The only time mention of NSW Planning Minister Sartor is funny

Cartoon found at NSROC Hands off our Councils

Joke found while browsing the online newspapers.

Q: How many votes could Frank Sartor muster in a leadership coup?

A: If you count Frank, Frank and then Frank, that would be one.

Which rather sums up how many in the Northern Rivers think of the Minister for Overdevelopment.

Just how average are you?

SHOPPERS too lazy to walk to the supermarket add nearly 1.9m tonnes to our greenhouse gas emissions each year, a survey has found.

A national audit into everyday shopping habits by online search directory TrueLocal (owned by the publisher of the Herald Sun) also found shoppers who travelled outside their local area to make their purchases were robbing local businesses of up to $92 billion a year in revenue....
The study revealed that over 12 months, the average Australian made more than 43 trips, travelling up to 477km outside of their local area and spending more than $7000. Collectively, this generated 7.3 billion kilometres of extra travel, the study found.
So said reporter Chelsea Mes at News.com.au yesterday.

According to TravelSmart 40 percent of all car trips are less than two km, and 66 per cent of all car trips are less than five km in Melbourne.
While in Brisbane an individual makes an average 835 car trips per year as a driver and/or passenger.
By comparison in the United States Americans average 9.7 trips per day per household or over 3,500 trips each year and in the U.K. it appears that each person makes over 1,000 car trips annually.

Thankfully, on the NSW North Coast, there are many who either 'let their fingers to do the walking' or make most of their trips to the shops on foot.
As a nation we appear to be doing a bit more walking than the two countires we usually compare ourselves with, however there are obviously not enough of us regularly leaving the car behind or the Australian average number of trips would be lower.

Are you doing your bit for the climate?

Update on U.S. numbers here.

Nelson takes 20 steps back, but the troops refuse to follow

Leader of the Federal Opposition, Brendan Nelson, has briskly taken 20 steps back (one for each of the last twenty years) when announcing his 'new' climate change policy.

Yesterday the Herald Sun reported:

"BRENDAN Nelson has foreshadowed a tougher line on emissions trading that hinges on action by big polluters including China and India.
Announcing the policy shift, Dr Nelson said Australia must move ahead with an emissions trading scheme, but insisted that it "must be informed by what the major emitters throughout the world choose to do". He said Australia must "methodically and responsibly" implement its scheme with a price on carbon. "Australia must act with the rest of the world, but not be so far in front of the major emitters that we risk Australian jobs and we don't do anything for our environment," he said this afternoon. Coalition sources told The Australian Online earlier that hardliners in the shadow ministry were claiming a victory after today's meeting and claim the "big shift" was from frontbenchers Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt."

However, it seems the troops are still wedded to Howard's tardy timetable for an emissions trading scheme and didn't take to Nelson's even tardier conditional scheme.

In another ratchet to leadership tensions, the Libs are once more floating the idea of nuclear power.
Is Deputy Leader Julie Bishop deliberately seeking to undermine Nelson's earlier anti-nuclear stance or is this an issue she just doesn't want to let go of.
Either way the Opposition has absolutely no way of pushing such an unpopular idea onto the Australian people.

Who'd have thought that those right-wing goose steppers who created fear when in government would turn out to be as amusing as a barrel of monkeys once in opposition.

Is this the shape of things to come if 'hie heidyin' Iemma gets his way over privatisation of NSW electricity supplies?

With Morris Iemma due to meet with the ALP administrative committee next week, after previously attempting to smooze State President Bernie Riordan, I would like to remind Iemma, Costa, Sussex Street and the Coalition Opposition that voters are still watching their manoeuvres.

Thus far, none of those pushing for the sale of NSW power assets (or those Nationals currently pretending to oppose the idea) have been able to satisfy that the following will not come to pass.

Dozens of governments have embarked on the pathway to electricity deregulation and privatisation since the mid-1990s. It has become the accepted wisdom amongst governments and opinion leaders despite the consequent price rises and disasters that have followed in its wake: the series of blackouts that have been experienced from California to Buenos Aires to Auckland; the government bailouts of electricity companies that have been necessary in California and Britain; the need for electricity rationing in Brazil; and the fact that it has become too expensive for millions of people from India to South Africa.

Electricity deregulation and privatisation is referred to as ‘liberalisation’ by its advocates who use the term to disguise what is in essence a massive shift of ownership and control of electricity from public to private hands, in the name of economic efficiency and in the cause of private profits. ‘Liberalisation’ has meant that maintenance teams that were once fully staffed have been dramatically cut leading to frequent equipment failures. It has meant that privately owned electricity conglomerates are able to blackmail governments into bailouts and high prices with threats of blackouts. And it has meant that the planning function of electricity authorities that once ensured adequate generating reserves for times of peak demand, and kept infrastructure up to date in developed countries, have been abandoned to market forces. Because of market forces electricity prices are based, not on the cost of production, but on how desperately consumers want electricity and this has led to sky-rocketing prices whenever private companies have been able to limit supply in times of high demand.

The privatisation of electricity is not something that citizens have demanded nor wanted. In general, there has been very little public participation in electricity reform decisions and as the consequences are observed, there have been many bitter protests against electricity privatisation.
[From Sharon Beder,'Critique of the Global Project to Privatize and Marketize Energy', June 2005, pp. 177-185]