I must confess that I haven’t been following the national innovation debate closely. It does seem to me that there are some in principle incompatibilities between:
(1) Industry policy by another name;
(2) Fostering innovation as a behavioural disposition;
(3) Specific attempts to create either new knowledge or research or create the infrastructure and skills which support these efforts.
The default policy reflex seems to be (1) and (2) is very difficult for governments to do directly. Since a lot of this stuff was pioneered here in the SunshineSmart State, it’s interesting to see Anna Bligh redirect some of the “big picture” stuff and the industry policy money - signalled by the abolition of the Department of State Development and now by a switch in focus from infrastructure to direct funding for research, scholarships and fellowships. Continue reading ‘Innovation smarts?’
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Numbers and more numbers. Now Access Economic claims that 800 000 people will leave or not take up private health insurance. This research, like the last lot of numbers tossed around, was commissioned by an organisation with a vested interest - in this case the AMA. The Opposition immediately translates this into “longer waiting lists”.
It seems Tim Flannery’s comments on geoengineering have gotten a bit of a run in the Australian blogosphere, with people from Andrew Landeryou to Graham Young to Darryl Mason piling on to attack his comments.
Essentially, Flannery is saying that because the risks of climate change are so great, we should be considering the last-ditch options. The last-ditch option he mentions is one that’s been discussed before - dumping sulphur into the upper atmosphere to block some fraction of the sunlight getting to the surface. Frankly, anybody who’s been reading the science would conclude that the risks are pretty damn terrifying, and that we might have to seriously consider drastic action. I know I have. That said, this particular idea might not be a goer. The latest research on the sulphur proposal suggests that as well as ensuring we’d not see a blue sky again it will deplete the ozone layer - you know, the one we banned CFCs and halons to save back in the 1980s.
But Flannery is dead right that we seem to be heading straight towards a global disaster, one that is worth taking pretty drastic action to avoid, and one may have to involve artificial fixes. Whether it suits our particular philosophical agendas or not, that is what we face. The sooner people get their head around that concept, the better.
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The time has come, the walrus said… Oops! I’ll start again.
The time has come to begin the the greatest contest, the longest stoush, in the greatest game of all. Well that’s the view of the 0.0000000001% of the world population that follow rugby league. Tonight we have the first State of Origin match, where the cane toads take on the cockeroaches from south of the Tweed in the opening stoush in enemy territory where the reviled Blues have won 10 out of the 12 matches played. This on one of the most unsuitable venues for the game in the country, a round field for a rectangular game, for Chrissake, and a slippery surface unsuitable for grazing cows, or anything useful really.
It’s part of the dark plot by the game’s governing body, where NSW always has the numbers, to tip the odds their way. As is the adoption of the 10 replacement rule, specifically requested by the NSW coach, as against the 12 replacement rule used in international competition, when any donkey knows that SOO is faster and more furious than any international game we are likely to play.
The long and short of it is that skilled migration and temporary working visas have been lifted to almost 300 000 a year, with more on the way. Add in international students and those on some forms of tourist visa and you have a very large boost to Australia’s workforce.
Kelly’s correct to write that Howard lifted the migration quota over his term in office, but doesn’t add that he played the politics of it through distracting attention with all sorts of “look! over there! Muslims!” scares. I’m not sure I agree with Kelly that there’s going to be a particular political risk for Labor here. I suspect that Paul Keating took the brunt of it, with his “embedding in Asia” rhetoric and his economic case for migration a long time before the perception of the need for more migration to build a skills base and competitiveness really kicked in. Opposition to the changing face of Australia washed out of the national psyche, largely, one could argue hopefully, with the receding of the Hansonite wave of protest and indignation. John Howard may have had his face turned towards the past in this regard in his last years of office.
We probably should be having a debate on the ecological consequences of increased infrastructure spending for a bigger population (among other climate change related impacts), and on the fact that while “unemployment” might be still near record lows, there are still a lot of people either underemployed or locked out of the labour market for reasons that are fairly intractable to short term policy influence, but I doubt we’ll be seeing much of either.
Ross Gittins has a great piece in the Sydney Morning Herald today, making the obvious point that:
… households earning $150,000 or more - starting at almost twice the median - are in the top 15 per cent of households.
The top 15 per cent aren’t rich, but they’re certainly not battlers. They’re not even anywhere near the middle; they’re up near the top.
The average earnings of adult full-time employees are now $60,000. So someone on $150,000 is pulling in 2½ times average. And you’re asking the rest of us to feel sorry for you? You reckon the bottom 97 per cent of taxpayers should be paying you special benefits?
The carry-on we’ve seen from people pulling down a paltry $150,000 a year borders on the obscene when put beside the troubles of the people who really do have cause for complaint, single pensioners living it up on $270 a week. That’s a bit over $14,000 a year - less than a 10th of what the well-off whingers are getting.
But how can people living on two or three times the average income genuinely believe they’re middle-income strugglers?
He goes on to answer his own question, and in doing so, makes the point that people usually have a poor perception of what others’ incomes actually are, and that they tend to compare up rather than down. There are oodles of studies that make that point.
Claims that global warming has ceased since 1998 (or 2002), and even that global cooling has set in, have been the stock in trade of the greenhouse denialists this year. These claims are, for the most part, made by the sort of people who in 1998 (or 2002) were denying the existence of the global warming which they now claim was actually happening but has ceased. However, I digress.
For the purposes of the current discussion, let us note that these claims are also based on two basic failures to comprehend Climate Science 101.
The most immediately obvious failure is that the denialists do not realise, or have conveniently forgotten, that long-term trends in global average atmospheric temperature change are reflected, not in year to year changes in average temperatures, but in trends averaged out over a series of years. When recent global average temperatures are analysed in this light, we find that the evidence does not support the claim that global warming has ceased. This has been amply explained at RealClimate and Deltoid, and by David Karoly of the CSIRO, and requires no further elaboration here. Continue reading ‘The Stupid Cult of Cooling and the Goyder Line debate’
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Why is most of the news out of Canberra these days reporting on the danse macabre of Brendan and the Walking Dead, when we actually have a government that like, does stuff (or so I’ve heard), and which the newspapers are supposedly there to investigate and report on?
Murdoch and Fairfax are able to report at length on the fascinating intricacies of inter-office emails between senior members of the not-government, and whether said members of the not-government support a not-policy that will be not-implemented some time in the next 3 years. But we basically have no idea what’s being cooked up for the $40 billion of our money that’s been earmarked for various ‘future funds’, what’s in store for superannuation, corporate taxation, state-Federal relations, and so on.
Not a clue. Not a whiff even of speculation. Just…silence.
Are the press gallery off the drip-feed? Were they so cosy with the Libs that they forgot to ask Rudd for his telephone number? Are they disinterested in finding out any of the important stuff, or have they lost the ability to distinguish what is important any longer?
Anyone have a pet theory?
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Seriously, though, folks, the whole idea of a blogging “carnival” is a collaborative exercise to highlight posts on a certain theme or from a certain subsection of bloggers - it’s done a lot in the UK and the US, but doesn’t seem to have taken off here. So mad props to Lauredhel at Hoyden for organising one for Australian and Kiwi feminist bloggers. All the good oil via the link.
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After all the expressions of distaste for watching Bogans on the last BB thread (and yes, I know, it was more complex than that), I just wanted to point out what happens when non-Bogans go on BB. They really try to play the game. You can see it with Ben “the law student” right at the moment in Big Brother 2008, you could see it with “Lefty” Tim Brunero (who’s now happy to analyse his own calculatin’ on that floparama, Big Mouth, but I suppose being articulate and having some connection with the Chaser Boys and being a Sydney Uni boy and all gets him media gigs which aren’t a “bikini model” “career”). And we can also see it with “webmate” Nathan, or so Eye on Big Brother thinks:
The difficult thing to decipher, here, is to what extent Nathan is driven by his motives to manipulate his way through the game, utilising that understanding I talk so much of, here, about how the show “works”. I certainly think he does have that understanding, and that it is at play, here - though maybe not in the simplistic way, many are now suggesting.
If I tried really hard, I could probably think of some bad things about working from home. But today, it was all good. By about 3pm, I’d edited around 18000 words of PhD thesis to my satisfaction, and was on top of teaching and book review editing tasks, so having noticed when I wandered down to the shops earlier for some lunch it was an incredibly beautiful Brisbane autumn day, I decided to go for a gratuitous walk to the city - along the Riverwalk - about 2.2k. With a bit of discussion around the traps about Brisbane transport lately, it’s worth mentioning that Riverwalk, a network of walking and cycling tracks along the river stretching for about 20km, is one of the most visionary projects undertaken in our fine town in recent decades. An initiative of the Jim Soorley Labor Council in the late 90s, it was initially opposed by riverside property owners and the Liberals. But aside from giving New Farm residents the chance to walk or cycle to work, the floating pontoon section which stretches from Merthyr Road along to the Story Bridge and then joins up with the city stretch is just such a wonderful contribution to the city’s amenity. It’s usually jam packed with office workers around 5pm, and a little later on with strollers, joggers and cyclists, but if you can get the chance to do the walk on a week day outside peak hour, you have it almost all to yourself. I seized the chance, really enjoyed the walk, and snapped some photos.
There are more than I’m posting here, and you can see them all at this link. If you want to see a bigger version of any of them, remember to click on the “full view” link once you’re inside the gallery. If you haven’t done the walk, you might be interested by some of the unusual views of the iconic Story Bridge.
If you’re in Melbourne and have any interest in transport issues, you’ll have heard of Paul Mees. He’s a one-man headline for public transport. Formerly a lawyer, he took a job lecturing in urban planning at the University of Melbourne, where he has continued his advocacy of public transport. For what it’s worth, I reckon he does get a bit over-enthusiastic sometimes (see for instance this earlier LP post). But that hardly justifies demoting him and docking his pay, because his outspokenness has allegedly hampered the university’s ability to get state government grants:
The University of Melbourne’s reputation for upholding academic freedom has been damaged by the demotion of a senior lecturer after a complaint against him by the State Government, the tertiary union says.
The Age revealed today that Paul Mees, a senior lecturer in transport planning and a prominent public transport advocate, was told his pay would be slashed after he made a strongly worded attack on the Government over transport privatisation.
I didn’t see anything about gagging uppity academics in the Melbourne Model myself…
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While most of the focus in the climate change mitigation debate has been on power generation and transport, there are a number of other emissions sources which are large and pose mitigation challenges of their own. Andrew Bartlett has often raised the issue of emissions from farm animals, and emissions from forestry have come up repeatedly here. But one that doesn’t get much attention is emissions from industrial processes, particularly the production of steel and concrete. Locally, manufacturing cement makes up less than 1% of total emissions (which is the kind of thing you can find out from the excellent AGEIS tool), but globally it’s a different story - getting definitive statistics is hard, but this IHT article quotes around 5% of global emissions, most of it in the developing world.
But a new Australian company claims they’ve got an alternative available that reduces the life cycle emissions from concrete by about 80% compared to standard, Portland cement-based concrete. Zeobond, a Melbourne company, use something called “geopolymers” to make concrete that doesn’t contain any cement. And, even better, we can apparently already buy their product - though they’re not exactly forthcoming with pricing information at this point. In any case, they’re featuring on the ABC’s Catalyst on Thursday night, along with a story on London’s plans to generate its own energy. Should be worth a look, either on TV or as a podcast.
As far as steel goes, the only substantial research program for reducing the emissions of steel production is the European ULCOS project. It appears that eliminating CO2 emissions from steel production almost inevitably means carbon capture and storage. Like it or lump it, it seems that we’re going to need CCS technology, whatever we do about coal.
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So, it’s time again to condemn. Here’s a nineteenth open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except Jolie Holland. Because Tom Waits is a big fan of hers. As am I. You can condemn the budget. Every loud interest group is. Or you can condemn the condemners!
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But why should that surprise? Isn’t that what they do at state level? Isn’t that what they did the last time they were in opposition federally?
Speaking of which, Malcolm Turnbull apparently came up with the *clever* plan of suggesting all possible leadership rivals move to state politics.
The Australian can reveal that Mr Turnbull spoke in March to Mr Hockey, the former workplace relations minister, suggesting a possible switch to the NSW parliament. Earlier this month, it is understood Mr Turnbull made a similar suggestion to Ms Bishop, the former education minister and current federal deputy Liberal leader, suggesting she take over the leadership of the troubled West Australian division of the Liberal Party.
Turnbull’s being trashed from all sides within the Libs, it seems. Who wants a bet on Costello being leader by the end of the year?
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Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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