With the fortnightly cycles of Newspoll and Morgan coinciding, and other pollsters having gone a bit quiet lately, the polling calendar has fallen into a pattern of on weeks and off weeks. This one was an “off”, with only the regular Essential Research to relieve the monotony. The poll may have recorded a move to Labor on two-party preferred, but there wasn’t much behind it so far as the primary vote numbers were concerned. This makes for the dullest week ever on BludgerTrack, on which the biggest change is an increase in the Greens vote by all of 0.2%. That said, the Greens result is of genuine interest, in that the party has held on to its 1.4% lift from last week, leaving little room for doubt that the bipartisan consensus on Iraq has been to its advantage. This week’s seat projection is unchanged on last week, but there’s at least a little something happening under the surface here, with Labor up a seat in Western Australia and down one in Victoria. There were no new results this week for the leadership ratings.
Reachtel Fed poll TPP ALP 51(0) LNP 49(0) Primaries LNP 41.6 ALP 37.4 GRN 10.5 PUP 5.3 OTH 5.2
Last one was on 21 August
https://www.reachtel.com.au/blog/7-news-national-poll-18september2014
[7 News – National Poll – 18 September 2014
ReachTEL conducted a survey of 3,470 residents across Australia during the evening of 18th September 2014.]
[Once again, the Australian media has been completely bluffed by national security theatre.
What the Prime Minister and the various police chiefs – even George Brandis – have said may be proven. They haven’t been proven yet and their words are worth nothing. Nothing. All this would have much more credibility coming from a judge after fair and extensive trials, even with the law’s palaver.
No government is entitled to be taken at its word, especially this one. A policeman’s finding is the start of a trial, not the end.]
http://andrewelder.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/national-security-theatre.html?spref=tw
New thread.
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Fran Barlow
Fran, I can sympathise with your desire to make the CF generators wear the costs of closure.
However, there are other ways of looking at this.
From the viewpoint of consumers of electricity, some of their spending is directed towards shifting the proportion of energy derived from renewable sources. This is true whether the cash is used to close obsolete CF plant or buy energy from RE generators. So this is value-neutral from the viewpoint of the consumer $.
Of course, when the cash buys closure of plants, it buys a near-on permanent shift in the renewable/non-renewable ratio. So there is possibly a bigger shift available from each $ spent on consumption. That can’t be bad.
Here we’re talking about the buyout of externally-accruing costs, as you’re doubtless well aware. There are lots of similar instances. They include the fishing and forestry industries, agriculture and irrigated horticulture as well as transport and communications. Cash is used to enable the liquidation and exit of capital from obsolete, polluting or uneconomic industries and to prompt the transfer of mis-allocated resources to new ones. The same sort of rationale has applied following the reduction in tariff protection and other kinds of industry assistance.
In these cases, the moral standing of the recipients is seldom the issue, though it certainly could be made into one. The issue is always to shift behaviour, and to impel mobility of capital and other resources away from activities that carry high negative external costs.
These generate public goods/benefits in themselves. But they also have other advantages. In particular, it should be relatively easy to quantify the relevant opportunity costs of failing to act. This means we can focus on objective outcomes – what we get for each $ spent or each $ foregone.
In the case of the RET, we can see very clearly what each $ spent on electricity will buy in terms of emissions reductions. At the very least, this means we can allocate our spending to places where it will achieve the greatest effect, at the best discount and at the earliest time.