GhostWhoVotes reports the latest Newspoll has the Coalition with a 52-48 lead, unchanged on a fortnight ago. More to follow.
UPDATE: The Australian reports Julia Gillard’s preferred prime minister rating is at an equal low of 49 per cent, down four points on last time, while Tony Abbott is up two to 34 per cent.
UPDATE 2: Graphic here. Labor is up a point on the primary vote to 34 per cent, the Coalition is steady on 43 per cent and the Greens are down a point to 13 per cent. Gillard’s personal ratings are now worse than Abbott’s: she is at at 41 per cent on both approval (down three) and disapproval (up four), while Tony Abbott is up three on approval to 44 per cent and down four on disapproval to 42 per cent.
Other matters of note:
• The Prime Minister has announced a panel will be established to consider a referendum question on constitutional recognition of Aborigines. The panel is to report by December next year, and it is currently suggested a referendum will follow at some point within three years. While logic might dictate that it be held simultaneously with the next election, the possibility that election day referendums might act as a drag on the vote of the incumbent has been noted by Peter Brent at Mumble. The panel will have to consider whether the recognition should involve a largely symbolic preamble, or substantive change to the body of the constitution. A 2008 parliamentary inquiry report identified two expressly discriminatory provisions that should be reviewed with any consideration of a preamble. One was the redundant section 25, which requires that population figures used to determine the states’ House of Representatives seat allocations exclude any races disqualified from voting under state law – something now forbidden under the Racial Discrimination Act. The other is section 51(xxvi), empowering the federal government to make laws for “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws” – from which the words “other than the aboriginal race in any state” were excised by the 1967 referendum. This came under the microscope during the Hindmarsh Island Bridge case of 1998, when the federal government argued that it was not for the High Court to distinguish between permissible positive laws under the section and impermissible negative ones. The court was unable to reach a majority ruling, and constitutional law expert Anne Twomey argues the distinction would likely prove highly vexed in any case. A number of options were canvassed for replacing the existing provision with “a new legislative power in Indigenous affairs subject to the rule of non-discrimination on the grounds of race”, none of which strike me as being terribly promising from an electoral point of view. The same goes for any number of more radical suggestions for constitutional recognition, such as George Williams’ call for constitutional recognition of agreements reached between indigenous people and the various tiers of government, or Professor Kim Rubenstein’s “special Indigenous executive council” empowered to seek explanations from parliament regarding legislation that did not meet its approval.
• Mal Brough has declared an interest in Liberal National Party endorsement for the Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher, incumbent Peter Slipper having most likely signed his political death warrant by accepting Labor’s backing for the deputy speaker position. Brough, who lost his seat of Longman at the 2007 election (Wyatt Roy recovered it for the LNP on August 21), turned his back on the LNP after unsuccessfully resisting the merger as state president of the Liberal Party, believing the terms to have been unduly favourable to the Nationals.
• Some subjects for further investigation, courtesy of events in the mother country. Firstly, Britain’s High Court has overturned the election of Brown government Immigration Minister Phil Woolas for falsely claiming that his narrowly unsuccessful Liberal Democrat opponent had been courting Islamic extremists. Woolas also faces possible criminal charges, and has been barred from standing for public office for three years. Andrew Bolt reproduces one of the offending publications, and argues – rightly in my view – that the presence or otherwise of Woolas in parliament should be decided by voters rather than courts. The episode stands in stark contrast to Australian practice, where the only substantial sanctions on misleading publications in election campaigns require that the deception be “in relation to the casting of a vote” – for example, through the distribution of misleading how-to-vote cards. The Labor-Greens agreement reached after the August 21 election obliged the government to seek to address this by establishing a “truth in advertising” offence in the Electoral Act.
• Secondly, the Court of European Rights has ruled Britain must grant the right to vote to prisoners, who have been denied it since the Reform Act of 1867. Parliament must now decide whether to thumb its nose at the court. There are echoes here of our own High Court’s 2007 ruling that overturned a Howard government move to extend the existing ban on prisoners serving terms of longer than three years to all prisoners regardless.
• Some Christmas gift ideas for the election wonk in your life. Courtesy of the Federation Press comes Professor Graeme Orr’s The Law of Politics: Elections, Parties and Money in Australia, “the first dedicated monograph on the law on democratic politics in Australia”. And from the Cambridge University Press comes Sally Young’s How Australia Decides: Election Reporting and the Media, a “four-year empirical study” offering “the only systematic, historical and in-depth analysis of Australian election reporting”.
Rod
I have friends also from Kinglake, Wandong and Kilmore, who by some miracle all survived the day.
But there was an interesting story about my sister’s friend whose father was up at his weekender in Kinglake that day tending to his horses. He went up early in morning to do this. By early afternoon, his horses were behaving in a way that lead him to believe, that his own life was in danger. Mind you there were no signs of fire at that stage, but the horses gave him the sense that he should leave immediately. This intuitive connection with his horses, saved his life basically. If he had tried to leave later, he would have been doomed.
bemused
you sure are bemusing.
confessions
the Greens are upset, because when the last got the Libs preferences at the Fed election, Adam Bandt was elected. The Libs did not want to do that again.
Victoria @ 4203
I have been involved in crisis situations (mild by comparison with Black Saturday) and anyone in any sort of a leadership role knew they had to drop everything else and focus on the crisis.
The thought does not seem to have crossed the mind of many in senior leadership roles on Black Saturday. Those at the front line doing their duty were let down badly.
Nothing bemusing about such notions.
Wasn’t it established last night that in a bushfire emergency, Nixon was not going to be making the strategic decisions?
Surely someone else could have paced up and down the command centre, clapping their hands and periodically shouting things like “C’mon people, let’s get this right, this is all-important!!!” while she was out?
kersebleptes
I am sure there were plenty of people tearing their hair out that night 🙂
vic
It is definitely a case of leave early or stay and fight. Leaving late is the worst thing you can do in general. The problem is you don’t know what to do in each specific case.
[That was, that the first female PM was supposed to come from the other side of politics and the favoured candidate was Julie Bishop who had been touted as the first female PM right from her entry into Parliament.]
Scorp, methinks it went back further than that. It was the other Bishop. Bronny Bishop and the cries of “who lost bronny” still can be heard among the ruins of time along the power corridor of Canberra. It was the hair!!!!!
diogenes
hindsight is always 20/20
[diogenes, hindsight is always 20/20]
Victoria, that is the only thing going for Diog. He likes to quit when he is behind. 👿
victoria,
Well, I shouldn’t be so flippant about it, but I think the same point has already been made.
vic
[hindsight is always 20/20]
That’s why you have reviews so you can do it better next time.
Fire awareness day today. Just heard it on the radio.
[So the Victorian Government shouldn’t be implementing 66 out of the 67 recommendations of the Royal Commission?
That should save a lot of money.]
No, not at all, Dio. There are lots of recommendations in Royal Commission reports that are certainly worth considering, and in many case implementing. They won’t stop tragedies of substantial magnitude from occurring on days like Black Saturday but they have the potential to do a lot of good in lesser situations and , if people are very lucky, might help a bit on the truly catastrophic occasions.
The thing that offended me about the manner in which the inquiry was treated was the focus of the media (and, at times, of the inquiry itself) on personalising “blame” for events which stood far beyond the real limits of normal human responsibility.
We have had three major events of this kind in the last century – Black Friday, Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday. The inquiries after each of them have produced important knowledge, even if sometimes we have had to “relearn” the same lessons when the passage of a few decades has dimmed the horror of the previous tragedies.
But anyone who believes that a tragedy like Black Saturday was largely the result of some sort of human failure (short of the the fact that our bodies can’t endure temperatures outside a very limited range and people like to live in the bush) is kidding themselves. These things will happen again and significant numbers of people will die when they do.
No doubt we will look for people to blame when that happens, and some people may feel better as a result of imagining that someone human (and therefore controllable and answerable) was “responsible” rather than such events being dependent primarily on natural forces beyond our limitations and the vagaries of personal chance and circumstance. But they will be kidding themselves.
Morning everyone!
Just a quick peep in & then back to painting.
On Kroger. Can anyone tell me about Kroger pre-uni, best friend of Costello days?
Rod
I have no doubt that human failure was only a small part of Black Saturday. It was largely due to horrible weather conditions and large amounts of combustible material.
That doesn’t mean that a better response wouldn’t have saved some on the 173 lives, which seems to be what people are saying.
[These things will happen again and significant numbers of people will die when they do.]
I think people in other countries call it “natural disaster”. they accept that Mother Nature do get angry sometimes and punish us the arrogant human beings.
They fixed things, cleaned up and moved on with their lives rather than whinging, whinging and whinging.
Dee @ 4216
I encountered Costello and the 2 Kroger brothers (Michael & Andrew) at uni and thought that is where they met. At that time MK was clearly identified with the Libs, AK was identified with the ALP club & Costello was all things to all men.
Diog @ 4217
Agree 100%
STOP THE AGREEING !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finns @ 4218
Great idea! Forget about such strange ideas as disaster planning, firefighting, risk mitigation… how quaint!
Just let the fire rip and forget all about it later.
Hey, now that really would save a bucket of money!
And that mourning and grief… get over it folks.
I’ve been thinking all week that Gillard is going to need to define herself somehow in terms of foreign policy. It seems that climate change is the answer (albeit with the help of a Republican victory at the mid term elections).
Of course this could kill two birds with one stone i.e if we’re seen to be pushing the reluctant USA towards a climate change policy, it could have a positive impact domestically.
Listening to Joe Hockey in Parliament. I can’t figure out what the heck he is trying to achieve?
Diogs,
Desperately plea bargaining I see.
Rod Hagen
Again you make salient points. I wish there were more wise people about 🙂
bemused, no wonder you keep agreeing with Diog, you are both the biggest whinger on PB 😛
[Listening to Joe Hockey in Parliament. I can’t figure out what the heck he is trying to achieve?]
Relevance?
[Can anyone tell me about Kroger pre-uni, best friend of Costello days?]
Only could find this, about his uni days with Costello:
[… Costello then became a lawyer, married into Liberal Party royalty (his father-in-law is Peter Coleman, a former NSW Liberal leader and federal MP) and spent the rest of the 1980s playing political games as he and Kroger terrorised the Liberals’ so-called “wet” faction.]
The Age, 6 May 2007
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/a-masters-stroke/2007/05/05/1177788462755.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
[… Costello had sharpened his political teeth in the cut and thrust of university debate. So effective was his group, including future Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Kroger, that it transformed Monash into the first overtly right wing campus in Australia.]
Workers Online, February 2006
http://workers.labor.net.au/features/200602/b_tradeunion_costello.html
confessions
Good one! 🙂
Finns @ 4227
We obviously have a different idea of what constitutes whinging.
[STOP THE AGREEING !!!!!!!!!!!!!]
Agreed.
[We obviously have a different idea of what constitutes whinging.]
bemused, this is whinging!!!!!
Where does Helen Kroger fit into the Kroger family tree?
Finns @ 4233
If that was whinging I presume you were the whinger.
I must say that my appreciation of the reach of PB has been greatly enhanced 😉
Confessions @ 4234
Not sure where she got into the picture but she married Michael.
They have subsequently divorced but appear to remain in a political union I nothing else.
[That doesn’t mean that a better response wouldn’t have saved some on the 173 lives, which seems to be what people are saying.]
What today might be thought of as a “better response” might have actually killed many more, Diog. An unlucky attempt at town evacuation or sending extra units into a particular fire area in an attempt to control the uncontrollable might just as easily have killed more rather than less. We will never know.
As I’ve said , I am not saying that things gleaned from the inquiries after the major fires are of no value. In this case, for example, it is clear that communications were not as good as they could or should have been. Knowing what was happening and where was almost impossible on the day unless you were actually there experiencing it and this clearly posed problems for emergency service people (and rendered the value of “centralised command” pretty insignificant in reality).
Whether better communications with the general population would have saved lives or not is another matter. More people might have panicked or taken actions that would ultimately have placed them in greater danger if they had known what was happening, and died as a result. Others might have been saved through fore-knowledge.
We learned (or re-learned) lessons about individual behaviour that, if you are lucky, can make a difference. Don’t jump in the bath in a room with only one exit while the fire front passes if your house is burning down for one! Don’t use plastic gas pipes and leave the gas bottles turned on is another! Don’t presume you are safe because the nearest reported fire is twenty kilometres away is a third. Don’t assume that there will be a fire engine there to save you if you stay on a serious fire day is a fourth. We’d have to have one under every car port on those sorts of days!
There are a host of other such things, of course, and they will make a difference for some of those who heed them , if they are lucky. No doubt similar pieces of knowledge, at an individual level, saved many even on Black Saturday. No doubt many others died despite taking heed of them, though. Taken in toto they will probably save some lives in lesser fire situations, and that is probably about as much as we can really hope for, given the capriciousness of such situations.
ROFL @ Finns
What would the good Sun Worshipping folk make of this !!!
Dear Melissa Parke,
Mount Merapi is not the most dangerous volcano in Indonesia. It is just a small pimple that refuses to go away.
The biggies are Krakatau and Tomboro. The later is due, when it does you will feel it.
Aaahh
The time is now 2 o’clock and time for question without notice 😉
Rod Hagen @ 4237
I am disappointed that you appear to counsel fatalism. Don’t do anything we might make it worse!
[What would the good Sun Worshipping folk make of this !!!]
Paulj, There is more:
Blame Diog, he was whinging too much.
bemused:
Ta. I thought she might be a sister, or sister-in-law.
Julia just hammering Tones over 3 word slogans.
What about forced evacuations?
In NSW it is the police who have the power not the fire services. (In consultation with us) As the police have heaps of other jobs to do it is not effective unless it is in a close urban situation. Then what if they refuse or hide, which happens regularly? The cops haven’t a lot of time to play around, they generally move on to the next and hope to catch up later.
Community education is what we are doing a lot of at the moment and hoping the message gets across for every home to have fire; stay or go plans to suit various situations that arises.
Confessions
What’s the interest? Doing a Kroger family tree? Rogues gallery?
STOP, STOP STOP!!!!
Sock it to him Jules.
Julia accuses Rabbott of behaving like a 2yr-old having a tantrum after not winning election, WOO-HOO. Go Jules!!!!
Abbott’s question ended, “…above all else stop the boats”.
STOP THE “STOPS”!!!
Jules on Abbott:
“A man whose entire philosophy can be reduced to a few 3 word slogans”