As you can see in the post below this one, the Courier-Mail yesterday had a YouGov Galaxy state poll for Queensland that found both major parties stranded in the mid-thirties on the primary vote. State results from this series are usually followed a day or two later by federal ones, but no sign of that to this point. If it’s Queensland state politics reading you’re after, I can offer my guide to the Currumbin by-election, to be held on March 29. Other than that, there’s the following news on how various parliamentary vacancies around the place will be or might be filled:
• Noel Towell of The Age reports two former state MPs who fell victim to the Greens’ weak showing at the November 2018 state election are “potentially strong contenders” to take Richard Di Natale’s Senate seat when he leaves parliament, which will be determined by a vote of party members. These are Lidia Thorpe, who won the Northcote by-election from Labor in June 2018, and Huong Truong, who filled Colleen Hartland’s vacancy in the Western Metropolitan upper house seat in February 2018. The party’s four current state MPs have all ruled themselves out. Others said to be potential starters include Brian Walters, a barrister and former Liberty Victoria president, and Dinesh Mathew, a television actor who ran in the state seat of Caulfield in 2018.
• Former Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman’s seat in parliament will be filled by Nic Street, following a preference countback of the votes Hodgman received in the seat of Franklin at the March 2018 election. This essentially amounted to a race between Street and the other Liberal who nominated for the recount, Simon Duffy. Given Street was only very narrowly unsuccessful when he ran as an incumbent at the election, being squeezed out for the last of the five seats by the Greens, it was little surprise that he easily won the countback with 8219 out of 11,863 (70.5%). This is the second time Street has made it to parliament on a countback, the first being in February 2016 on the retirement of Paul Harriss.
• The Age reports Mary Wooldridge’s vacancy in the Victorian Legislative Council is likely to be filled either by Emanuele Cicchiello, former Knox mayor and deputy principal at Lighthouse Christian College, or Asher Judah, who ran unsuccessfully in Bentleigh in 2018. Party sources are quoted expressing surprise that only four people have nominated, with the only woman being Maroondah councillor Nora Lamont, reportedly a long shot. Also in the field is Maxwell Gratton, chief executive of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
Cud Chewer
A sneakier way could be to set a level of CO2 permitted to be emitted per MWh .
So what’s today’s new sports pork story?
JM
Thanks for link to the Great Filter. Interesting stuff.
I suggest that we can add to the following list of the Great Filter steps:
10. All intelligent life gets caught in an infinite but contracting Whorl of Bludger.
Bludger Paradox #34
The coronavirus has in a couple of months delivered more CO2 emissions cuts than 30 years of the Greens Party.
poroti,
Smoking etc were all profit making enterprises or increased the profit margins for big business. That is why the market embraced them.
Coal, whether mining or power stations, will over the next twenty years continue to decline as profit declines due to the increasing low cost competition from renewerables.
The market is driven by profit and coal be be overtaken by renewerables.
It is just a simple example of economic evolution. Just like Kodak.
Boerwar
Teh Filter is interesting but lost all credibility with this 😆 “The idea was first proposed ….’The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?”, written by economist Robin Hanson. </blockquote
Di Natale resigned as Greens leader and is leaving Parliament to “spend more time with his family”. Bandt is becoming Greens leader because “family inspired him to seek Greens leadership”. The implication is that Bandt thinks Di Natale has been a failure in tackling climate change.
Paul Kelly reflects on our state as a nation…
https://youtu.be/-hY1w_c7nO4
CC
Wow, superiority, arrogance and condescension writ large. I never refer to other people in those terms, or think of them as such, as it is hardly going to bring people on board with whatever you are trying to achieve.
To use your disrespectful characterisation, I would speculate there are a lot of “dumbfucks” in every community in every location throughout Australia.
If Labor can not prosecute a positive vision for the future, every day, all day, then we are indeed screwed.
citizen @ #457 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 6:45 pm
Has anyone interviewed RDN’s family
p
LOL
Applying the universal rule of the chances of an economist being right about something:
50% chance of there being something in it?
I wouldn’t put it as harshly as “Fuck off back to China”, but the reality is that:
● the coronavirus we are dealing with at present DID originate in China,
● as a result of an illicit but thriving trade in wild animals that is sanctioned at least unofficially by officialdom there,
● the vast majority of those affected are Chinese,
● and literally thousands of Chinese travelled at their special time of Lunar New year, thus spreading the disease to most other parts of the world.
Unless we are going to ask each individual Chinese person to wear a label stating whether they are from Wuhan, and have travelled from there recently to be standing next to us in queues, shops, hotels or on public transport, it’s probably safer to assume that the Chinese person standing next to you could be carrying the disease… until we at least know more about Wuhan coronavirus and how it is spread.
The same would apply if the disease was called “Sydney coronavirus” because it had originated in the wild animal markets of Sydney and our government had covered up the extent of the outbreak (indeed persecuting whistleblowers) before allowing planeload after planeload of Australians to travel all over the world for New Year’s celebrations. Who could complain about racism against Australians – or any westerners – in these circumstances? But we DON’T have wild animal markets, NO virus originated here, and the government DID NOT cover anything up at all.
Prudent measures taken against infection are not necessarily racism, or racist in origin, no matter how it feels to the person in question.
I was resident in a Pyrmont hotel near Sydney’s Chinatown at exactly the time thousands of Chinese tourists poured into Sydney, unfiltered,for Lunar New Year, many of them in my hotel. Until the 2 week incubation period was up, I’ll admit I was quite nervous.
Is that racist, or a prudent concern?
The footage shown on Insiders today during the Talking Pictures with Mike Bower’s segment and the comments of his guest and himself about RDN’s departure for family reasons, indicates the heartfelt relief felt by RDNS and his family. RDN reason for his leaving has generally been seen as genuine as reported by generally cynical journalists.
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/insiders
Mavis Davis
Greenies drive cars powered by batteries
Tradies use cordless tools powered by batteries
Cud Chewer’s banging in interminably* about batteries
Spot the comment element – there’s your miracle
*Obscure EE pun…
If you believe the line that “we don’t need to do anything, the market will do it all for us” then I have some sure-fire financial investments you may be interested in
_________________________________
At the moment coal only survives because of Government intervention that gives it a leg up. If the market were genuinely left to its own devices, other than to ensure that big players do not suppress smaller and more innovative players through market power, we would not have the problems we are having now.
He most certainly has. The only thing is that Bandt hasn’t done any better.
doyley
As it happens I worked for Kodak. It’s demise was driven by human stupidity and greed . Kodak made the original digital camera, they had the patents for much of the key technology. As early as 1998 the local boss cocky was telling us digital was the future and film would be gorn by early 2000s . What went wrong ? Head office went for milking the rivers of gold that still flowed from film . Helped with the bonuses 🙁
So now a quote from the Kodak guy who made the first digital camera in 1975 ,Mr Stephen Sasson ‘
Pegasus @ #459 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 6:47 pm
I don’t think CC was expressing a personal view. The “” are a bit of a giveaway!
I guess Adam Bandt being a parliamentarian during the Gillard-Green accord when the carbon price was introduced and resulted in a decrease in emissions, could be counted a failure by someone who is shy about trumpeting its success and the Greens’ role in its implementation.
Bellweather
I saw the quote marks. He has said as much in many of his comments to date.
On Wind Turbines, Barnaby Joyce and Bob Brown, Same Same.
Pegasus (quoting someone apparently called James Bradley)
– The Royal Navy transitioned away from coal about a century ago.
– Train travel transtioned away from coal about 50 years ago.
The author of the section quoted is like a teenage boy who thinks he’s the first to discover masturbation, and part of the problem.
Stop with the holier than thou stuff Pegasus – you are living up to a stereotype
Did anyone see the Project?
Anyone else spot the contradiction in Pegasus’ “dumbfuck” self sanctification?
rhwombat,
There’s a story in the NYT today that China have been refusing WHO and CDC expert teams who have offered to go to Wuhan and help because the leadership of China don’t want to be seen as needing outside help!
What fools!
Though the WHO team might be allowed to go to Wuhan in a couple of weeks.
Poroti
You seem to be allowing your anti-market bias to miss the market isn’t backing coal. There might be a few coal mining supporters but the overall market is not and hasn’t for sometime. Black Rock was not acting in isolation because renewables are now cheaper than coal and its only time before the battery technology overcomes the reliability issues.
It is government policy that is keeping coal alive.
lol As I said the other day, PB will become as feral as it was pre-2010.
Did I hear ‘market’?
Tesla shares are over $800.
Each.
C@t:
I was reading earlier that Xi has decided to lay low to avoid any public backlash.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/08/world/asia/xi-coronavirus-china.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
Fulvio S,
I did but I couldn’t be bothered pointing it out. All you get for your trouble is more sanctimony with a heaping of smarm and snark. 🙂
The only outstanding feral today has been Pegasus in her defence of the mighty, awe inspiring and totally politically impotent Bandt.
The cruel trick inherent in buying an EV is that, if it was built in China, India and some other states, it embeds a shedload of coal-fired CO2 emissions.
Which is why Australian Greens have pledged themselves not to have a car at all, at all.
It is the climate emergency, stupid!
Having just watched the Marles’ interview, the part I had a problem with his his responses around the sports rorts.
It seems, from them, that the problem was the level of Ministerial intervention not the intervention itself.
This, to me, misses the point completely, which Spears then highlighted.
Fess,
Xi is getting the backlash anyway, so I think that is why the change in behavior. He probably thought China could solve nCoV19 all by itself and thus prove its superiority in this field as well.
Yeah nah. Xi Xinping,meet reality. 🙂
Boerwar @ #482 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 4:20 pm
That’s one reason why coal is still important as it facilitates the building of the technologies that will make it redundant.
Mexicanbeemer
Anti market bias ? How about healthy skepticism rather than worshiping at the Church of the Immaculate Market ?
Plus he’s sidelined all his rivals so really there’s nobody left to blame when things turn to shit. The trouble with a ruling dictatorship when you’re it!
poroti
Yes, I thought about that one, but its a bit technical. Whereas simply insisting on CCS is a far more direct wedge and leads to a better outcome in terms of how the media handle it, I think.
Poroit
There is nothing wrong with questioning the market because that is what the best investors do but the market has been pricing renewables as the future for sometime.
A better way to deal with embedded CO2 is to produce hydrogen based steel here in Australia and then ship that to where its used in China etc.
We have the advantage in having near limitless cheap renewable resources.
C@tmomma @ #336 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 7:13 pm
From a Chinese and global scientific perspective, neither WHO or the US CDC have much to offer in China at present. This is about the biotech, and the Chinese do not need us. They will develop, and probably control (though not exclusively), most of the early critical developments for control from detection to vaccines.
I suspect that the nCoV pandemic will be the major catalytic event of the Chinese century. We priviledged laowai should start consider our unexamined prejudices and realise how pathetic and inconsequential they are in a global perspective.
I read an article (and as usual cannot find it now) saying the Chinese media were tying themselves in knots trying to censor information against a public clamour to know what is happening. Now there is a danger for Xi and the ruling elite that the whole thing is becoming beyond their control.
One thing that has been demonstrated several times is that ordinary Chinese citizens are not slow to voice their opinions on social media despite a regime of censorship.
Link to PVO 10 piece on another Lib … Lab rought
https://twitter.com/theprojecttv/status/1226417710877331456?s=20
lizzie:
[‘Someone who’s a member of Labor can correct me, but wouldn’t it be a mistake for Marles to state a new policy without it being approved by the Party, or at least by Albanese? Is he being blamed for something that isn’t his fault?’]
That’s precisely the problem for Labor: it hasn’t articulated an unequivocal policy. On such a crucial issue, one would think it would; Marles is as thick as a brick. After viewing him on “Insiders”, I think I might turn Tory, surely knowing that Speers would not give him a free-kick. By the way, I’m not a member of the Labor Party, but I’m a supporter; but it’s waning in the wake Marles’ eff-up.
This is getting out of hand….
FLOOD EVACUATION ORDER – Narrabeen Lagoon
Narrabeen Residents: Evacuate by 10:30pm NSW SES is directing people within #Narrabeen Lagoon to evacuate the high danger area using Pittwater Road or Ocean Street.
Continue reading ses.nsw.gov.au
You’ve missed the point yet again Pegasus.
I don’t particularly care where you live. You still live in a Green bubble in terms of your assumptions about voters. You simply have it wrong in thinking that Labor will win an election based on adopting the Green’s policy of “now new coal fired power stations”. And note, I have no problem with the Greens having this policy and having people vote for it. I’d like more people to do so. Fact is, more people won’t.
I describe voters as I see fit here. Doesn’t mean I don’t smile and talk about the footy with these people in person. But make no mistake, many of these people are, frankly, wrong about many basic factual issues. They’re the antithesis of people who would vote for “no new coal fired power stations”. These people are going to vote for whoever can most believably talk about jobs. And this isn’t just small town folk, this is lots of people in the outer-urban electorates. These people aren’t interested in “no new coal fired power either”. At least not enough to make a difference. Again, its called projection.
Boerwar @ #453 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 5:08 pm
🙂
C@tmomma @ #471 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 5:35 pm
🙂
citizen @ #493 Sunday, February 9th, 2020 – 7:45 pm
Yeah. Politicians have little control over, or relevance for, biological reality in China too, but by all means cling to your illusions of agency and relevance in the coming world.
Mexicanbeemer
The market told the Kodak boss cockies sticking with film was good as the profits were great so share prices and bonuses were super dooper. Shame about what it meant for long term survival of the. Which when it comes to Global Warming is what it is about, long term survival. Good that the holy “market” has already factored in the demise of coal though………………..too late ?
A real shame about Kodak carking it though. They were a pretty ‘bolshie” corporation for a US of A one. As per Mr Eastman’s wishes the company believed workers should share in the profits and they had a damned generous company pension scheme on top of the normal super. Man how I wish I was still with them 🙁