopping alone Psephos. You may not be able to resist their siren-like seduction.
(Mediocrity has it’s way of getting into your soul… via your pants.)
Abbott’s dream of planting trees and sinking biochar rather than having a carbon price is running into its second bit of difficulty.
The first one was that the Libs have had to admit that it will not be cost free and they don’t know what it will cost, but, not to worry, all will be revealed.
The second bit of difficulty is actually challenging, policy wise, as well as politics-wise. The Libs want to sequester scads of carbon in trees. In the absence of a carbon market, they will have to pay people to do it. This means that people will want to put the trees in the best soil, well-watered by reliable rainfall. This runs smack bang into the destruction of rural communities by endless stretches of trees. It also runs into food security policy. Most of all, it runs into destroying farmers, aka National Party voters. So the the Nats want the trees planted in marginal land. The trouble with marginal land is that there is a reason why it is marginal land. The reason is usually a combination of very low rainfall and very poor soil. So if the trees are forced into marginal land they will grow very slowly and they will not sequester a whole lot of carbon quickly. Mallee can take a long, long time to grow up. The second low-hanging fruit they will try to grab is carbon sequestration in soil. Nothing wrong with it in principle. The policy challenge is that it will take years for folk to figure out just how much additional carbon goes into the soil as the result of some specific treatment. Then, the efficacy of the treatments will vary from soil to soil, climate to climate and agricultural practice to agricultural practice. It will take years to generate some sort of believable, quantifiable outcome. But hey, let’s trust a party that is choc-a-bloc with denialists who appear to be wanting to give farmers money for jam. Your money. Their jam.
Get ready for flummery and blather.
jv,
That’s a teeth-staining coffee regimen! If you need dental assistance and live in Queensland, then for god’s sake don’t source any services on the web!
I can confirm that Musrum’s Miracle Medicine is working a treat.
Dr Good
[Do you believe that anything which can be put on the web anywhere in the world should be able to be viewed by Australians?]
No I do not. I believe we should have laws that make it illegal to view child porn etc.
We already have them. We should spend some of the $130M on enforcing them which would be much more effective than a filter which will do nothing to prevent P2P, email and 99% of the content of child porn being viewed.
Will the website* dedicated to honouring those 13 year olds who can hack Conroy’s filter in record time be blacklisted?
And if so, how long will it take a 13 year old to hack it?
* Whose emergence is inevitable.
I thought Monbiot provided one very useful insight the other night. When asked why he thought that those who believed in the AGW were reducing in numbers he said that he thought it might be because once they understood the cost of doing something about it, they decided that it was easier not to believe in it.
Heard an example of just that on the radio this morning.
i have read you all for a while
But this grandmother is fully in fabour of the conroy policy
And i think you would find 95 percent of grandmothers and mothers are.
sorry but thats the real world we want to protect our children.
have you all had a read of barnabys blog
have you all read barnabys blog scary stuff
my say
do you have a link?
[And i think you would find 95 percent of grandmothers and mothers are.
sorry but thats the real world we want to protect our children]
Also us dads.
🙂
ps well said
The other very tricky bit with very large scale of carbon sequestration in trees is going to be the nexus between that land use, capital value of land, and food prices.
Very tricky, policy-wise.
Inner Westie
Not only will it be blacklisted, the filter-busters will be criminals and Conroy can then divert further resources to chase a whole new class of “criminals”.
Boerwar,
A paralysing material cost is one thing, moral inertia caused by eschewal of responsibility is quite another.
Capitalism has us right where it wants us. lol
my say
[thats the real world we want to protect our children.]
That’s interesting. If you have been reading ‘you all for a while’ how do you see the Conroy filter achieving the end you apparently crave? That is, what is your view of the points made in the discussion citing the reasons it won’t work?
[how long will it take a 13 year old to hack it?]
They’ll run stories on how the filter can be hacked, same as the tele runs stories now and again on kiddies buying cigs and alcohol.
There will however be basic protection in place with the web filter, same is there is basic protection in place with laws prohibiting the sale of cigs and alcohol to kids.
Quite easy for kids to be led to porn sites and most would be comfortable if there was some filter to stop this happening.
IW
Well, if they aim to get the sequestration done by planting mallee in marginal lands, then I think we should insist that the platations should be at least 1 metre above sea level, because mallee (depending on the species and the circumstances) tends to work in centuries, not decades.
castle
[Quite easy for kids to be led to porn sites and most would be comfortable if there was some filter to stop this happening.]
Same question to you as in 2077. How will the filter proposal achieve that end given all the points made today explaining how it will be impossible?
castle
[Quite easy for kids to be led to porn sites and most would be comfortable if there was some filter to stop this happening.]
But the filter is not filtering porn (99% of it anyway).
Can the filter tell if the fingers pressing the computers buttons are 13 years old because that would be a very clever filter.
[Not only will it be blacklisted, the filter-busters will be criminals and Conroy can then divert further resources to chase a whole new class of “criminals”.]
just wait till the Liberals get back into government and start blacklisting union websites for promoting workplace disharmony (or some similar frivolity). You reap what you sow.
The script kiddies will continue to do whatever digital derring do they are doing now. Whatever that is. Who knows?
But most kids are not script kiddies. Some unknowable part of them will avoid seeing the worst of the web’s fare as a result of the filter, which is no bad thing, really.
Most of them will also get to see, either accidentally or deliberately, pictures of people doing it, because that is part of growing up.
In time some political control freak will probably try to extend the list to include political stuff. That will be a bad thing, democracy-wise.
“thats the real world we want to protect our children.”
And what steps have you taken to protect your grandchildren?
Have you obtained net-filtering software? Do you closely monitor their internet use?
Anything at all?
Well they should be hounded down every fibre-optic cable, the little upstarts!
How dare they reveal Conroy’s initiative for the ill-judged, counter-productive and wasteful turkey that it is…
Here’s a neat* idea for Christmas: Conroy’s Catholic Appeasement Turkey. (Get in while stocks last.)
* Not in the American sense.
Interesting fact: Conroy is the president of Volleyball Victoria. Now what’s-a-bet this doesn’t end up on the blacklist. (Even if the site is used as a front for running guns in long socks!)
Castle
[Look at the history of any media,it is a self explainatory process that rules are resisted or embraced dependent on who gains /loses. ]
I truly wonder what those complaining about are losing?
I for one have my suspicions
Gusface,
Don’t be shy. If you suspect that all those who question Conroy’s initiative are peddlers of kiddie porn, come out and say it! lol
And why would a contributor who is usually so forthright be so coy?
I have my suspicions…
Gusface
[I truly wonder what those complaining about are losing?
I for one have my suspicions]
Ah, the old “Those who don’t support the filter must be perverts.” line.
How about being a little less like a character in “The Crucible”; and instead address rationally the points raised here and in the MSM today as to why the net proposal is a crock, and will not do anything to achieve its stated aims?
I had a look at Barnaby’s blog as suggested. (Just Google Barnaby Joyce Blog.)
What a putrid cesspit of warped malevolent thinking.
Threats of violence, death threats, lewd abuse, total intolerance, LaRouche veneration, one nation cheer squads.
All that is missing is the sound of banjos.
And this after Barnaby says on site that he has moderated the posts!
If ever there was an argument for net censorship, Barnaby’s blog is it.
Go visit.
Inner and JV
you guys are so dumb,and please a better attempt at verballing
0/10
*steps over excreta and continues along*
mysay@2071:
[have you all read barnabys blog scary stuff]
I agree, Barnaby certainly scares me.
That is, when I can work out what he is saying!
👿
*steps over excreta and continues along*
I’m offended but I’m laughing. How do you do that?!
Don #2026
It reads credit cards (it does, I checked)! If, for instance, I was a restaurant worker who brought you the bill on a plate (or whatever) & to pay your bill you put it & your CC on the plate for me to take back to wherever the card was scanned, I could copy it very easily & note the security code.
Just remember this, whenever the card leaves your hand.
Inner
[I’m offended but I’m laughing. How do you do that?!]
Lift first your left leg and then slowly negotiate over the excreta, then lift your right leg (remembering not to step in said excreta) and move forward.
NB nose holding or use of nosegays is optional.
HTH
Inner Westie
[I’m offended but I’m laughing. How do you do that?!]
Glorious, isn’t it? 🙂
It’s apparently a forlorn hope to get a reasoned analysis of the points raised repeatedly today against the filter, but addressed by a total of *nil* filter ‘supporters’. Ah, dear.
My god! Nosegay… I’d never heard of such a thing!
I just checked out a few nosegay websites, and I’m telling you, they’ll be straight for the blacklist. Disgusting.
zebra3
[And what steps have you taken to protect your grandchildren?
Have you obtained net-filtering software? Do you closely monitor their internet use?
Anything at all?]
I find this offensive and unnecessary.
Your response implies that mysay is negligent and lazy and that their concern for their grandchildren is hypocritical.
Please treat posters with a bit of respect, even if they disagree with you (with the possible exception of Diog…oh, and truthy…oh, and….)
Many a person who is capable of composing a post is not net savvy enough to install a filter. (Most people who can drive a car shy away at the thought of changing the oil). Many don’t think they have the time. They may be wrong on both counts, but failing to install a filter or to hover over their grandchildren every second they’re on the net doesn’t mean that they don’t care, and you shouldn’t insinuate that.
Anyhoo, another point I’d like to make: I want kids to use any source of information they can. I don’t want parents using dubious excuses to ban them from the net, and I don’t want parents to feel that they have to hover over junior every second they’re on the computer (I mean, really).
If having a filter means that some Christo fundie type lets little Nigel break out of the confines of the commune and engage with the real world, that’s a plus.
On a more realistic scenario, if Kim from Fountaingate is comfortable that Epponnee can rattle away on the net to their heart’s content, that’s good for both of them.
And sorry, $130 mill plus over how many years (3?) is cheap as chips when we’re talking government expenditure.
(And I’ll end that bit of hackery, which of course was emailed to me from Conroy Control Central, by saying I’m still not decided on this issue. But I won’t be until the anti filterers give me more sensible arguments – and ones that I, as a non tech savvy person, can understand).
I wrote:
[OPT@2021:
The best buy came with a wee card reader that accepted the chip – a very cheap, dinky little device I can conceal in the palm of my hand.
The answer to the obvious question is You’re damned right it does!
I have no idea what you are talking about.
You wanted a cable for your camera and got a chip reader instead.
I have a chip reader too, it is easier to use than the camera to computer connection.
Your point being?]
you wrote:
[Don #2026
It reads credit cards (it does, I checked)! If, for instance, I was a restaurant worker who brought you the bill on a plate (or whatever) & to pay your bill you put it & your CC on the plate for me to take back to wherever the card was scanned, I could copy it very easily & note the security code.
Just remember this, whenever the card leaves your hand.]
That has always been the case, that a restaurant can use your card for their own purposes. Ever since credit cards came into general use.
You don’t need a card reader even, with the old version of credit cards (which is what I have, without a chip) all you need is the numbers on the card.
If it happens, you inform your bank, your card won’t be the only one they are skimming, your bank tells the police, the dishonest restauranteur goes to jail, you get your money back, not a problem.
I am still no wiser, you seem to be talking in riddles.