Something for the weekend

Parliament resumes on Monday, bringing with it an end to the silly season. We have had no Morgan this week, but there should be a Newspoll on Tuesday. Monday’s Essential Research poll had Labor’s two-party lead steady on 56-44; rated the relative importance of various issues; found a high level of support for Tony Abbott’s green jobs policy; and showed most respondents agreeing with the opposition after the emissions trading scheme issue was explained to them in a particular way. Other than that:

• Antony Green and Possum offer common sense reflections on the state of the opinion polls at the moment. Possum in particular identifies the peculiarity of the 2007 federal result, which alone out of seven observations failed to deliver on a landslide which the polls had shown at long range. The question now facing us is whether the extraordinary factors of 2007 equally apply in 2010 – whatever they might have been.

• A day after Bob McMullan announced he would retire from his seat of Fraser at the next election, Annette Ellis announced she too would be vacating the other safe Labor ACT seat, Canberra. Ousted ACT party secretary Bill Redpath claims national secretary Karl Bitar’s refusal to allow an earlier preselection indicates they were pushed as much as jumped. Christian Kerr of The Australian reports Ellis in particular agreed to go after Left and Right failed to finesse a deal in which the former would take Fraser at the election, and the latter would take Canberra when it became available. Michael Cooney, former adviser to Mark Latham and Kim Beazley and current chief-of staff to ACT Education Minister Andrew Barr, was reportedly all but certain to take Canberra, while Fraser was likely to go to the party’s assistant national secretary Nick Martin. However, a new candidate for Canberra has emerged in Gai Brodtmann, runner of communications firm Brodtmann & Uhlmann Communications and wife of ABC report Chris Uhlmann.

• Peter Lindsay has announced he will vacate his knife-edge marginal Townsville-based seat of Herbert, and readily admits the timing of the announcement was chosen for “strategic reasons”. The Townsville Bulletin reports candidates for Liberal preselection are “thin on the ground”, no doubt reflecting a lack of confidence in Coalition ranks. Townsville deputy mayor David Crisafulli and V8 Supercars event manager Kim Faithful were rated as obvious successors, but both have declined to enter the ring. The one candidate known to have confirmed interest is Colin Dwyer, an economist and unsuccessful candidate for Mundingburra at last year’s state election. The Bulletin also reviews the achievements of Lindsay’s final term: a fact-finding mission encompassing 13 different countries, resulting in a report that plagiarised Wikipedia and featured a Photoshopped image purporting to show Lindsay at a Beirut war cemetery. Labor’s preselection process has turned up 2007 candidate George Colbran, former mayor and long-established local identity Tony Mooney, and Townsville councillor Jenny Hill.

• Soraiya Gharahkhani of the Campbelltown Macarthur Advertiser reports Paul Nunnari, wheelchair athlete and adviser to state Campbelltown MP Graham West will contest preselection for Macarthur, going up against presumed favourite Nick Bleasdale, the narrowly unsuccessful candidate from 2007.

• Michelle Carnovale of the Oakleigh Monash Leader reports Monash councillor Joy Banerji is Labor’s unlikely prospect in Kevin Andrews’ seat of Menzies.

• Those of you who have about 30 seconds to spare are encouraged to fill out Crikey’s website reader survey.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,289 comments on “Something for the weekend”

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  1. ru

    I’m glad you said “possibly”. The jury is still out on that one.

    That argument is more heated than an all-out Green vs Labor flame war.

  3. Itstime@48:

    [Sydney desal plant has about double the capacity (max 250 Ml / day) as Kwinana (130 mL /day). And the renewable source is a wind farm.]

    Any idea of its capacity, and whether it actually would run the Sydney desal plant over a twelve month period?

  6. [However, DDT has never been banned for anti-malaria use,[19] and Carson argued in Silent Spring that:

    No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story—the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting. … What is the measure of this setback? The list of resistant species now includes practically all of the insect groups of medical importance. … Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes. … Practical advice should be ‘Spray as little as you possibly can’ rather than ‘Spray to the limit of your capacity’ …, Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible.

    The widespread use of DDT in agriculture and other fields contributed to the selection of DDT resistant mosquito populations. This threatened to reduce or eliminate its effectiveness as a weapon against mosquitos and other disease vectors.[20]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

  7. So I am 55, Boerwar and Its Time are so devious as to aviod the question, Could it be they have made comments that do not support their assertions? 😉

  15. [So I am 55, Boerwar and Its Time are so devious as to aviod the question,]
    If you really want precision, I’m 53. And I assure you that I have never said anything which contradicts this fact.

  16. [Finniss, Only if you’ve got chocolate for everyone.]

    I’m afraid I usually only bring a sort of bitter carob to the table GG. 😛

    To get things back on topic, one of the interesting questions at hand seems to be whether the upcoming federal election is going to follow the “normal” pattern and result in the incumbent government getting back in with a decreased majority, or whether it will follow the labor state government pattern of recent times, which is a modest first win followed by a massive second election victory.

    Personally I feel things will be more like the state government pattern, although there is no chance of a Peter Beattie in Queensland type of landslide at a federal level. But surely the liberals have to go backwards? Surely the coalition needs to drop at least a couple of points off their primary vote from 2007?

    That would be my guess anyway.

  18. ru

    I am just changing my nappy… you get to a certain age and the waterworks, you know you practically need a desal plant to keep the blood clean, and the valves don’t work so good anymore, and the next thing you know you are changing nappies again but this time its your own nappies, and…

    nah, just joshing.

  19. Hmmm, looks like the wind farm has a fair chance of powering the desal plant, even if the wind only blows one third of the time:

    http://wind.energy-business-review.com/news/infigen_energys_1407_mw_wind_farm_to_be_operational_soon_near_bungendore_australia_091116/

    [ Infigen Energy’s 140.7 MW Wind Farm To Be Operational Soon Near Bungendore, Australia
    Published: 16-Nov-2009
    Infigen Energy Limited’s (Infigen Energy) 67-turbine, 140.7 MW Capital wind farm is set to be operational from next week, watoday.com.au reported. The wind farm is located near Bungendore, east of Canberra in New South Wales. The power produced by the wind farm will be enough for about 60,000 homes. Under a 20-year contract signed in 2008, the Capital wind farm’s output will be used by Sydney Water to power its desalination plant at Kurnell, Sydney.

    Infigen Energy’s Managing Director Miles George said that the desalination plant would use 40 MW of electricity when it began operating this summer, and that any left over power generated by the wind farm would go into the national electricity grid.]

  20. William, we also need a URL function on the site. That URL above pokes out the sides of the available space.

    How is the upgrade coming along?

  22. [Hmmm, looks like the wind farm has a fair chance of powering the desal plant, even if the wind only blows one third of the time:]
    Wind farms put out about a third of their max rated capacity so there will be precious little left over to put into the general grid capacity.

  24. Ru – suggesting that people who want to stop human population explosion world wide and in Australia are neo Hansonites etc is hardly credible. Thats not to say it is easy but its an obvious proposition that continuing expansion of human numbers makes everything else harder in terms of environmental protection. And a majority of the population in Australia are in broad agreement judging by polls.
    Reducing the living standards of a few of the most wealthy and massively increasing assistance to poor communities are also obvious logical steps. More economically secure people rapidly reduce their family sizes and gross wealth by a few increases demands from everyone to keep up.
    If anyone can produce evidence that bigger populations rather than more egalitarian populations are helping sort out the world’s problem then I’m all ears.

  33. [Any Desal plant with an appropriate clean energy supply or equivalent offset system is energy neutral. ]

    Thats total and complete BULLSHIT!

    Using that logic every single home, business, company and industry in NSW is “carbon neutral” because their carbon is being offset by green energy.

    I can’t believe people are stupid enough to believe government rhetoric, it’s so blindlinly ridiculous it makes my head spin.

  35. [Using that logic every single home, business, company and industry in NSW is “carbon neutral” because their carbon is being offset by green energy.]
    TTH, I can’t count how many misconceptions you have loaded into that single sentence.

  36. Wakefield @ 74

    [Ru – suggesting that people who want to stop human population explosion world wide and in Australia are neo Hansonites etc is hardly credible.]

    I am opposed to the so-called “Big Australia” and can hardly be considered a racist, being the left-wing lunatic I am. I don’t understand how politicians can look at our water-restriction-affected major cities and say to themselves “We should make these twice as big.”

    It seems mad to me. Twice as many people means twice as much demand for water. Twice as many toilets flushing, twice as many showers and twice as many gardens. Where is the water going to come from? Even if it’s not literally twice as much demand, due to increased density or lifestyle changes or whatever, it will still be massively increased demand.

    And there may be twice as many people and twice as many cars, but I bet you anything there won’t be twice as many roads or twice as many parking spaces. Seems crazy to me. Our current enviable lifestyle will go right down the toilet.

    And for what benefit? Australia will still only be a “middle power” in strategic terms. And if we need so many new people to fill economic roles, how about properly investing in training the kids of the boganised underclass instead of leaving them to rot on the dole and importing people to do the jobs instead.

    It will be interesting to see how this issue goes in the electorate of Melbourne at the upcoming election, given that Lindsay Tanner is outspoken in his support of doubling the population of the city of Melbourne. If I were the greens I’d plaster his views to his forehead and run a populist campaign.

  37. Its Time,

    Truthy is wilfully ignorant. It’s been explained to him before. His mock misunderstanding is a try on.

  38. [TTH, I can’t count how many misconceptions you have loaded into that single sentence].

    Hence, Troothy explains.

    [it’s so blindlinly ridiculous it makes my head spin.]

    All is revealed.

    Its, The Facts Hurt

  41. Hey guys I am having a couple of beers right now.

    Luckily the guy down the road is not a drinker.

    That means he is offsetting my beer intake, making me beer neutral!

    Weee! It’s fun being part of the State Government spin!

    Bit like having someone build a wind power plant and then 10 years later building a desalination plant and connecting it to the coal fired power grid and claiming your 10% increase in power demand is offset by a wind power plant built to REDUCE greenhouse gases.

    Now I have to go have a smoke… don’t worry! The bloke next door is a non-smoker, he’s offsetting my smoking! 😉

  43. So Troothy’s not a member of the Liberal Party, and GB says he’s not a Labor member. Why are the most fervent and uncritical party supporters not committing themselves to helping their preferred parties?

  45. [That means he is offsetting my beer intake, making me beer neutral!]

    Quite so. If the average beer intake is 1 unit per person per day, and you drink two units, you can offset that by paying me to drink no units, rendering you beer neutral.

  46. Diogenes #2

    Psephos
    We had a discussion a few weeks back about Ron’s posts. Several posters said that they had dyslexia and recognised it in Ron’s writings. He didn’t comment but I think that was construed as tacit acknowledgment of the veracity of the suggestion.

    As my posts almost always look like Ron’s before I spend a long time (often more than an hour) correcting them (& I still miss errors), I can add a few more reasons:

    1. Visual problems – I’ve never been able to focus (I thought 2 eyes = 2 images until I was 17 & wanted a pilot’s & drivers licences!), with some degree of nystagmus in the left eye (involuntary eye movement that is part of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), characterized by alternating smooth pursuit in one direction and saccadic movement in the other direction. The oscillations may occur in the vertical,horizontal or torsional planes, or in any combination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiologic_nystagmus ).

    Mildly annoying until June 2009, when a series of small strokes made the L eye worse & sent the R one beserk – like having a waltzing left & a jitterbugging right, simultaneously! I had a long enforced vac from PB because of it (+ a dead HD) My keyboard still shifts constantly.

    Nystagmus isn’t an uncommon problem, by the way.

    2. Stroke (from minor upwards) affecting finger pressure & use + sometimes scrambling the message when synapses get “all shook up”. I type as I think, then take ages putting in missing letters, or unjumbling them. Similar symptoms can result from accidents & illness. Again, not uncommon problems

    3. Arthritis also affects pressure on keys (among other things) & makes typing very slow & painful; often (as with severe visual problems) leading to …

    4.Voice recognition computer programmes, which translate speech into typing – they’re getting better, but still frustrating. Many are USA designed – they just type what an American hears; eg darby (derby) clark (clerk) commarnd (command) program (Grrr), prolog (ditto). Gets worse if one’s using a prog & the USA spellcheck won’t turn off!

    Again, not an uncommon problem

    Unless a PB member has explained physical/ health/ learning problems, as I just have (& I did it as an illustration, not an excuse), then no poster knows, when deciding to do a Thwackum & Square on the way another poster communicates, whether s/he is actively subjecting another to offensive discrimination because of disability. And there should be absolutely no reason why one PB ought to have to explain a problem to avoid being insulted by a latter day Walter Shandy!

    Blogs are informal communication, the essence of which is speed. I seem to recall that, even in the starched & corseted 50s & 60s, we were expected, both in secondary school & university, to use informal forms for informal communication … all that sense, feeling, tone & intention and tailoring usage to the audience and medium stuff.

    William, as BlogMeister, has every right to make the rules. If he doesn’t demand pedantry, I can’t see why anyone else should.

  50. Adam

    You upset about Shakespeare missing joke Two weeks ago Oz Tragic made a jest blog about me , re Shakespeare being before Johnson in great detail , plus about German words at that time I’ve simply repeat an in house joke , so oz tragic deseves credit not me Had an assistant but luv work has its limits before moolah in kind takes over Save energy and skip my posts

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