Flying Santas at 12 o'clock high

Skydivers over Sydney NSW

From Times Online picture gallery

One final word before Senator Conroy [insert crow calls] the Internet

I went onto the Australian Communications and Media Authority website th' other day and happened on an 8th December media release.

Did you know that at June 2008:

• There were 1,009,347 registered .com.au domain names


• There were 7.23m Internet subscribers - 5.66m being broadband and 1.57m dialup


• There were 22.12 million mobile services in total, and quite a few able to access the Internet on the move

Now I might be a bit of a dunce, but that seems like an awful lot of voters to p*ss orf if Senator Conroy and his Prime Minister still want to keep the ship steady until 2010.

The website also threw up another little morsel - want to know just how much personal information sharing telecommunications companies are doing?

See ACMA's 2007-08 report chapter National interest matters

For those too lazy to have a shufti, here's a bit of a graph (includes 000 calls):

Buying political influence: getting in on the ground floor?

US ABC News has highlighted an interesting aspect of American political life - how Obama is finessing political donors' expectations of influence.

He's banned lobbyists from the transition team and stopped companies from giving money to the effort – some of the boldest limitations on money in a presidential transition

But big donors -- particularly bundlers -- still play a key role in his transition efforts. And good government groups say the real test for whether President-elect Barack Obama will change the culture of lobbying depends on whether he can address the broader question of special interests funding campaign donations.

"They are important for sending a signal but let's not confuse the low hanging fruit with the real hard fruit," said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center..........

Despite the ban on lobbyists, not all big money people have been banned from the effort. Bundlers, many of whom raised hundreds of thousands for Obama, are still allowed to play a role.

Public Citizen has identified at least five members of the transition team so far who raised upwards of $50,000 for the Obama campaign, including Valerie Jarrett, a transition co-chair; Susan Rice, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute; Julius Genachowski, managing director of Rock Creek Ventures; Donald Gips, a vice president of Level 3 Communications; and Michael Froman, a Citigroup managing director.

Meanwhile, the Presidential Inaugural Committee lists those privately contributing to his inauguration splurge; including shareholders/employees of a numbers of companies such as Agvar Chemicals, Innova Aviation Consulting LLC, Kpmg LLP, Verizon Telecommunications, Google Inc, Cheyenne Exploration Inc, Tyco International.

It looks as though companies might get to pay and play after all.

Full list of Obama bundlers at White House For Sale

Want to have a say on political campaign funding in Australia?

It hasn't escaped attention that, in the last few decades, the dollar amounts of both public funding of candidates/political parties standing for federal election and private political donations for these same parties have been growing at such a pace that Australia is now seeing election campaigns actually begin long before an election is declared.

It has never been more obvious that the biggest political parties are attempting to buy their way into government via expensive sustained media campaigns.

Incumbent governments in recent years have also barely concealed the fact that they will use government advertising budgets for the same end.

So it was interesting to see that this week the Australian Special Minister for State released the Electoral Reform Green Paper: Donations, Funding and Expenditure.

The perception of undue influence can be as damaging to democracy as undue influence itself.

It undermines confidence in our processes of government, making it difficult to untangle the

motivation behind policy decisions.

Electors are left wondering if decisions have been made on their merits.

Restrictions on the use of money in election campaigns and the raising of money by political parties and other political actors enacted in other jurisdictions have as their aim the limitation of the potential political influence exercised by private sources of wealth, by controlling either the supply of, or the demand for, campaign cash – or both.

The central priority of this approach is to maintain a degree of fairness between the individual participants in the political process, and equality of opportunity between the candidates and parties contesting the vote.

Many countries have pursued electoral reform to reduce or remove these problems.

Limiting or eliminating donations to political parties, limiting spending, increasing public funding and other support and extending electoral regulation to third parties are solutions pursued or proposed elsewhere.

These and other remedies are discussed in this Green Paper.

Copy of green paper can be read here.

The Australian Government invites written submissions in response to this paper.

General comments are invited.

Interested people are also invited to respond to some or all of the specific issues raised in the paper, and, in particular, some or all of the questions at Chapter 11.

The closing date for submissions is 23 February 2009.

Late submissions may not be considered.

Details on how to make a submission here.

Favourite Wikileak of 2008

From Times Online and Wikileaks this month on the folly of pollies.

"JACQUI SMITH, the home secretary, has suffered fresh embarrassment from a new Whitehall leak disclosing that ministers are seeking new powers to search the homes of staff working on ID cards.
An 11-page confidential Home Office document – which was sent to a campaigner against ID cards – suggests that the employees’ homes could be entered without the need for a police warrant."

U.K. Home Office document is here.

Fred Singer is a 'climate scientist'? And here I was thinking he was an Exxon Mobile superannuant!

Club Troppo has pulled a really entertaining rabbit out of the hat since 19 December, with its online debate headed by David Evans a well-known greenhouse sceptic.

This is a serious debate worth visiting and, if you have a mind to obey the rules, participating in.

It made my day to read Evan's describing Fred Singer as a climate scientist.

Now S. Fred Singer may be a lot of things (including a man with a couple of decent university degrees, an extended work history in atmospheric physics and a published author), but a reputable voice on climate science he has not been for some time.

As far as I can tell he is fatally compromised by his perceived longstanding relationship with Exxon and other big oil/energy companies as well as his association with the discredited Frederick Seitz petition and, his constant repetition of a fear that developing climate change policy will in turn distort energy policy, a principle argument that there is no global warming trend and there might even be a cooling trend and, an assertion that an emissions trading scheme would just be a tax ruse.

Indeed Singer has been a denialist since at least 1998 when this correspondence occurred.
However, almost every argument he has floated over the years seems to be easily refutable by academics and working scientists.

This has led Singer to assume the position of front man for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) which appears to represent the published opinion of around 23 authors who reputedly are not all scientists and, his Science & Environmental Policy Project founded in 1990 is beginning to sound distinctly nutty.

Now I am aware that there has been legitimate scientific opinion which has swum against the tide in the past and later been proved right, but Fred Singer appears to have done no independent or collaborative science in years and apparently relies on a anti-global warming stance he developed years ago before much of the current data had been either gathered or collated.

The fact that the NIPCC document published this year online has purportedly 'peer reviewed' the same primary sources as the UN international panel does not give cause for comfort because of the small number of participants involved.

As Singer has reportedly also published his doubts about the links between second hand smoke and lung cancer and between UV rays and skin cancer one has to wonder at anyone citing him as an expert.

NIPCC's 2008 Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate can be found here.

The former candidate objects!

It would appear that it isn't only the Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy who wishes to censor content on the Internet.
At least one failed local candidate for political office also has a personal list of 'unwanted content', if a comment recently posted on North Coast Voices is any indication.

It's seemingly quite alright to keep a 'sanitised' campaign website alive long after the event and cheerfully link a current blogger profile to that site, but having another's legitimate political opinion still posted for the world to see apparently goes against the grain for one who obviously would rather forget a foray into the political arena earlier this year.

I wonder if newspapers were also asked to remove any mention of the candidate from online articles commenting on that local government election campaign? I suspect not.

After all - that would be changing the Clarence Valley historical record.
A record of which North Coast Voices is now part, along with a number of other blogs, bloggers and letters to the editor correspondents.

Scheduled posts during Australian national Internet censorship trial 24 December 2008 onwards

Due to the fact that the Rudd Government intends to run a trial of its national ISP-level filtering scheme and because some Australian ISPs are now participating, North Coast Voices is uncertain if it can reliably publish over the next six-seven weeks or if it will be able to be read by local visitors.

Predictably the Minister's office refuses to clarify his recent obtuse remarks about a new 'closed' trial without customer involvement.

However, it now appears that the 'live' trial is to go ahead based on the existing ACMA black list and a further 'closed' trial will be conducted using a vastly expanded dummy list to test performance levels.

In an effort to keep online we have pre-scheduled a number of posts for the festive season.
Please pop in to see how we are faring and leave a comment or two.

Cha ghéill sinn!

As the world turns.......

As we approach the end of 2008 it seems odd that a year begun in the bright promise of a new Federal Government should have limped to such a pedestrian end.

Kevin Rudd can't keep his staff or his feet on home soil, Peter Garrett can't keep his word, Stephen Conroy can't convince the electorate that he knows what he is doing, Barnaby Joyce can't keep with the flock, Warren Truss can't be found, Malcolm Turnbull can't keep a Coalition functioning, former prime minister John Howard can't keep his mouth shut, and Australia is no nearer solving its water security crisis or truly confronting the climate change disaster knocking on our door.

Still, looking skywards at the echo of another exploding world, a sense of perspective is inevitable.

A Vivid View
More than four centuries after the brilliant star explosion witnessed by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers of the era, NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space observatories and the Calar Alto observatory in Spain captured this image of the supernova remnant. This composite image combines infrared and X-ray observations. The explosion left a blazing hot cloud of expanding debris (green and yellow). The location of the blast's outer shock wave can be seen as a blue sphere of ultra-energetic electrons. Newly synthesized dust in the ejected material and heated pre-existing dust from the area around the supernova radiate at infrared wavelengths of 24 microns (red). Foreground and background stars in the image are white. Image Credit: MPIA/NASA/Calar Alto Observatory