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.
Don – #4
[ Put your money where your mouth is, Townsville needs you! ]
Well Truthy is all cashed up and so has plenty of money to put where his (big?) mouth is.
He says he sold out of all his holdings on the Gamblers Exchange.
Wakefield, where is the logical flaw in my #95? Of course offsetting one’s beer consumption by paying someone else not to drink their quota doesn’t reduce the overall consumption of beer, if that is the objective. But if the objective is to maintain average beer consumption at 1 unit per person per day, I can safely drink 2 units if I can get someone else to drink 0 units. Similarly, I pay a surcharge on my air tickets to plant a tree somewhere, thus offsetting my share of the GHG emission caused by my flight.
102
These pollute but plant trees schemes have benefits but are not foolproof and are rather indulgence-esque.
I agree, but I still do it because I want to fly.
Pseph
Our swedish visitors bought a goat as an “offset”??
(ie they could choose various “offsets” and chose the goat)
Go figure.
Boerwar
issue of pop present 6.7 bill , project to about 2045 is 9.2 bill So yes CC , food , water will be a World problam from pop , but what do you suggest India may in time overtook China I read recently
Have the ABC got this wRONg.
According to an ABC news report:
Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard says the website has been immensely popular with parents,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/29/2805299.htm?section=justin
I would love to see the statistics which show that parents have been accessing the MySchool website for the purpose of making parental decisions regarding their kids education.
On the other hand, those accessing the website might all be parents (except for me) – but that status of parent is merely coincidental to the reason the website was accessed.
PY,
Put the dog back on.
GG
He cant- distemper
😉
So why should we be thank Rudd, Swan and Henry?
[Euro-zone unemployment hits 10%
LONDON (MarketWatch) — Unemployment in the 16-nation euro zone reached 10% in December for the first time, according to statistics released Friday, showing the slow economic recovery has yet to translate into job-making power.]
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/euro-zone-unemployment-hits-10-2010-01-29
Or we could have had the ‘great’ Treasurer Howard waiting for the signs of recession to appear before acting by which time horsy has bolted.
How do goats offset flying? Do goats absorb C02?
GG-108
Pathetic response. You know i am rIGHt and Julia wRONg and the best you can do is is make an inane comment like that. Get a life!
Winston
“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?”
GB not here
That is BS , heard Gary disagree with Labor Govt
Which Party do you suport , and when disgreed with here
PY,
The pot plant will do if the dog’s not available.
Pseph
their travel agent organised the equivalent of there GHG emissions consistent with the greens and swedish Gvt offset
1. approx 500 kronor
2. tax debit of 750 kronor
3. other form of of offset
a) carbon offset-brazil eco venture
b) renewable offset-danish wave power venture
c) african goat by 5 yrs
ps
Unfortunately they get no pictures of the goat
😉
It has been quite sometime since i saw Chris Curtis post, and i had hoped the school website issue might bring him out. As he would know i have massive sympathy for teachers and their plight over decades. Much as i have massive lust for their work to holiday ratio, but enough of my personal problems.
i have to say the teachers have been definitively pathetic on this issue. They don’t like the website, that i get, statistics can give an incorrect perspective, unless you have a possum for a spirit guide and you go on lot of spirit journeys, that i get, but what i don’t get is how they are so very far removed from the parents that provide them students to suggest that the way we should be evaluating their damn schools is to get to know the school our children actually go to in detail.
There are two problems with this.
Firstly last year i’m pretty sure the teacher for one of my delightful angels was just incompetent. You see i realise i’m biased, and she / he had a whole class room of perfectly behaved mental giants if only they could overcome their hangover and pour wisdom in. But see, as a parent of one of these intellectual diamonds waiting to be discovered, as a parent suspecting the teacher wasn’t quite up to it, i still didn’t have enough to go to the principal and suggest my diamond needed a competent educator. And quite frankly, in keeping with this fountain of advice from education unionists i knew that the principal had had a difficult few years and was frankly lucky to have staff to pop into each classroom.
So not much joy for me there.
But then these idiot teachers, sorry but i’m getting a tiny bit passionate, fail to notice that i barely have time, and no influence at the school i’m paying to put my diamonds in. How the big fat unpleasant truck experience do they expect me to evaluate all the schools in my area this way. And even they, as stupid and self absorbed as they have seemed this week, could expect me to become intimately acquainted with all 8 local schools and the 20 or 30 within a drivable distance.
So until they come up with something better for ME than the website, and something more possible than having effective blackmail leverage over all the principals in my immediate vicinity, they should either shut the truck up, or just admit that the damn website and the very limited and probably distorted stats it shows is the best damn thing i have to go by; right up until hell freezes over and the principal will say over morning tea: oh yes the year 4 teacher is a real lemon, can’t spell ‘help’ to save himself, yeah bad luck your kid is in his class.
pps This for 2 persons plus excess baggage.
return.
I think on the evidence of GG and PY we can conclude that dogs have no sense of humour. Certainly less than possums and dolphins.
Psephos,
I have a wonderful sense of humour.
I laugh at your posts all the time.
“just admit that the damn website and the very limited and probably distorted stats it shows is the best damn thing i have to go by”
Jasmine you speak for most Parents , hense millions of hits on Site
There are some differences between the coming election and the previous election.
We had a well liked ‘popular’ shiny new candidate full of optimism and talking about the future up against a PM past his use by date, who often focussed on the negative, looked to the past and attempted no longer novel tactics. It was someone tired and a bit dirtied up against the new fresh nerd that people at last felt they could trust.
This time it is the same as above….plus economic guru saver of the economy plus does us proud on the international stage up against…..Howard’s evil nephew. The big change is that evil nephew is not the incumbent so even less effective.
Last time even though many trusted and felt comfortable with Rudd at the very last it was hard to break with the old worn safe comfortable existing PM. Hence the late narrowing – change is always hard to make. This time with the Howard mystique/hold gone there is nothing to pull people to the Libs. On the contrary we have a new PM who on balance has done pretty well. Up against the well known never really liked that much, or previously considered by the public to be PM material.
The last election was the new shoe up against the comfortable old shoe. This time it is the newly worn in ‘new’ shoe (now with new and improved economic credentials) up against the smelly mouldy old comfortable shoe.
Come this election it will be the tried and successful Rudd up against yesteryear. I would expect that the aversion to change from something that seems pretty OK will see Labor’s polling widen in the last few weeks.
[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.]
Ron
If jasmine is the redoubtable Jas A of ozpolitics etc, I suggest she is worth listening to.
ps if you are JA, welcome back, Zoom perhaps is the best person to discuss this with
🙂
#
#
119
Psephos
Posted Friday, January 29, 2010 at 11:39 pm | Permalink
“I think on the evidence of GG and PY we can conclude that dogs have no sense of humour. Certainly less than possums and dolphins.”
Psephos
Posted Friday, January 29, 2010 at 11:22 pm | Permalink
“How do goats offset flying? Do goats absorb C02?”
test yourself ?
Ron,
If I was a politician and I got 10-15 million responses to what I did in 24 hours, I’d be very very happy.
Gillard is going to cream the Libs next week.
OK i’ve had a passion stirring week. No trucks in this post i promise, or ok just a few.
But IR. I get how employers who are just out to screw the life out of employees, not because they want to of course but because the market says the must for the very ordinary middle class struggling shareholders who give them life, and i get how ‘collectives’ such as unions scare the proverbial digested breakfast out of them and they prefer, peaceful sensible fair bargains with individual employees. All that i get.
But i don’t get this week and the woodside issue with their pluto workers. Woodside and their fearless leader have divided and conquered, i understand. No evil communist collective bargains there.
But something went wrong and the slaves, i mean rats, i mean employees, are unhappy about how many sugars in their coffee, or how much genuine down in their company provided quilts or something, clearly i don’t really care, but what confuses the truck out of me, is how woodside, who clearly likes individuals (except when more than half the individuals building their little project think the same) and hates collectives (like evil unions) at the first difficulty demands, not requests, but demands that the biggest collective of the people of all, the peoples democratically elected government no less, that this collective drop everything immediately and solve their little quilt not soft enough problem. Is there not a tiny tiny little contradiction in wanting every poor little trucking employee to have to look after themselves but then want the political collective to solve all their problems when their quilts aren’t soft enough? i’m just a simple person so i’m confused.
Ron 124. Well done on a perfectly spelled post. (Note, positive reinforcement.)
Jasmine- #117
A simple question. As a parent of diamonds have you accessed the website for the purpose of making a decision as to the future education of the precious stones? If so, when do you expect to implement that decision?
Jas
woodside spelt large
Cribs (that word again) read beds!
Budgeetted workforce =2500
Real (read actual) = 4250
Ummm
I havent shared my bed since i was bunking at Myuna Bay in ’71
And woodside expects MEN and WOMEN to share bunks
FFO
[Our swedish visitors bought a goat as an “offset”??]
The way we are going in Aus, ritual animal sacrifices will be mandatory by 2015. Tony and Kevin would have been to at least one or two, guiven their levels of admitted superstitious thoughts. Tony has started slowly with camel culling as a precurser. 😆
I think most people who have accessed the myschool website have done it to check out their own former school and compare it with their friends/enemies/spouses/whatever. Although many will be “prospective” parents too.
The opponents of the website are short-sighted and misguided. It is vital to shine a light on who is performing well and who is performing poorly, otherwise there will be no real pressure on them to change.
The greens, lefties and education unions have been very poor on this issue. Lots of talk about “stigmatising” people, much less talk about the dreadful consequences of their own support for the status quo, which is seeing too many kids left behind by the education system.
Peter, thank you for your question, genuine and heartfelt as i know your concern is. And no, i have not yet accessed the website in question. The diamonds are enrolled, the class assignments for next year have been advised, and as far as i know the teachers for the diamonds can spell help, at least when a gun is held to their head.
I’ve taken the unions advice, i know who is on the school council and i know where this school is going. I’ve taken the unions advice a step or two, or three further, and know a little about some of the surrounding schools and i know i am not going to move my diamonds from their friends at this point.
But if i find a need to change schools i know the very very very best information available, as poor and limited as i know it is, will be online, and by the time i need it probably will put the schools in the right state, and not have every other person in australia looking at it to write pathetic news grabs for the ‘once was mine’ abc.
JV
It is really interesting.
Apparently the total offset over 5 yrs is equiv to one MW of coal fired electricity.
NO I dont know the sums!
But in terms of sustainable offsets , it seems a good idea.
Adam , not sures you read my post an hour ago to you , but no Poem came after it from for you
Pspeh
How much was your offset?
the swedish one works out at approx $80 AUS
Thanks for the welcome Gus, i miss ozpolitics, and the time i had to play with it back then. I have read here a lot, and forgive me sometimes i scan fast, but there are lots of references to Adam who i assume is the Adam i remember, but i don’t actually see Adam posts very often at all?
Jasmine
#126
“And even they, as stupid and self absorbed as they have seemed this week, could expect me to become intimately acquainted with all 8 local schools and the 20 or 30 within a drivable distance.”
with you 100% Jasmine , Parents want this info , its why Julia acted
Sure can improve MySchool but where ar suggestions , No just whingers & knockers
Children, children, since the Parliament starts on Monday, surely we here at PB can show those kiddies at Canberra how to behave like adults and conduct proper debate and discussion without getting into name, herr, dog, cat, possum and dolphin calling. OK?
Gusface
[Apparently the total offset over 5 yrs is equiv to one MW of coal fired electricity.]
But … what are the sums? …. 😆
We can’t talk about this in esoteric terms. The question is: How many animal farts must be prevented by the farting animals’ deaths to keep the climate stable by 2050. And where do they live? Those are the first questions Abbott should be asked after his ‘policy’ announcement. 😆
Jasmine
“but there are lots of references to Adam who i assume is the Adam i remember, but i don’t actually see Adam posts very often at all?”
I changed my name
Gus,
I’ve got the marketing plan worked out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjSjB-3xPVM
[It’s going great, Don. Very exciting things are afoot.]
Bilbo, it’s better be. i have just renewed my Crikey subs. Not going to put up crabby stuff anymore from Crikey, like it better has a mobile version of Crikey & PB soon.
[but there are lots of references to Adam]
Jasmine, Adam is Adam Carr, also known as Psephos.
GG
WE WILL TALK
Jas
I most respectfully welcome your return,may god/dog have mercy on those who cross your path.
Pseph is the redoubatable Adam.
🙂
Sadly Fonz is still searching for his policies
🙁
Other than that,
SNAFU
r/Ron
I changed my name
You can talk. You’ve changed your name from ‘ron’ to ‘Ron’ and sometimes to ‘Craig’.
What happens on the full moon?
Ron – #137
[ Sure can improve MySchool but where ar suggestions }
Ron where are your suggestions for improving the MySchool website?
Or are you too busy whinging about the whingers to have time to provide us with your thoughts? 😆
Ahhhh fonz, he still owes me a dance and a drink i’m sure.
gus,
Your people can talk to my people,
We can do lunch.
Jas
those were the days my friend!
We shan’t see their likes again.
🙂
Just by the by – no-one seems interested in genuinely debating what the government should do on CC. For example, just to throw a few ideas out there:
1. Is the accepted scientific and economic modelling correct for the world and Australia?
2. Have the political elements of the issue changed for Australia since the Copenhagen meeting?
3. Should the govt. follow Prof Garnaut’s revised way forward(Jan 26 speech)or stick to the original plan?
4. Should there be negotiations between the government with Mr X and the Greens (and the 2 potential Lib crossers in the Senate) on a revised plan or the old plan? Explain 😆