Political malcontent Luke Hartsuyker MP gets his long weekend back

The Rudd Government announced yesterday that it was abandoning its newly scheduled Friday sittings of the House of Reps, pointing to the Coalition's disruptive behaviour which twice suspended the House on the only Friday it sat so far this year.

 

I'm quite sure that Nationals Member for Cowper, Luke Hartsuyker thought he was being rather smart as he followed the Coalition mob, defied the Deputy-Speaker and forced that final suspension.

 

What he was of course was very transparent. Aside from an obvious chance to grab a national headline, Canberra gossip has it that our Luke was really showing just how miffed he was at the thought of losing his chance to return home early each week for the traditional pollies' long weekend.

 

Now he and his friends have had their way (or their bluff called), I expect that this wilful pollie will turn up in the local media hypocritically bewailing the loss of a sitting day.

Don't bother to keep clacking your clogs on the issue, Luke mate - few will believe you.

I certainly don't and neither it seems does the ABC's Virginia Trioli.

Japan accused of vote buying ahead of International Whaling Commission meeting in London

Image taken from The Guardian.

There appears to be little sympathy in the international media for Japan's stand on so-called 'scientific' whaling.

In the UK The Guardian ran this piece.

"Australia will today call on Japan to end its controversial whale hunts in the Antarctic at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in London, as condemnation mounts over Tokyo's attempts to build a pro-whaling majority ahead of the commission's main conference this summer.

Japanese delegates, meanwhile, are expected to push for international action against conservation groups attempting to disrupt the annual culls.

Japan was accused of vote buying after it hosted a seminar this week on the sustainable use of whales that was attended by 12 African and Asian countries - including landlocked Laos - that have recently joined the IWC or are considering doing so.

By bringing in sympathetic new members, it hopes to challenge the 1986 ban on commercial whaling.

Despite the ban, Japan continues to hunt whales every winter to collect scientific data it says is necessary to understand the mammals' migratory and other habits.

This season the fleet had planned to slaughter a record 935 minke and 50 endangered fin whales, but the slaughter has been hampered by confrontations with activists Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace.

Critics said Japan used the Tokyo seminar to offer aid packages to countries that had little or no history of whaling in return for their support.

"Once again it demonstrates the clear link between fisheries aid and support for whaling - a policy which Japan has been following since 1994," Greenpeace said.

The chances of overturning the moratorium in the near future are virtually nil, however. Anti-whaling member of the IWC, including Britain, outnumber Japan and its allies, and a three-quarters majority would be required to lift the ban.

Though Japan denied vote buying, an insider told the Guardian that there was a "likelihood that in the near future, at least one of the countries taking part [in the seminar] could find itself in receipt of a quantity of cash.---"

Meanwhile the Japanese media continue to stress attacks on the whaling fleet by the US-based Sea Shepherd organisation and comment on what portrayed as Australia's role in these protests.

"If the perpetrators can be identified, the Japanese government will demand that countries where they have citizenship hand them over to Japan. But Japan has extradition treaties only with the United States and South Korea.

In addition, many Sea Shepherd members are Australian nationals. As antiwhaling sentiment is strong in Australia, it is uncertain to what extent the Australian government will cooperate with the investigation."

The Daily Yomiuri online also expresses some concern that anti-whaling sentiment in Australia may affect visitor numbers to Japan's ski fields.

Slow death for WorkChoices begins on the NSW North Coast

The Northern Star article by Alex Eaton yesterday.

 

"Uni learns about rollback of hated AWAs

 

THE individual employment contracts at the centre of the former Howard government's controversial WorkChoices legislation began its slow death in Lismore yesterday.

 

But, ironically, the first of the city's workers to have their individual contracts jettisoned are the ones least likely to have suffered under them.

 

Federal Page MP Janelle Saffin met with members of the National Tertiary Education Union yesterday to discuss the axing of Australian Workplace Agreements in universities and the Commonwealth public service.

 

Since 2002, universities have had to offer the individual contracts to new staff to be eligible for vital Commonwealth grants funding.

 

The move to axe the contracts was enthusiastically welcomed yesterday by union members, who had campaigned against the contracts.

 

However, union member Jenny Austin conceded the university's administration had never been enthusiastic about the contracts and that new staff had been offered a genuine choice between going on AWAs or being employed under an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, which allows workers to have their pay and conditions negotiated for them by a union.

 

"I understand most elected to stay on the EBA, although there may be a small number of staff on AWAs," Ms Austin said.

 

Ms Saffin agreed the new Federal Government had started its rollback of AWAs with easy targets in areas where it has a direct hand.

 

However, workers in the private sector would have to wait until 2010 for individual contracts to be completely scrubbed from the workplace.

 

"Where we can get rid of them now, we are doing it, and that sends a signal immediately that we are serious," Ms Saffin said.

 

The scheduling of how and when AWAs would go was spelled out in Labor's 'Forward with Fairness' industrial relations policy, she said

.

Ms Austin said there were some universities where AWAs had been enthusiastically adopted and the new rules would have a dramatic impact.

 

However, even at Southern Cross University's Lismore, Tweed and Coffs campuses, the new rules would trickle back into the broader community in the form of greater spending by university staff who felt secure in their jobs."

What a miserable and deceitful little worm is our former PM

On Wednesday 5 March 2008 John Winston Howard delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture to around 1,400 guests at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) gala dinner in Washington DC.

 

Ignoring the fact that both the Australian electorate and his own party repudiated his major industrial relations and foreign affairs policies as well as conveniently forgetting that the Howard Government presided over rising interest rates and decreasing national productivity, the former PM sort to justify himself and dump on the new Rudd Labor Government. 

 

In a display which confirmed his local standing as 'lower than a snake's belly'; Howard also managed a swipe or two at left-wing liberals, single parent families, feminists, gays, those against the Iraq war and anyone who had ever disputed his version of Australian history.

 

Showing an unparalleled level of manure shovelling in Washington, John Winston Howard has also awarded himself the honourific title of The Honourable according to AEI documents. Something he is no longer entitled to since he was kicked out of Parliament.

 

Here are some excerpts from the speech.

 

"The former Australian government, which I led, was accused of many things, but never of betraying its essentially centre/right credo. We pursued a blend of economic liberalism – in the classical sense of that term connoting as it does a faith in market forces - and social conservatism. So far from being in conflict the one reinforced the other. ---

From our election in 1996 we pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy. On the social front we emphasised our nation's traditional values, sought to resurrect greater pride in her history and became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.---

Of particular note, economically, were our major reforms to the taxation system, the complete elimination of net federal government debt, and changes to our labour market laws which produced a freer and less union dominated system.
These last mentioned reforms, strongly supported by small business, not only boosted productivity but even more importantly they helped reduce unemployment to 4.2%, a thirty-three year low, when the government left office, compared with 8.5% in March 1996.
They included the abolition of unfair dismissal sanctions on smaller firms, which had been discouraging those enterprises from taking on more staff.
The new government in Australia is pledged to reverse those labour market changes.---

We should maintain a cultural bias in favour of traditional families.---

In Australia, at any rate, the late eighties and nineties was the heyday of the more zealous feminist view of these matters. According to this view women who elected to stay at home full time when their children were young were regarded as inferior and in some cases traitors to their gender.--
I am disappointed that Australia's battle group will be withdrawing from Southern Iraq in June as one of the new Labor government's election commitments – rather than making a greater contribution to training the Iraqis to maintain their own security."

 

John Howard's 2008 Irving Kristol Lecture full text.

Is the Rudd Government going to be the new cyber bully?

I'm at a loss to understand exactly why the Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is so hot for Internet filtering at service provider level, if his aim is actually to protect children with PC clean feed access but not to impact on other users.

From 1999 onwards the Federal Government has been told that this preferred method of filtering has problems.

 

A September 1999 CSIRO commissioned study outlines what appears to remain ongoing problems with Senator Conroy's current plan to apply blanket internet censorship. 

 

"The disadvantages include:

• Performance impacts including increased delays and reduced capacity.
• Costs of installing and administering suitable filtering systems.
• Limited effectiveness.
• Potential impact on all Internet users.

ISP-based filtering may prove to be difficult to implement on a large scale because of the very nature and size of the Internet. Any delays or access restrictions imposed by ISP filtering mechanisms can have an impact on all Internet traffic, on e-commerce and business as well as on educational or recreational Web browsing."

 

"ISPs are concerned not only with delays imposed on individual messages as they pass through the filter but also with any associated limitations that the filtering workload will place on total system capacity. Excessive delays will degrade the overall useability of the Internet and may make some delay-sensitive Internet applications, such as Internet telephony, infeasible altogether."

 

"There is no single, 'good' technology that could be adopted by all ISPs to filter Internet content."

 

"ISPs implementing content filtering also have to be concerned with introducing instability into their networks and reducing the overall reliability of their services. Reliability and availability are critically important to ISPs and their customers, especially as the Internet takes on the role of providing the data communications infrastructure for the nation. ISPs currently use 'telecommunications grade' equipment designed to be exceptionally reliable (99.999% availability). The kinds of standard computers and software used to implement filtering are more general-purpose and complex, and are unlikely to be as reliable. The computers will, in many cases, be directly in the path between users and the Internet and the failure of a filtering computer would then have the effect of blocking access to the Internet rather than temporarily allowing access to prohibited material."

 

These same problems were still found to exist according to the February 2008 ACMA study, commissioned by the previous Coalition Minister for Communications and on which Senator Conroy now relies.

 

It is looking suspiciously as though, in Senator Conroy's case, ideology is outweighing commonsense when it comes to a desire to censor the world wide web.

 

This push also appears to be at odds with the Rudd Government's boast that it will supply a faster broadband service.

Indeed, Senator Conroy is beginning to come across as a bit of a cyber bully in his approach to telecommunications companies.

Obama spins Clinton wins in Rhode Island and Ohio as Texas hangs in the balance

With Hillary Clinton taking Rhode Island, Ohio and possibly Texas in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama puts the best spin on this first major setback to his progress.

Yesterday's email from the Obama for America team makes it obvious that Obama was anticipating a bad result.

"We may not know the final outcome of today's voting until morning, but the results so far make one thing clear.
When the dust settles from today's contests, we will maintain our substantial lead in delegates. And thanks to millions of people standing for change, we will keep adding delegates and capture the Democratic nomination.
We knew from the day we began this journey that the road would be long. And we knew what we were up against.
We knew that the closer we got to the change we seek, the more we'd see of the politics we're trying to end -- the attacks and distortions that try to distract us from the issues that matter to people's lives, the stunts and the tactics that ask us to fear instead of hope.
But this time -- this year -- it will not work. The challenges are too great. The stakes are too high.
Americans need real change.
In the coming weeks, we will begin a great debate about the future of this country with a man who has served it bravely and loves it dearly. And we will offer two very different visions of the America we see in the twenty-first century.
John McCain has already dismissed our call for change as eloquent but empty.
But he should know that it's a call that did not begin with my words. It's the resounding call from every corner of this country, from first-time voters and lifelong cynics, from Democrats and Republicans alike.
And together you and I are going to grow this movement to deliver that change in November.
Thank you,
Barack"

Blogs that Australia preserves for posterity. Are you there?

Pandora , Australia's official web archive, lists 157 Oz blogs. The full list can be found here.

Below is a brief selection.

A Fugitive Phenomenon

After grog blog

Ampersand Duck

Anonymous Lefty

Bent lenses

Blinding sunlight

Cheeseburger gothic

Club Troppo

Cooky La Moo

Daily Flute

Dikkii's Diatribe

Dreadnought

Eclectic Garden

Esoteric Rabbit

Flop eared mule

Frog garden

GalFromDownUnder

Grab your fork

Hecho en Mexico

Intergalactic hussy

Jellyfish online

Larvatus Prodeo

Legless in perpetuum

Lisa's losin' it

New Mandala

Polemica

Possums Pollytics

Wino Sapien

Wog blog

And the slips keep getting bigger

Wilson Tuckey boycotting Parliament, Peter Costello busy with his laptop during Question Time, Downer off dining while the House is sitting, and now Mark Vaile moonlighting as a lobbyist and unavailable to his northern NSW electorate.

The arrogant contempt being flaunted by former Howard Government ministers and MPs has stripped Brendan Nelson of what little authority he had as Leader of the Opposition.

With the only response to this lack of enthusiasm for the job at hand being a call to these MPs to consider defaulting on their electoral commitment by resigning within months of the federal election, the entire Coalition has totally lost what little credibility it had left.

Any more public relations nightmares like these and Nelson may find his dismal 7% approval rating slipping even further. 

"New Matilda" lists the reasons behind an intuitive distrust of NSW Treasurer Michael Costa

It has long been obvious that Premier Iemma and I share some misgivings about NSW Treasurer Michael Costa's style of personal grooming and dress. Why else is this epitome of Mafioso-style elegance rarely found standing behind Morris Iemma during election campaign media conferences?

 

However, in other matters Iemma appears content to give his minister carte blanche whereas my mistrust remains visceral.

 

Yesterday's New Matilda gives a profile of Michael Costa which goes some way to explaining why many ordinary people dislike this politician.

 

"It's a strange old world when powerful unionists, who came to power through union politics and who nominally represent the Labor Party, are calling for policies that will only decrease the power of their own power-base - and hurt the lowest paid and most vulnerable in our society. But that's the allure of neo-classical economics. The stark beauty of the classical model often trumps the messy examination of the data on the ground. It's what the psychologists call a "heuristic".

On reading Labor, Prosperity and the Nineties, we shouldn't be surprised that Costa is spoiling for a fight with his union colleagues over energy deregulation. He has no truck with environmental concerns and doesn't seem to believe there is much of a case for union restraints on managerial power at all. Costa is a deregulator, a decentraliser, and a self-styled reformer. He is also a visceral climate change skeptic who once called Tim Flannery an "idiot."

Don't expect Costa to back down over energy deregulation. From the evidence on the public record, this is the fight of his career."