June 2005 Archives

New National Party leader, Mark Vaile, has called for greater support of Australia's biofuels industry which produces ethanol.

But Australian motorists are more likely to opt for smaller cars before they buy vehicles which run on anything but petrol.

Mark Vale may well lament that Australian motorists would rather fill their tanks with lard than with an ethanol blend petrol, but he has only his own coallition partner to blame.

One near-monopoly producer, the Manildra Group - which happens to be a handsome donor to the federal Liberal Party - continues to market it through independent service stations at concentrations of about 20 per cent.

Yet almost every major car maker in the country has warned that at concentrations of more than 10 per cent, ethanol damages engines. They will not honour warranties for cars run on higher blends.

And it's not just car companies that want a 10 per cent cap. So do consumers, boating and motoring organisations and the Australian Petroleum Institute (API). Not to mention the federal Environment Department.

But the Government has procrastinated on setting a limit, and does not even require retailers to inform their customers what they are buying.

This sorry chapter, played out before the last election, torpedoed an opportunity that could have substituted, quite safely, 10% of the country's petrol volume with a green alternative. Sensibly implemented, it may have lowered, albeit marginally, the cost of a litre of fuel, and made a positive contribution to lowering the country's greenhouse gas output.

The Liberal party seemed more concerned with the welfare of a corporate financial donor than complying with the recommendations of vehicle manufacturers that would have provided motorists with the confidence that ethanol in suitable concentrations would not hurt their vehicles' engines.

Blended fuel has been used in other countries' cars for years.

In this country, where every second petrol station sports a "No ethanol" sign, Mark has a huge task ahead to convince the motoring public that blended fuels containing up to 10% ethanol is a good idea.

Day 1 (20 June)

Last week was busy; hardly made it in front of the PC ... for purposes other than work, that is.

This week, I'm in Kiama (mid south coast NSW) with my daughter as she attends the state primary school soccer championships. (Can't bring my self to call it 'football!') She has a hectic schedule over three days, but I did see it as a chance to catch up with some blogging. I hired quite a nice apartment, one that has everything except a phone connection! Bugger!

So, to post this or any other articles, I'll have to try to do it through the local internet cafe. If that's not possible, then the sty will be more or less silent for another week. Perhaps the foreign correspondent will fill the breech.

As I don't have the luxury of using the net to link to articles, any 'comment' posts will be more recollection than substantiated fact. On reflection; situation normal.

Day 2

Checked options to get on line. It's not good unless I want to retype everything I've written. Bollocks to that! So I'll just write short bits and post them when I get back home on the weekend.

The daughter's soccer team's is progressing nicely. Two wins and a draw. At the top of the ladder in her group after the first day of competition. Three more games tomorrow, then the playoffs.

Day 3:

Two draws and a win. Good enough to top the pool in her half of the competition.

I've thouroughly enjoyed the tournament so far. Nice group of parents, very little bitchy barracking from the sidelines and a standard of the competition sufficiently high enough to bring this parent back to reality.

The only downside is that the games are played at 'Arctic Park.' The freezing westerly wind goes right through the spectators.

Day 4:

Finals day. The rest of the family drove in last night. Porkers en masse.

Hard to believe, but the weather is worse. Lower temperatures brought freezing rain to the grounds, and snow in the nearby mountains.

As the winner of our group, the team played the second highest team in the other group. It was nil all at full time, and nil all after ten minutes of extra time. Our team was declared the winner on a countback of corner kicks.

The bane of soccer; picking winners from draws.

Unfortunately, our team lost the grand final 2 - nil. Such is life. We certainly can't complain. My daughter was privileged to be selected and compete at that level. She has a pennant to prove she was there. She knows what's required and can try out for the team again next year. As a parent, I now have a much better idea of where she sits in the level of competition. I met some nice people who I hope to meet again at another venue.

All round, an enjoyable event.

[Written in Kiama, 20 June. Ancient history by blog standards.]

2005 was seen in some quarters as the year that Labor's grip on state governments would loosen. Western Australia was seen as vulnerable, and the Northern Territory an aberration that would swing back to the CLP status quo.

Well, the WA result is history, and in two NT elections, the CLP is now a rump. Reports in today's SMH had the CLP down to six (possibly four) seats. In a landslide, some seats swung by 20%!

Both losing contenders floated idiotic public infrastructure projects during the election campaigns. In WA, it was the water canal from the Kimberley to Perth to solve water shortages. The NT CLP wanted a $1.3 billion power transmission line from Queensland to Darwin to meet future demand. Both projects would have been expensive white elephants, heavy on energy and delivering diminishing returns.

In the NT example, line losses over the proposed distance would have delivered a fraction of the energy input. Average length transmission lines can lose up to 50% of the energy input. Imagine the losses over 3000km! The electricity would have been generated using coal, when Darwin sits on the edge of large, less environmentally damaging natural gas reserves. It was lunacy, and it's heartening to see that the electorate saw through it.

Having time on my hands allows me to give the broadsheets a good going over. The editorial of the Australian (21 June) caught my eye.

Headed "Douglas Wood tells it straight," it's a piece that backs up Wood's claim that things are going swimmingly in Iraq. Briefly, it gives a large kick into all the naysayers who cast doubts on the wonderful progress being made in that country.

They [the negative claims] are par for the course for people [the naysayers] who continue to claim there have been 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion by the coalition of the willing, more than a month after a UN report put the number at 24,000.

Only 24,000 deaths? Is that all? What a relief!

[Written 22 June, Kiama]

With the Senate about to be controlled by the government of the day for the first time in decades, an intriguing development has arisen where the National party is making noises that its support of government (read Liberal party) bills can not to be taken for granted ...

National Party senators are threatening to to block the Federal Governments legislation to outlaw student unions, potentially derailing one of the Prime Minister's ideological ambitions.

This comes on the heals of well publicised National Party concerns about the privatisation of Telstra when rural service standards have been shown to below promised benchmarks.

Could it be that the Nationals, always the junior party in the coallition, are going to use their numbers in the Senate to force a greater say on government policy? Holding the balance of power in the Senate is about to deliver them a lot more influence regarding government policy direction.

Seems that there may be other embarrassing government backdowns on government policy similar to the recent backflip on asylum seeker detention.

I don't know if this has made it's way to Oz yet, but it's gone huge in the UK and I have to say that it is thoroughly addictive.

It's Sudoku, a numbers game involving logic, reasoning and absolutely no mathematics. It is the perfect solitaire game/puzzle, if you ask me. If you're doing a crossword, your success is dependent upon whether or not you know the vocabulary, with this you just have to be aware of the numbers 1-9.

Find it, do it, spread the word. Play online here.

Events kept me away from the keyboard over the past week ... the long weekend, State of Origin football and various other family and work distractions.

It's nice to be able to get some time in front of the keyboard on the same day that a threat to the party unity causes our 'man of steel' to back down over one of the nastier pieces of government legislation.

Good luck to Petro Georgiou, Bruce Baird, Judi Moylan and Russell Broadbent who successfully forced John Howard to retreat from his hardline stance regarding the detention of asylum seekers. It's an extraordinary achievement. The rantings of Sophie Panopoulos would have been nothing to the taunts and threats that the band of renegades would have endured behind closed partyroom doors.

Now that they've won this breakthrough, perhaps they could turn their attention to the case of another person, an Australian citizen no less, who's been locked away for three years without trial .... David Hicks.

The Sty's Oz correspondent has not had time to blog lately. Soon to resume.

When I first started studying at Macquarie University, ten years ago, there were two things which sparked my interest (besides of course the obvious):

1. That if we voted for so-and-so for students' council, they would get a swimming pool constructed on campus.
2. That there was a Parramatta to Chatswood rail link being built which would run through the university.

Both if these sounded pretty good because:

a) I liked swimming pools (they got my vote) and,
b) I lived in Parramatta and the bus fare to Macquarie Univerity from there was extortionate.

Ten years later, neither of these are a reality. It has taken the NSW government ten years to begin building a rail link from Epping to Chatswood, ignoring The West, of course. And just take a look at Sydney's transport network compared to, say, London's and perhaps you'll get an idea of why every hog and their dog wants/needs a car.

So when Bob Car announces a 15 year rail plan, you'll forgive me if I'm not jumping for joy, because that 15 years will extend into 30, and he'll probably still be Premier too.

John Howard has, at last, stated that the government won't let filthy lucre prevent us from decently treating the Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin as he seeks political asylum.

Mr Howard says Mr Chen's case will be assessed on its merits.

"It's not going to be influenced by the amount of iron ore or coal we sell to China," Mr Howard said.

"It will not be influenced by trade and economic considerations.

"I've heard a lot of nonsense talk over the past little while about this."

Is it any wonder that there was "a lot of nonsense talk" over this issue? The government seemed to be in a state of paralysis when the story broke. This observer certainly thought that the authorities were more concerned over the Chinese government's reaction than Mr Chen's wellbeing. They did, after all, phone the Chinese embassy when he made his original application.

One would be forgiven in thinking that the Liberal party had their pollster do a quick survey to confirm that the electorate really does not think it would be nice to send him back, prompting public assurances by Tony Abbott that this won't happen ...

Mr Chen is in Australia. He is being dealt with in accordance with the ordinary processes of Australian immigration law and he is at no risk of being sent back to China.

If only it was so easy for kids in detention.

Chen first applied for asylum 13 days ago on 26 May. Today's assurance came five days after the issue became public. Makes you wonder what would have happened to Chen if the issue had remained secret.

Media Watch tonight poses the question ...

Will the government put the ABC's successful Asia Pacific television service up for tender, possibly (probably?) allowing Sky TV to take it over and receive government funding in the process?

Of course they won't!

Oink Oink, Flap Flap!

Don't answer that. Anyway, here's a quote from smh.com.au this morning:

Marcus spoke shortly before news emerged that two Britons had been charged with firearms offences on Saturday after reportedly trying to sell a stolen copy of the new Harry Potter book to London tabloid The Sun for about $US91,000 ($120,500).

Now my anal-ytic questions is why the amount is reported in US dollars, when the whole affair involved two Britons and a London newspaper?

Despite all the column miles being written on the coming industrial reforms, I think Paul Keating was spot on the money in a recent interview ...

"The real issues I think are of education training. We will never beat the Indonesians or the Chinese or the Indians for that matter in the provision of labour per hour. You know, we could slash our minimum wages almost to nothing and we would still be uncompetitive in labour-intensive products. Therefore, one doesn't have to be a genius to know or to believe that the best way forward for us is to do clever things which require training, education and training."

The former Labor government's reform process, in which I was involved as a technical union representative on the enterprise bargaining committee of a large industrial site, was big on skills development and training. The overall union movement recognised that upgrading skills, coupled with utilising more technology in the workplace, was a viable method of staying competitive. It was accepted that the number of workers in up-skilled industries would fall, so training schemes were implemented to enable displaced workers to move into service oriented industries.

The provision of training was one of the tradeoffs in the wages accord to sweeten the pill of industrial reform. Of course, training is expensive, and most of the programs put in place by the Labor government didn't last past the first Coalition budget. They've been cutting education across the board ever since.

Being blind to the concept that a ton of manufactured product is far more valueable than the same weight of raw material, the conservatives have never had a vision of Australian industry 'adding value' to exports. To them, why bother? Just dig it up and dump it on a ship. Keep punters feeling wealthy by engineering a housing boom, and prop up uncompetitive industries by providing the mechanism for cutting wage costs.

The Coalition lacks the imagination and forethought to pick technological winners. Their forebears thought rain making technology was a better bet than developing solid state electronics and computing technologies. Now they're oblivious to climate change and the economic opportunities that will come with it. They're turning their backs on the development of 'green' energy technologies for the dubious technology of 'carbon sequestration.'

The future is clear. Ever rising foreign debt as we spend more than we earn. Little incentive to modernise and nurture industries producing high tech, high value exports. Why go to the trouble, when the workforce can be simply stood-over to accept lower pay and conditions to keep our outmoded industries going?

So the European 'Constitution' has been knocked back by two of it's founding members, "The French slapped the left cheek of Europe, the Dutch have now slapped the right," plunging Brussels into chaos and the future of Europe into confusion. Those looking to the future and hoping for Europe to be a more 'approachable' super-power holding the US and China in sway may be disappointed at this apparent arrow through the heel of its progress, but I feel inclined to disagree.

It's interesting to note that of the countries who had already ratified the 'constitution' (I keep doing that because it wasn't really a constitution, more of a collection of treaties to be ratified, apparently unreadable) didn't do so through referendums but through parliamentary debates, which brings me to this statement, "The EU has to face the problem of the mismatch between the views of the people and the views of the politicians." Naturally a problem which I think places other than the EU suffer from.

There's a theory that researchers and academics should be forced to teach, with the idea of keeping their feet on the ground, so that they remain connected with not only the practical elements of their field but also with reality. Perhaps the European Parliament should look at something similar, with 25 separate member states, that's a lot of different types of toes to step on.

It's not as depressing as all that, really, I think it's fantastic that the people of France and the Netherlands gave their governments a kick up the behind and said, 'get your feet back on the ground, Europe's important, but you forget that we are Europe,' or something like that. For starters, they could "go back to the drawing board with the aim of producing a much more understandable and accessible text." which would be a good start, and maybe listening to their constituencies would be another.

The terrorist who launched the suspected biological attack on the Indonesian embassy has turned Schapelle Corby's problem into Australia's problem.

Good on Peter Hartcher. Eventually, someone used the T word, and about time.

It was irritating to see Howard and Downer avoid calling this outrage what it is ... a terrorist act.

For a government that's pointed to the threat of terrorism for their own political ends, it's surprising that they were so reticent to use the lable in this instance.