Apparently Joe Hockey’s distancing himself from the OzCar attacks not because Grech worked for him or because it might’ve been the dumbest political move since choosing to invade Russia but because he wants the leadership of the party. At least that’s the view of some senior Liberals.
Below is the comment I left on the news article about Hockey and the Liberal leadership
Hockey could’ve rebuilt the party after the election loss; instead, they chose Nelson, a man who left the ALP when he couldn’t get preselection for Denison and asked the Libs for Bradfield.
Hockey, at least after the election, had some amount of credibility in the public eye but he’s since blown it all by acting like a petulant child in Question Time.
The Liberals need to dump all the old guard well in advance of the next election and get their fresh new faces (who aren’t hell-bent on a return to Howard’s policies) out in the community rebuilding confidence in the party. Then, when the Liberals lose the next election and there’s some generational change, they can start looking at what their philosophical grounding is and who is best in the party at bringing that to the Australian people.
As it stands, they’re a rabble caught between Howard’s 11 years in the seat and Malcolm Turnbull’s naked ambition. They are unelectable and will remain so for a long time unless things change.
While the ALP and Liberals are beating each other around the head with accusations of lying, cover-ups and improper connections to Godwin Grech, the Greens are working to get rid of some of the worst legislation to come out of the Howard era.
Scott Ludlam has introduced a bill to the Senate to repeal the anti-terrorism measures which were rushed through when the government thought the ANZUS treaty was all about kissing Bush’s backside and that if we eroded the fundamental freedoms this nation counts as part of its core, we would be better guarded to protect the fundamental freedoms we counted, as a nation, as part of our core.
Of course, those who would trade liberty for temporary security deserve neither and it’s hard to see how the draconian legislation we enacted in Australia has made us safer. It certainly hasn’t made anyone with brown skin and a foreign sounding name any safer in Australia’s streets and on its beaches.
I thank Senator Ludlam for bringing to the parliament’s attention an issue which the Australian public had most likely forgotten about and which is far more important and has more far-reaching consequences than whether or not an email about helping out a car dealer was sent, what it contained and whether it was fake or not.
I’ve just added @Nardijah’s BNE Politico Blog to my blogroll; something I should’ve done a while ago.
To show, once again, just how small Brisbane is, Nadia is in a relationship with the older brother of one of my best friends from high school. That’s not how I know her, though; I know her from her whinging about studying maths on Twitter. I asked which subject was giving her grief and it turned out to be one of the subjects I was tutoring that semester. So there you go.
Is it possible to love a woman in particular while still holding misogynist views about women in general? That is, can one have an attitude that women are inferior to men, incapable of certain tasks, better off raising kids than having a career, not to be trusted to make their own decisions, and so on, and still love?
Can there be love without respect? Can one truly say they love a woman if they don’t think they’re every bit as good as themselves? If one is able to respect a particular woman, is it a stretch to expect that they can respect all women as women?
Is it that one’s wife/girlfriend is just a special case and somehow not like every other woman on the face of the planet (excepting, perhaps, one’s mother)? If so, is that really love or is it merely obsession with one particular person?
Do feminists love better because they respect their wife/girlfriend as a person with rights as well as loving them for who they are as an individual? Is it possible to be an anti-feminist lesbian?
Twitter had planned some maintenance during daytime hours in Tehran where citizens opposed to President-Elect Ahmadinejad are using Twitter to organise resistance and get the message about what’s happening on the streets.
Many Twitter users thought that it’d be good if Twitter could organise to delay the maintenance (to be carried out by their service provider) until about 1am Tehran time so that people in Tehran wouldn’t face an interruption in their ability to organise.
Some people think Twitter acted in good faith by delaying the maintenance, others thought Twitter has no business protecting the people of Tehran and that Twitter shouldn’t be relied upon as a means of communication in a crisis. I believe that in the absence of any other method (given the Iranian government’s repression of media and social networking sites like Facebook), you have to use what you can get your hands on and hope like hell that things will be okay.
I don’t have a problem at all with Twitter stepping in to help out the Iranians. I don’t think it’s inconsistent with the notion that service providers have an obligation to their users. I don’t think that is inconsistent with liberal capitalism, either. It wouldn’t bode well for Twitter’s image if they were seen as a callous bunch sitting by, watching events unfold, wringing their hands and talking about having to adhere to a strict maintenance schedule.
You may disagree, of course, and that’s why I’ve made this post and Twitpoll.
As US legislators debate the content of the biggest climate bill ever introduced into the US Congress, debate is raging as to whether this bill will deliver the action required to curb US Greenhouse emissions. Whilst we are not going to know exactly what the bill will look like if and when it passes the US House or Representatives and Senate, probably by the end of this year, we can make some major guesses based on the drafts that are now being discussed in the committees of Congress. These drafts give a picture of something that although may not be perfect is quite dramatic and will see a real shift in the energy policies of the United States. The question still remains however; will this bill provide what is needed for the US to take real action on climate change?
read more…
As a result of Forestry Tasmania’s win in a court appeal on a technicality, logging in the Wielangta Forest continues and Bob Brown has to pay about $240,000 in court costs or he’ll be declared an undischarged bankrupt and will have to resign his Senate seat.
Australia can’t afford to lose Bob Brown from the Senate. He’s been putting the screws on successive federal governments for years now, his Senate term’s not due to expire until 2014 and his leadership of the Australian Greens has ensured that issues like climate change, refugee treatment, peace and democratic reform have been heard in the Senate when the ALP and Coalition don’t want to hear about them.
Donate now to help Bob cover the court costs. If you don’t, Australia’s democratic institutions will be the worse for it.
The Labour party has slumped to 15% in the elections for the European Parliament, falling to third place behind the Conservatives and the anti-EU UK Independence Party. What’s more, the racist British National Party have just won two seats.
Things aren’t going well for Gordon Brown, either; his government is in tatters, he doesn’t have the firm support of his own party, Labour have just lost a lot of local government seats and the parliamentary allowances scheme has led to the resignation of members of many parties but his seems to be hit worse.
There’s no doubt about it, UK politics is a mess at the moment. Labour are facing a wipeout at the next general election (due June 2010) and it looks like the Conservatives will absolutely shit it in. David Cameron’s Conservatives will no doubt pick up a lot of the ex-Labour vote but there will be progressive voters who will abandon the party yet not want to vote for the Tories. This may mean a huge bonus for the Liberal Democrats if the swings are in the right places.
There’s no doubt that Labour will lose their majority but will they stay the second biggest party in the Commons? The Tories will no doubt pick off most of the seats of Labour’s current majority but the first past the post voting system (unlike the PR system used for the election of MEPs) makes predictions tricky given coarse polling data. Is an alliance between the Labour and Liberal Democrats likely in the face of a Conservative government? Will the LibDems become the main opposition party? Will there ever be serious reform of the UK parliament to implement the recommendations of the Jenkins Report?
Proportional Representation is very dangerous when coupled with non-compulsory voting. An extremist party like the BNP just has to get out the vote and win a few percent in order to be elected. Low turnout in PR benefits those who campaign on fear and division, allowing them to rely on the relative apathy of the general population. I am disgusted that the BNP have won one, let alone two, seats in the European Parliament. The major parties need to get their shit together and starve the BNP of any oxygen before they can convince people that the key to getting Britain through the GFC is kicking non-whites out of the country, closing the borders and denying the holocaust.
I went to see Prof Lawrence Lessig talk on Friday night about his new project, Change Congress. Change Congress’s aim is to encourage candidates to sign on to a new campaign finance system to change the role of money in politics.
As Lessig said on Friday, the problem isn’t that money is in politics, it’s that the money is in the wrong places. Corporate lobbyists are able to buy access to politicians for their clients which may lead them to make decisions not strictly in the interests of their constituents. It’s not so much that lobbyist dollars and corporate donations “buy” the vote of the politician but that they may feel obliged to reciprocate and come to a position on a Bill for less than the right reasons.
Money in politics, as it currently stands, breeds a mistrust of politicians just as Big Pharma has made people wary of their doctors’ advice (including a decrease in the proportion of parents immunising their kids, for starters). In order to rebuild trust we need to change the donations system so that donations come only from individuals and are capped at $100. The aim of this is to break the dependence on corporate donations and have the candidate look to their constituents and individual supporters for the money they need to run a campaign. It’s hard to be beholden to a special interest group if all they can do is ask their members to donate the maximum legal amount. Even then, would all these donors say “I’m a member of such and such a group and we all support you”?
Lessig refers to the role of money in politics as corruption. It corrupts the process. Money buys influence, access, etc. The acts of the members of Congress may be completely legal and even ethical but they are still corrupt. This is what Lessig terms “good souls corruption” rather than direct bribery, extortion and evil people being evil. We need to reform the culture of politics in order to do away with this corruption which is no more an integral part of American democracy than the butterfly ballot. To learn more, watch the video here.
It was interesting to note that there were essentially two types of people at Friday’s lecture. The first group you would expect to see: lawyers, Law academics, Judges, etc. The second group was young, internet-savvy, politically aware nerds. Yes, some of these young people were Law students (or academics) but it was still good to see young people getting engaged with topics which may be considered quite dry, even within the topic of politics.
Prof Lessig’s reputation as a revolutionary, intellectual reformer (a man with a vision rather than a Kalashnikov) means that people are willing to listen to the message of hope he brings. In the past, it was a message that the restrictive copyright system didn’t have to be the way our creative industries worked. Now, the message is that the corrupting influence of large sums of money handed over from industry to politicians doesn’t have to be the way politics works.
In Australia, we are lucky enough to have a system of public funding for elections. Federally, you get about $2.50 for each first preference vote you get. In Queensland, you get about $2 per vote if you can prove you spent that $2. So, at least in Queensland, it still takes donations up front before an election to run a campaign unless you’ve got heaps of money in the coffers.
We see businesspeople like Clive Palmer, Silvio Pradella and others such as trade unions and farming and business groups pumping tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of the two major political parties. Premier Anna Bligh went as far as to say that Clive Palmer had “bought” the LNP and the charge has been levelled at the ALP that they are in the pocket of the unions (a theme the Liberals ran hard on at 2007’s federal election).
Perhaps the public financing of election isn’t working as well as it could be if these private donations are still high enough that the major parties can accuse each other of being unduly influenced by moneyed interests. I don’t doubt that people listen to these messages and weigh up in their mind if they’d rather be ruled by a party which owes its success to trade unions or to big business.
Of course, public funding doesn’t mean that we have to ban individual donations. I don’t think that would be particularly democratic. What should happen, though, is that donations should be restricted to individuals (because incorporate bodies don’t get a vote) and be capped so as to avoid an unfairly weighted level of “influence”. Elected representatives are there to represent all their constituents, not just those who voted for them and certainly not just those who made a whopping great contribution to their election campaign.
I’d like to take the ideas of Change Congress on board and help organise a similar campaign in Australia but I think it might be more wise for a group like GetUp! to run a campaign. We’ve got to get big donations out of politics. It’s fine to have the Business Council of Australia and the ACTU try to influence politicians, I wouldn’t deny them the opportunity to have their say; what’s not fine is having a group put pressure on politicians financially as well as by pushing for certain law outcomes.
If we want a Parliament who are working in the interests of their constituents and the nation (rather than the coal industry) then we need a system in place which breaks the dependence on industry donations. Even if the ALP aren’t making decisions on the ETS at the behest of the coal industry, they are at least perceived to be doing so. This mistrust of the processes of government doesn’t help the public’s perception of the worth of democracy.
