Morrow putting the boot into Rudd and other enjoyable pieces of political theatre

"The Chasers War On Everything" co-founder Julian Morrow during his 2009 Andrew Olle Media Lecture televised by Auntie last Sunday night:

"At this point I want to take a gratuitous swipe at the Prime Minister. And I want to make very clear, I'm going out of my way to do this as an act of petty personal revenge because he went out of his way to criticise us, especially as he hadn't seen it. To me Kevin Rudd's enthusiasm for buying in on any cultural controversy - from Bill Henson to The Chaser to Gordon Ramsay - is a bit unseemly, and at risk of sounding old-fashioned, not very Prime Ministerial. Frankly, I was stunned a few weeks ago that Mr Rudd wasn't tweeting alternative names for Vegemite's iSnack2.0, or phoning Indonesia to see if as well as those poor Sri Lankans, they'll also give asylum to the poor bastard who came up with the one name in Australia less popular than "Kyle Sandilands".

Kevin Rudd clearly fancies himself as an intellectual leader of this country. But being a true intellectual leader means more than tossing off the odd economics essay for The Monthly between nanosleeps on your weekend off. It means setting the tone for the national discourse and resisting, rather than inciting, hysteria."

Former PM John Howard also had this very nasty habit of running off at the mouth on anything and everything in the hope of scoring brownie points with voters, but it's still good to see Rudders being called on this.

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Otherwise Kevin Rudd had a good week himself, socking it to climate change sceptics and deniers everywhere during an address to the Lowy Institute (but specially to homegrown opposition):

"As we approach the Copenhagen conference these groups of climate change deniers face a moment of truth, and the truth is this: we will need to work much harder to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because these advocates of inaction are holding back domestic commitments, and are in turn holding back global commitments on climate change.
It is time to be totally blunt about the agenda of the climate change skeptics in all their colours – some more sophisticated than others.
It is to destroy the CPRS at home, and it is to destroy agreed global action on climate change abroad, and our children’s fate – and our grandchildren’s fate – will lie entirely with them.
It’s time to remove any polite veneer from this debate. The stakes are that high.
The first category of those opposed to action is the vocal group of conservatives who do not accept the scientific consensus. This group believes the science is inconclusive and does not provide an evidentiary basis for anthropogenic climate change.
In Australia, before the 2007 election, this group was thought to be relatively small. There appeared – for a time – to be bipartisan consensus on the need for action on climate change. In recent times, this bipartisan support has frayed.
As one Liberal Member of Parliament said to Phil Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald last year:
“[at the last election we supported an ETS because] we were staring at an electoral abyss. We had to pretend we cared.”
(SMH, 28 JULY 2008)
More recently that pretence has been increasingly cast aside. Would-be Liberal leader Tony Abbott said in July this year that “the science … is contentious to say the least”.(27 July 2009)
Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi said:
“I remain unconvinced about the need for an ETS given that carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth”.
Liberal Senator Alan Eggleston said:
“Levels of carbon dioxide have risen in the world, but whether or not this is the sole cause or just a contributor to climate change is, I think, unanswered.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)
Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin said this year:
“CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant… This whole extraordinary scheme is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming.”
(11 AUGUST 2009)
Alternative Liberal leader Joe Hockey – who knows better – has been drawn into the same sort of doublespeak, remarking on the Today Show in August:
“Look, climate change is real Karl, you know whether it is made by human beings or not that is open to dispute.”
(12 AUGUST 2009)
Even the leader of the Opposition, once Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has flirted with this doublespeak, telling Alan Jones on 2GB: “I think most people have at least some doubts about the science.”
(19 JUNE 2009)
The tentacles of the climate change skeptics reach deep into the ranks of the Liberal Party, and once you add the National Party it’s plain the skeptics and the deniers are a major force."

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Leader of the Libs Malcolm Turnbull gave a few people a good belly laugh last week when (with fingers crossed behind his back) he repeatedly fronted the microphones saying that he didn't want to do a running commentary, make the task harder for, or give off-the-cuff advice to the Prime Minister in relation to the possible use of force to remove asylum seekers on board the Ocean Viking. Of course making life difficult is the Opposition's raison d'être and something Truffles has been doing with gusto ever since these asylum seekers first propped and bucked.

Graphology is a load of crap

... however, if the handwriting on a prescription is illegible, you have a good doctor, and if your job applicant's writing is uneven and they overuse phrases like "I really love you", they are drunk.

A reader wrote to Jim Bright (professor of career education and development at ANU) who writes a column in My Career in Saturday editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and asked, "Do you see how it (graphology) forms a useful tool in recruitment? Would you professionally agree it may have a place in the industry?"

Bright's reply was a ripper.

Bright noted that:

* on the British Institute of Graphologists' website, it is noted that "large writing can mean almost anything connected with greatness."

* according to a BBC report in 2005, about 3000 businesses in Britain use graphology in their recruitment processes.

* in one well-known example, graphologists made a series of confident interpretations about "Tony Blair's writing", only to later discover it was Bill Clinton's.

The British Psychological Society conducted a thorough review of the ability of graphology (and other techniques) to determine personality. It concluded it had "zero validity".

One absurd response to this finding was that graphology's French heritage might have led to a British bias. Well, bad news, the latest peer-reviewed study to damn graphology, which was conducted last year, was French.

The reader claims graphology may not predict intelligence but might be useful in predicting emotional performance.

Bright's conclusion: There is no evidence to support this contention. There is a caveat, however. If the handwriting on a prescription is illegible, you have a good doctor, and if your job applicant's writing is uneven and they overuse phrases like "I really love you", they are drunk. Other than that, all the reliable peer-reviewed evidence concludes that graphology is, to put it technically, a load of crap. Click: Boom. Boom.

Source: My Career, SMH, November 7-8, 2009

Run For A Safe Climate passing through Byron Bay and Lismore on 11 & 12 November 2009

Runners taking part in Run For A Safe Climate will be passing through Byron Bay and Lismore on 11 and 12 November 2009 respectively.
Show you care about these emergency workers putting their feet where their hearts are and give a big wave if you see them passing down our roads on the North Coast leg of this 6,000km run.

What is Run for a Safe Climate?
- 6,000km run from Cooktown to Melbourne to highlight the growing threat of global warming to the social, economic and ecological health of our country.
- The route will take runners through capital cities, regional centres and rural towns, engaging with all levels of these communities.
- The runners will meet leading scientists tracking a range of increasingly dangerous and destructive impacts of global warming affecting Australiaʼ s communities, water and food security, coastal settlements and world famous ecological icons.
- The run will highlight energy resources and technologies – including geothermal, biomass, solar thermal, wind and smart grid technologies – which can be harnessed to hasten the move to a clean-energy economy, and emerging techniques that can be deployed to safely sequester carbon from the atmosphere.

Who is participating in the run?
- The team includes 25 Australian emergency service workers including serving police, a nurse, firefighters, paramedics and CFA volunteers.
- Emergency workers are the ʻfirst respondersʼ to extreme weather events and our first line of defence in dealing with global warming.
- All runners are donating a month of their annual leave to participate in this project. They are donating their time, and are receiving no financial benefit through their participation in the Run for a Safe Climate.

When?
- Runs from Monday 2 November 2009 until Sunday 29 November 2009.

Where?
- The Run starts in Cooktown and follows the coast through Cairns, Townsville, Brisbane, Sydney, and Canberra to Albury on the Victoria/NSW border.
- It will then follow the Murray River west to Mildura, then on to Adelaide and the Coorong.
- The final leg to Melbourne is via Apollo Bay, Ballarat, Kilmore and the towns most affected by last summerʼ s devastating fires, to finish with a community run along the last two kilometres of the run at St Kilda beach.

Follow on www.twitter.com/Run4SafeClimate

Become a Facebook fan of ʻRun for a Safe Climateʼ

Follow the blog and news on http://www.runforasafeclimate.org/

The vexed question of holding political office in two tiers of government raises its head once again

Sometimes it is hard to tell if candidates for political office are merely doing the bidding of their ego-inflated party bosses or are just old-fashioned paternalistic control freaks themselves.

This question is likely to be one faced by voters in the Richmond electorate sometime in 2010-11 if a report in the Tweed Heads Daily News is accurate:

TWEED Shire councillor and former mayor Joan van Lieshout faces no impediment to remaining a councillor if she is elected to Federal Parliament, according to senior council staff.

Cr van Lieshout confirmed earlier this week she would nominate as a Liberal party candidate for the Federal seat of Richmond, challenging sitting Labor Member and Minister for Ageing Justine Elliot.

Cr van Lieshout said she intended to stay on as a councillor even if elected, raising questions from some readers if that was legally possible.

According to the council's Technology and Corporate Services director Troy Green "on the face of it, there is nothing in the Local Government Act that precludes a councillor from being a Federal member".

"Several councillors throughout the country hold positions in local and state government, so there are certainly precedents."

According to a report compiled by political researcher Dr Ian Holland while State and Federal public servants are not eligible to stand for Parliament "no- one is sure whether local councillors are affected".