On Line Opinion has just published an article by Mark Lawson querying estimates that said the world was about to imminently run out of oil. He didn’t dispute that it would run out some day, but he particularly instanced David Suzuki who claimed in an interview in the ’80s that we would run out of oil by the year 2000.
The price of oil interests me, not least because I have put some of the family interests into oil and gas companies, including renewable energy companies. In an earlier blog post I linked to an article on the site of Platinum Capital, which put a fairly cogent case for the likelihood that we have passed peak oil flow.
We have had two responses to Mark’s article, and I thought I would post them here to see what comments, if any, they inspired.
From Glenn Conroy:
This article by an Australian journalists reminds me of comments made by Lomberg (Skeptical environmentalist) to National Press Club (which this journalist may well have picked up on) that predictions of oil running out have been made every decade since oil was first used in motor vehicles. He said one day they will be right.
However, predictions of oil’s running out misses point. That is, oil is an energy source we cannot simply keep on using, not because it is becoming scarce, but because its by-products are literally killing us.
Misquoting Lomberg again, he said ancient man did not end the Stone Age because he ran out of stone; similarly modern man does not have to wait until oil runs out to end the Oil Age, it can and should be ended sooner rather than later and alternative cleaner energy sources used instead.
Sincerely
Glenn Conroy
Australia
From Dr Louis Arnoux:
Laherrere are indeed professionals who go to extremes of rigorous
analyses to provide as robust as possible an evaluation and
understanding of oil depletion as is possible and to keep it up to
date.
Oil never runs out abruptly. I guess Suzuki talked colloquially and
meant that decline would begin around 2000; which was basically
correct. King Hubbert had anticipated that much as early as the 70s
using much less advanced data than available now.
The key parameter is hydrocarbons (gas and crude) per head and that
peaked in 1979.
It is actually not that difficult to think straight in this matter.
It requires only a modicum of knowledge concerning oil and gas fields
and wells, the physics of depletion, and oil and gas world markets;
nothing that cannot be quickly mastered by an average well educated
person.
The data is clear, and Campbell and Laherrere keep stressing it: it is
not just about conventional crude, and it’s not a matter of
‘economics’. It concerns *all* hydrocarbons. Even assuming they get
mined regardless of cost, the absolute peak is reached before 2020 and
it’s all gone for practical purposes before the end of the 21st
century. There is no magic in this. There is nothing ‘technology’ and
holy economics can do about it. The only way to make new ‘oil’
(equivalent) economically and in large amounts is with biomass, not out
of wells; and the world is not geared up to it (and won’t be for quite
some time). It is about time people learned to abandon their cargo
cult mentality with respect to oil.
Best,
Louis
Dr. Louis Arnoux
Managing Director
IndraNet Technologies Ltd.
http://www.indranet-technologies.com/

This article in today’s Australian tends to reinforce my view that the housing boom was starting to slow under its own weight without the need for an interest rate rise. Supply of investor stock apparently peaked in March last year.
Mind you it’s hard to get a straight comment out of the housing industry. How do you square Harry Triguboff’s statement that he will continue to build 1,500 units per annum (admittedly down from 2,000 last year) because there is “no over-supply” with his prediction that 30% of Sydney buyers will default on off the plan sales? It doesn’t matter that he ascribes the potential defaults to the unwillingness of banks to lend – this is still a prediction of a surplus of stock over purchasers, which is the definition of over-supply in anyone’s terms.
It can probably be explained by the fact that while real estate agents and developers will be the first to tell you about the virtues of the market, they are also amongst the first to put out their hands for government assistance when the market slows, or looks like it might slow. They don’t really believe in the market at all.
When they do put out their hands they are torn by greed. They know that government assistance will put money into their pockets, but they also know it won’t do this if they scare off all the buyers. So they are simultaneously in a permanent state of denial in both directions – whichever way the market is going.
Governors and board members of the Reserve Bank also have to fall into this atheistic category. If markets really tend to self-adjust, then there is little need for them to do too much most of the time apart from go to lunch. In the case of real estate, if the major reason for raising rates was to kill off the housing market, they arrived at the deathbed about the same time as the under-takers. Of course that won’t stop them from claiming the credit. If the market peaked in March, as the article claims, this was well before anyone was talking up the chances for an interest rate increase, so the first paragraph which says“the mere talk of higher rates deterred property investors and heralded the likely end of the three-year housing boom,” can’t be right. I wonder how it got in there? Surely not as a result of spruiking to journalists (took three to write this article) by the inflation guardians desperate to defend their position and reinforce their reputations for omniscience and omnipotence?

If we were told that from now on all major decisions by our government had to be vetted and okayed by the US Congress there would be national uproar. After all, haven’t we fought in two world wars to maintain national sovereignty?
But our national sovereignty is draining away more each day. No, not through those international treaties the rednecks get all excited about, but through so-called free trade agreements. These can be either multilateral through the WTO or bilateral like the current agreement being hurriedly negotiated by Australia and the US.
The problem is that such agreements aim at removing all restraints on trade, and sooner or later almost anything can be interpreted as such. In particular, government actions for social equity purposes (like the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme) or environmental protection (like a species quarantine regime) can be seen in this light.
There is some irony here, and some simple politics. For instance, Australia is now weak in manufacturing, thanks to the demise of protection, which has decimated the working and lower middle classes, who tend, or at least tended, to vote Labor. While primary industry, which is the backbone of the conservative parties, has been made internationally competitive largely through government support programs like those run by the CSIRO. Indeed, it was the mining industry, with its international linkages, that pushed the whole neo-liberal (in Oz, ‘economic rationalist’) agenda so hard, while the manufacturing sector as a whole slept.
The principle of free trade is sound. Production should be carried out according to actual comparative advantage, no matter where. But given the complex and political character of the global political economy, and its various institutions, this is in fact a recipe for consolidating existing inequalities in economic power. The developed nations, of course, originally got that way by protecting their own manufacturing sectors, and then decided everyone else should be subject to a free trade system. The Asian Tigers – at least until they got clobbered by the global finance system still run from London, New York, Tokyo, etc – were succeeding though their own version of industry protection through strong government. The extent to which the developed nations do actually open their own manufacturing sectors to free trade tends to reflect their perception that their own economic interests have shifted into post-industrial sectors like services and finance.
Australia is in some ways a developed country, but in other ways it resembles more a developing economy. This is a tricky situation, and we should tread warily to maintain the careful balance needed to keep our privileged way of life. Handing our key decisions over to a bunch of American econocrats is not going to do that.
In fact, if we want to give up our national sovereignty we should do it properly and demand a world government. At least that way everyone would be in the same boat.

Goodbye to Steve Waugh, and a nicely timed exit at that. Still near the top of his game, not keeping some deserving young batsman out of the team, and as canny a captain as ever. But his batting was going downhill, and he was right to go.
Steve Waugh embodied how Australians like to think of the national character: not flashy, down-to-earth, best in a crisis, talented enough, and underneath it all a nice bloke. But there was another side to him that probably also reflects changes in the Australian character, a healthy opportunism manifested in his rather too frequent books.
Interestingly, new Labor captain and erstwhile cricket sledger Mark Latham said he’d welcome Steve into the ALP. Is this the start of celebrity politics in OZ, as foreshadowed in my recent OLO piece?
If Steve does go into politics (and who knows which side he’d choose: most of the footballers – with the notable exception of Justin Maddern – seem to be conservatives), I hope he bothers to do some reading and find out a little about social and economic matters, for starters. Over the years parliaments of all kinds have been replete with men and a few women who thought they knew all they needed to when they entered parliament. We just can’t afford that mixture of arrogance and ignorance in our pollies any more.
And spare a thought for Ricky Ponting, the new captain. Unlike Steve, he inherits a team probably in decline. This test series showed just how much Australia relies on McGrath and Warne to bowl opposition sides out (does anyone think India would have made 700 runs if Shane Warne had been bowling? I suspect the Indians murdered McGill’s test career along the way to that total). After the resounding success of Mark Taylor (who was set up by Border’s hard work in the bad old days) and Waugh, Ponting can really only fail. Especially as the other cricket nations seem to be catching up at last (although, what’s the betting on England being top side by 2006, with or without Rod Marsh’s brain-work? Dennis Lillee told me it was Marsh behind Australia’s current all out attack strategy, promoted while he was head of the national academy).
Steve Waugh was a great cricket captain. But ultimately, cricket is a trivial pursuit. I wish Steve the best of luck in whatever he does next, but if it is something in the public eye I trust he knows that it will require much more than was ever asked of him on the cricket field.

On my way into work every day I am confronted by a billboard. This morning it carried an ad, quite a clever one, from Castlemaine Perkins, the brewers of Fourex Beer. Ray Weekes, the Chair of the Brisbane Institute (one of our major sponsors), habitually describes the beer as “our beloved brew”. 27 years ago when I first went to University this would not have been an overstatement. Back then, no-one north of the Tweed admitted to drinking anything else, even though there were a few Carlton pubs around with their coteries of furtive addicts. This Christmas I noticed that premium beers and wine were the big growth segments in Australian liquor retailing. I used to ascribe the metamorphosis in Brisbane drinking tastes to Expo ’88 which brought beer from around the world to our gullets, but these stats suggest a more general Australian trend.
The billboard features a chain saw, the teeth of which are made of beer cans and the caption is “For a XXXXer of a thirst…”. Each of the “x”s is made of crossed beer cans. It made me think about the convention of using asterisks, ampersands, “at” signs and other non-alpha characters in words of a scatological derivation. What is the difference between using the word and alluding to it? Surely they are just the same thing when they are decoded by your brain? If I substitute the letters “x”, “x”, “x” and “x” for “f”, “u”, “c” and “k”, and everyone knows they substitute for them, don’t they symbolically and actually amount to the same thing? Did the enigma code mean other than what it said because it wasn’t written in straight German, but in code? And didn’t it mean the same in English as it had in German and in code once it had been translated?
Well, I guess in this case they don’t. Because if it wasn’t for the convention, and the ludicrousness of it, the billboard wouldn’t be funny and Castlemaine Perkins would sell less beer.
The sign also reminded me of one of Fourex’s great marketing disasters. Somewhere, I think around 20 years ago, they (possibly under Alan Bond’s ownership) decided to launch Fourex in either the English or American markets. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this story. At the time Fourex was running an ad on TV and radio with the jingle, “I can feel a Fourex coming on, got the taste for it, got the feel for it, I can feel a Fourex coming on.” They were going to use this jingle in the launch. Only problem was, in the country of launch there was a particular brand of condom. It’s name – you guessed it – Fourex .
And if this usage is so universal maybe XXXX is the way you spell F*U*C*K, which makes me wonder what the “x”s stood for in the first place when they became the brand of the beer in 1878. (Asterisks merely for the purposes of fooling fascist firewalls and IT managers, not because I couldn’t quite bring myself to go all the way…or maybe a tacit admission that words are context as well as collections of letters).

Steve Irwin, the world famous “Croc Hunter”, is in trouble. He held his one month son Bob in the crook of his arm while he fed a whole chicken to a four metre crocodile named Murray as part of a feeding display at his Australia Zoo. As concern that he might accidentally feed Bob to Murray rather than the chook mounted the Queensland Department of Families and the Police were called in and the acting Premier was giving press conferences. What’s worse Irwin has said he will do it again.
I’ve never been a fan of Irwin. While some might call him an “environmentalist, conservationist, naturalist, and animal lover” and “unique” Australian for me he is a boof-headed self parody who bears the same relationship to real naturalists and film producers like Richard Attenborough as a boy running his ruler over the palings of the neighbours fence to make their dog bark does to Pavlov. If he really is an “ambassador” for Australia I’m not sure that it is a country that I am entirely comfortable living in. His TV programmes are smart alec, gimmicky and should be filed under “entertainment” rather than “science”.
Having got that off my chest, I don’t think he deserves the carpeting he is getting at the moment, but he had it coming – for two reasons. The first is the tall poppy syndrome. Irwin was becoming so omnipresent that someone was bound to try to find a way to pull him down a peg or two. Yet our relationships with famous people are subtle. If being a tall poppy was enough, then we’d all be happy to see Steve Waugh play his last test. There has to be something more.
Irwin provided that something more when John Howard visited Australia Zoo in October last year. Not only did he say John Howard was the best Prime Minister we have ever had but he also impliedly supported our involvement in Iraq. His overly fulsome and presumably unscripted support made the PM whince, but it got right up the goat of that significant proportion of the community who believe it is their holy mission to obliterate John Howard and all he stands for from Australian life. What’s more, Irwin, with his boofy unsophisticated approach to life is a pretty good proxy for the aspirational voter (except he hyperventilates rather than aspirates) who has embraced Howard.
So the “Bob and Croc” affair owes something to politics. It also owes something to the way we perceive risk and our sensitivity towards children’s issues. Essentially the charge against Irwin is one of child abuse and exploitation, in a very similar way that the charge in the “Children Overboard” case was also one of child abuse and exploitation. This raises the question as to what risks Irwin was really running. My suspicion is that the risks are not much higher than taking my children by the hand and standing on the corner of Main and Vulture Streets at peak hour waiting to cross over. Yes, the Croc might jump towards Irwin, but this Crocodile is well-fed (as a reptile they don’t eat a lot anyway, taking significant energy from the environment); it’s been regularly taking its meals this way so is trained; and Irwin presumably knows its habits inside-out and has his eye on things, just in case. Just as I know that as long as I stay off the road and keep an eye out for the one-in-a-million out-of-control truck that might jump the kerb, my kids are going to be O.K.
Irwin hasn’t helped himself since the incident. First he apologized. Now he has essentially retracted and promised to do it again, but that when he does he will not get caught. His explanation that his reason for exposing the child in this way is to teach it about crocodiles would make even an alligator smile. At one month of age children are still learning to work out the expressions on their parents’ faces, how to get their nappy changed when they need it, and how to get to that nice soft source of food between their toothless gums. They don’t have a sense of personality, and they are certainly not ready for a lesson in what constitutes crocodileness.
It’s much more likely that Irwin did this with his son because he is proud to have a son, and wanted to show him off. Most dads are like that. It’s also obvious that Irwin has a strong sense of family and a feeling that his family is a special case because of the family “trade”. When he held Bob in his arms he was stamping him as not just any one-month-old, but as a one-month-old Irwin. The selfish gene would have been at work as well. Why do we father children? Generally because we want to reproduce ourselves (even in the case of unintended pregnancies). So Steve was also saying “Look, my boy is just like me, he’s not scared of crocodiles either.”
My father used to cart me around the ships he worked on. Sitting on their front verandah with my “coudabeen in-laws” the other day they asked me whether it wasn’t dangerous to take a 14 year old through the centre of a cyclone sitting on top of a ship filled with highly flammable gas. Well, I guess it was, but hey, we were a seafaring family, and at least I wasn’t on the roads. Not that Dad actually wanted me to go to sea, but he did want me to be “practical”, a concept that encompassed a bit more than being able to bring furniture home from Ikea and assemble it.
Irwin also wanted to accentuate the perception that his act is dangerous. He is more an entertainer than a naturalist, and he makes his living by arbitraging between the impression of danger and the reality of it. As he is still alive you can be sure that there is a fat margin here from which to prise a substantial living. By having Bob with him he drew attention to the riskiness of the situation, thus accentuating the perception of risk, without having to increase it at all. Holding Bob was the inverse of alternatives like prodding the crocodile, or putting your head between its jaws which would have the same effect on the audience, but a potentially more fatal effect on Irwin.
This is the same psychological mechanism that the circus knife thrower employs when he uses his youngest and prettiest daughter as the target, or the magician when he saws through the teenage and nubile model when they both could have just as easily done it to one of the 50 year old stage hands. Humans are more distressed at the thought of something vulnerable or beautiful being destroyed than something robust or ugly. Next time you take your 5 iron to a cane toad wonder whether you could do the same thing to a green tree frog. So the vulnerable and beautiful at risk make the risk seem higher, even though it has remained the same.
Can Irwin extricate himself from his problem? Well, I’m not sure that it is really a big problem if you define it in terms of attendances at his zoo. If anything, they are likely to climb after this. In terms of his wider reputation and regard, I think he can kiss good-bye to any chance he had of being Australian of the Year this decade.
He could get around some public condemnation by delving into the nature of the human being and explaining his deeper feelings and what it means to him to be a father, but I’m not sure he’s spent a lot of time touring his internal geography. Irwin has made his living thus far from provoking wildlife, so probably best to stick to what he knows best. Who knows, if he can provoke the PC crowd, not to mention the Department of Families, enough they might turn him into a martyr – and Pauline Hanson, not to mention others, demonstrate what a strong force for self promotion that can be.

Without question, the biggest issue facing humanity in this century is how to deal with global climate change. Anyone who does not acknowledge this stark fact is simply in denial.
If the moderate predictions are correct and we see temperature rises of even two or three degrees on average this century, then we face the biggest challenge we have faced since we invented civilisation. Furthermore, this change in the weather will occur as we deal with a whole raft of other problems, including new technologies, population growth, new diseases, diminishing fresh water supplies and declining oil reserves.
Despite general agreement by scientists that SOMETHING really important is happening to the world’s climate, essentially nothing is being done at the moment to deal with it. Why not?
Firstly, there is the problem that out political decision-making processes simply cannot accommodate long-term decision making. Political leaders are always looking ahead to the next election, not the next problem to be faced. Our basic political systems are relics of the 19th century, while climate change is mostly a product of the 20th. We need 21st century political systems to deal with this problem.
Secondly, we cannot ignore the hard fact that most current political leaders think that the problem won’t become obvious until they are dead and gone. They are wrong about this, of course, since the effects are already apparent. But the reality is that the incredible egotism of many politicians makes them think that the world will end when they die. Our systems of politics place enormous emphasis on personality, and the people that thrive in this environment are mostly the least capable of acting selflessly.
So this combination of failed political institutions and personal egotism mitigate against appropriate decision-making on big, long-term problems like climate change. But there is another basic problem, and that is the system of thought known as economics. By this we usually mean classical or neo-classical economics which places the entire focus on the institution of the market, a supposedly rational and neutral mechanism for distributing resources within society (as opposed to, say, Keynesian economics which relies on action by the state). Mostly, when we use the term these days, we mean classical/neo-classical economics.
Economics simply has no way of dealing with a problem like global warming. Economics is concerned with the social relations of production and consumption, and getting the best mix between the two through trade mediated through the price mechanism. It thus makes gross assumptions about human beings, about the material world, and about reality itself.
Let us take one instance of how economic logic and actual material reality do not coincide. Essentially, economic logic is linear in that it sees a certain amount of input as producing an immediate, definite and proportional output. The material world is not necessarily like that, however. In the material world a vast amount of changed input can be soaked up with minimal or no change in apparent output, until suddenly it all changes. Basic states of being can thus alter quickly but with minimal warning.
So, for instance, the earth could soak up all the energy from burning fossil fuel with apparent ill effect, until a boundary is crossed, there is cascading effect, and a new state of equilibrium is suddenly created. The trouble is, this new state may be unsuitable for civilisation or even human life.
The root of this problem is the simplicity of economic models of reality. Essentially they are mechanical, and the natural world is far too complex for such models. This complexity is demonstrated in the famous ‘butterfly effect’ when a cyclone can be generated by a complex set of relationships originating out of one butterfly moving its wings. When we move into the realm of biology, or self-organising systems, this problem of complexity is greatly compounded.
The complexity of biological systems and the ramifications for economics (or more accurately, wealth generation) have been discussed in some of the recent writing on ‘clustering’. According to these analyses, real wealth these days comes out of knowledge and especially the interaction between different sets of knowledge. The complexity of these interrelationships makes analysis almost impossible, so theorists look instead for indicators. For instance, one theorist has argued that the best indicator for optimal clustering is a significant gay population.
So, economists, when they think about global warming at all, think that we will get plenty of warning about climate change, and then presumably certain – but so far unstated – economic factors will change that will deal with the situation to ‘clear the market’ and produce a solution.
It should be clear that the whole conceptual model of change in economics is inadequate in dealing with change in the material world. Unfortunately, this restrictive model of social organisation is completely dominating mainstream discourse, especially when it comes to politics.
In Australia we have seen over the last two decades the national development model, in which the government and other state-based institutions (such as the industrial arbitration courts) play a central role superseded by the so-called economic rationalist ideas which give final authority to markets. To confront out own domestic environmental crisis, including salinity, governments will have to take the prime role. To play a part in global attempts to control climate change our national government will also need to participate.
At least we have a national governing system that we can crank up again after some years of neglect (with the associated popular disillusion). One of the biggest problems facing us is that we do not have a global equivalent to allow real decisions to be made, and to ensure that the costs of dealing with climate change are allocated fairly.
Sooner or later, perhaps even this year, the climate change problem will break through into the public consciousness and become seriously political. When it does, the need for general reform of our political systems and the need to attract real talent into these processes will become starkly obvious.

Does the international public really think that Kurt Nilsen was the best singer in the World Idol competition? I suspect not. The real winner in terms of being the best singer and performer is probably Kelly Clarkson. In my previous post I suggested that Clarkson was the stand-out performer but would suffer from anti-American sentiment around the world. How strong was that sentiment? Hard to say, but it clearly showed up in the Arab world vote where she came in second last (so I understand). Clearly this was a result not of performance or musical taste (they went for the Polish singer Alex) but of regional politics. That she didn’t come in absolute last in this area might be a sign that the US can redeem itself in Arab eyes.
I suspect (and there is no way of knowing for sure without doing polling, which of course no-one is going to do now) that Nilsen was a beneficiary of everyone wanting their own regional idol to win. In my previous post I tipped him as a likely winner because he was the “least offensive” and his gap toothed smile also gave him a chance of “underdog” status.
Another factor which may have worked in his favour was that the voting turnout was low. Only the most motivated were actually voting, and motivated voters are more likely than others to think tactically.
Next time (if there is one) they run a World Idol contest can I suggest some tweaking to the voting system? Rather than automatically giving each contestant 12 points from their home “electorate” they should allow voters to vote for their own country representative and decide how many points they get by benchmarking their first preference vote against all the other first preference votes cast for home country participants in all the other “electorates”. They should then require preferential voting down the ticket for all the other contestants. That way they would generate a much higher voting turnout which should give a deeper result. Whether this will be a better result is a different (and ultimately unknowable) question.
Of course, they could only conduct this sort of voting over the Internet which would mean some modification of the sms voting procedure that they use now. As sms is one of their revenue streams you couldn’t expect them not to use it. This could be achieved by requiring anyone wanting to vote to send a blank sms message in. The Idol people could then send back a randomly generated identifier which could be used to then vote online. Not only would they generate twice the sms revenue as this would involve two, not one, messages which the voters could be charged for, but it would ensure that voters only lodged one vote each.
If anyone from World Idol is dedicated to scouring the web for posts on their competition and wanted to know more I’d be happy to explore the possibilities! 😉 National Forum could probably even handle their software requirements and introduce some qual into their polling.

The release of cabinet papers from 1973 gives us a chance to review those dramatic years of the Whitlam government. It is hard to overestimate the importance of that first Labor government after 23 years of stultifying conservative rule. Australia was in dire need of social reform, if only to keep pace with changes occurring overseas. Even after all these years, when we consider the most significant social and economic reforms of the last fifty years, a few can be sheeted home to Hawke but most to Whitlam.
Indeed, Whitlam’s longevity and sustained engagement in political life has to a degree masked his crucial role in Australian history. His work in first reforming the ALP so it was a credible political force again, and then being at the centre of developing policy reform in so many areas, was an extraordinary feat in modern politics. We will consider Mark Latham a startling success if he even does half as much. I would argue that Whitlam is – by any criteria and with all his well-known faults acknowledged – one of the greatest Australians ever.
The Whitlam government might have been the start of a golden age in Australian history when economic reform, social reform and foreign affairs reform coincided to revitalise this country. But the Whitlam government ran afoul of two of the most important influences on Australian life. The first was the newly forming global economy which made national policy-making much more difficult. The global experience of stagflation and the oil shocks would have put any Australian government under dire pressure. This was a particular problem for Whitlam who inherited an expansionist budget from the previous government and who came in with many new spending objectives.
The other problem was the mass media, in particular the press which still dominated political reporting at that time. Perhaps most important was the Murdoch press which initially supported Whitlam but soon returned to their natural stance of strident support for the conservatives. Every problem faced by the government, such as ministerial shuffles, was portrayed as a political crisis and exploited to destabilise the government.
In 2004 these two problems are worse than ever. National economic policy is virtually hostage to global economic forces which can wreck the Aussie dollar or put pressure on interest rates of this small to mid size economy with ease. This then affects inflation and unemployment rates, and consequently the chances of the governing party maintaining power.
As for the mass media, we now have much greater influence by TV and radio, but the press still tend to set agendas and do any real investigative work. The advent of new technology was a chance to reinvigorate the mass media in Australia, but the Liberals have pretty much handed the reins back to Packer and Murdoch who have greater influence than ever.
I would like to think that Mark Latham embodies some of the intellectual qualities of Whitlam and I hope that he gets the chance to show them off as prime minister. I also hope he gets a bit more time than Whitlam did before the usual suspects mobilise their vast resources to return government to the natural ruling party.