Research into hurricanes in the North Atlantic indirectly suggests that the last 100 years in Australia have been relatively wet. Forget about Greenhouse. Just the normal swings and roundabouts of the climate have the potential to be devastating.
According to a paper (pdf 292 kb) published in Nature, intense hurricane activity over the last 5,000 years is controlled by El Nino and the West African Monsoon. In years when there are more and stronger El Ninos there are fewer hurricanes. What’s more, in a challenge to vulgar Greenhouse assumptions, there appear to have been more severe hurricanes in the past than the ones we’ve seen recently, even though the sea was colder then.
What struck me about the paper was the graph of reconstructed El Nino events going back 6,000 years. It appears that we are currently in an unprecedented period of relatively few strong El Ninos. Given that we believe that there is an inverse relationship between El Nino events and rainfall in eastern Australia, could the last hundred or so years have been much wetter than average, and this current drought puny by comparison to others that have occurred quite recently in geological time?
Perhaps we should be spending more taxpayer monies reconstructing paleo-climate, and less modelling future climate scenarios. The past seems scarier than the models, and indeed could be the future.

I didn’t think it would happen, but Therese Rein has decided to sell her Australian business, thus more or less removing the conflict of interest that Rudd has. I say “more or less”, because the value of the business is dependent on the current job placement regime staying in place, which is in Rudd’s gift if he becomes PM later this year.
I suspect this will play out in the media as a love story and enhance Rudd’s credibility.
It shouldn’t. The Rudds should never have put themselves in this position. They should have been able to see the problem and avoid it by taking the necessary steps before they were forced to. Turning it into a public relations coup doesn’t change the basic miscalculation which has to have elements of greed and wishful thinking in it, elements which are more often than not debilitating when you are running a country.

Rudd’s handled his “Reingate” fairly well because he’s been prepared to say he was “sorry”. It’s exactly the way that Peter Beattie has managed to prosper in Queensland as he stumbles from one disaster to the next. Beattie is so blatant that it has become a running joke amongst participants in our surveys.
The standard patter goes along the lines of, “I’m sorry and I take full responsibility, which is why you have to give me a mandate so that I can fix the problem, because I’m the only one that can.” One year this led to one of our respondents giving him the following end-of-season awards:
“Mea Culpa Award to Peter Beattie, it’s always his fault. Mirror Award to Peter Beattie again, there’s always something to be looked into. Best Supporting cast for remainder of State Parliament, whomever they may be… Vince Lester Trophy to , you guessed it, Peter Beattie, although not technically walking backwards, he has made an unceasing number of about-faces.”
Seems if you say you’re sorry you’ll be forgiven everything.
But for some south of the border, like the Prime Minister, “sorry” is the hardest word to say. Which raises the question, would we see a move in the polls if he learnt to pronounce it.

Therese Rein’s businesses represent real ethical challenges to Kevin Rudd, but it is unlikely that the government will pursue them, for fear of incurring the wrath of Australian women.
Today’s Australian carries the story that Rein underpaid some workers. Rudd says that it was an honest mistake. That’s hard to swallow, and one should give him the same benefit of the doubt that he would undoubtedly have given Howard in the same situation.
The response from many is that a married woman ought to be able to carry on her own business irrespective of who her husband is. That’s true, as far as it goes. It shouldn’t automatically be the case that a husband’s occupation ought to have a bearing on a wife’s – it’s just as reasonable that her’s ought to have a bearing on his. But some occupations are just not compatible with others, and it is up to the couples to manage them, and in cases where they are not compatible, one has to give way.
This is particularly so if, rather than the occupations being exclusive domains where each of the partners operates without reference to the other, they collaborate and discuss issues. Even more so when one partner, in this case Rudd, appears to operate as the public spokesman for the other.
A good, if unlikely, demonstration of the principle I am talking about is that it would not be possible for a man or a woman to be a minister of religion if their partner owned an escort agency, at least not in any mainstream church that I can think of. The couple would have to chose between vice and the vicarage.
Rudd’s problem doesn’t arise because his wife is in business, although it doesn’t help when she allows things like this to happen. His problem arises because her major client is the Australian Government, and he is obviously intimately bound-up in her company as well as aspiring to be Prime Minister. You can’t have a husband and wife on opposite sides of a transaction when there is a fiduciary duty involved, as there is with public money.
If the Rudd’s are serious about running the country, Ingeus, her company, has to go.
Note: I see in this morning’s Australian that Rudd foreshadows that the couple may have to review ownership of the business. Full marks for that, but it’s taken a while. The problem should have been obvious some years ago. I first pointed it out in this post describing it as the “real elephant in the room” of conflict of interest.

If you like omens, the New South Wales “under dogs” just lost the first state of origin match to Queensland. Will Kevin Rudd or Wayne Swan rubb it in tomorrow when they face the New South Wales under-dog from Bennelong over the dispatch box?
Still, state of origin football goes down to the wire, even when one side seems well in control. And there are two matches to go. I’m still hesitant to write Howard off, but it looks increasingly like he has no hope of winning the next election, and ironic that when he finally admits the truth and says the coalition faces “annihiliation”, Labor claims it is all just a clever ploy.
It’s certainly calculated, because Howard does have the opportunity of telling, or not telling the truth. And it’s a little odd he should have opted for the truth now, because when Peter Debnam made exactly the same admission in the New South Wales election campaign Howard publicly contradicted him. Was that a case of mixed messages, or was Howard keen to keep Labor in power in all states of Australia?
I haven’t heard the government playing the line too strongly yet, but surely one of the themes of the next election has to be this: While there are 9 state and federal governments in Australia, only one of them works, so why hand power to the party that stuffs everything else up? In other words, and with Rudd’s CV as the eminence grise of the Goss government on the table, if you can’t run Queensland, how can you run the country?
If Rudd and Swan do rub it in tomorrow, it will be a case of mixed messages, because Labor has been trying for under-dog status themselves, even though they are obviously the front-runners. But the Liberals also have their own mixed-messages, with Nick Minchin undermining Howard by telling Fran Kelly this morning that the Liberals can still win.
One thing state of origin football demonstrates is that the only winning strategy is to pick one for the game and stick with it, even when events and luck run against you. If you’re going to change strategy, then you do it at half time, or for the next match. It’s when the teams lose faith in their strategy and panic that they lose the chance of winning. Labor has a strategy, and they’ve been sticking to it. Their risk is carelessness. The Liberals are showing signs of panic.

That’s a possible conclusion that could be drawn from a new CSIRO report which says that the growth in the rate of CO2 emission in the atmosphere has risen from “1.1 per cent a year in the 1990s to a three per cent increase per year in the 2000s”. (All this in a decade when there has been no increase in global temperature.)
One contributing factor is that we are burning more carbon per dollars of wealth created than we were. China appears to be the culprit, but would China be providing as much of the world’s manufacturing if the rich countries of the western world hadn’t agreed to effectively cut back on their own manufacturing to meet Kyoto targets. In other words, Kyoto has quite possibly led to substitution of energy sources which is worse for global CO2 emissions than the status quo ante.
A failing of this report is that it measures carbon output at the source of production. This is the global warming equivalent of punishing the prostitute while pinning a medal on the client. If there was no market for manufactured product, then the CO2 involved wouldn’t exist either. Rich Europeans can bask in the praise of the world for their carbon sanctity, while stocking their houses with consumer nick-nacks forged in the Chinese fires of Hades.
Australia’s role in all of this is interesting. Australia’s carbon intensity is 20 percent higher than the world average, which presumably means a lot of dirty brown Victorian coal. So the argument that Australia joining Kyoto would have led to environmentally damaging substitution effects probably doesn’t hold water, depending on where our high energy consumption manufacturing would be displaced to.

The Howard government is trying to get Australians to focus on the reality of a Rudd government, but no-one’s paying attention. Howard has even admitted that the public is “considering a change of government”, a necessary precondition to convincing the public that change is in the offing. The problem for him is that the public is not paying attention.
In 2001 he was well behind in the polls, yet as the election loomed, and before the Tampa arrived, the polls started turning-up for him. Why? One reason was that he changed direction on the GST, petrol excise and beer earlier in the year.
Another reason is probably that he lost the Ryan by-election. The narrow win to Labor in a seat regarded as the jewel in the Liberal Party crown in Queensland confirmed that he really could lose. It got the public’s attention and made them start focussing on the possibilty of a Beazley Labor government.
This is speculation. I’ve got no way of checking it against qualitative polling at the time. However it is confirmed in some ways by the experience of Peter Beattie. In mid-2005 Beattie was travelling so badly that he lost the safe seat of Chatsworth with a 14% swing against him. 12 months later at the general election he was returned in another landslide. Just as with Ryan, the by-election losses confirmed Beattie could lose and made voters focus on the prospects of a Springborg government. It also made the opposition cocky.
Howard’s government is cocky, desperate and disorganised. It’s not conventional wisdom, but a by-election may be just what they need.

I don’t know why anyone worries about Howard stacking the ABC board when Auntie can produce agitprop like “The Bastard Boys” in an election year.
National Productivity and the inadequacy of our ports to handle the demand for exports have been issues in this election campaign. How much worse would things have been without Chris Corrigan?
I’m surprised that no-one’s tried to ask Kevin Rudd what he thinks about the docu-drama and whether he thinks Corrigan and Patricks were good or bad for the country. It bears fairly squarely on his claim to be the man for the future.
Howard’s been criticised for not being reformist enough, at the same time as he’s portrayed as being a political ideologue. He’s neither. His stewardship of the country has been unspectacular and stable. On the one hand he’s increased the size of government and kept most of the bounty of the economic good times to gift to privileged groups, like parents of new born children, rather than giving them back to everyone as tax cuts. On the other he introduced a GST and we now have tax scales which only apply the top marginal rate to the very highest earners. More of the economy is in the hands of companies – that’s good because their only reason for being is to save and invest.
While much of the economy’s bouyancy can be sheeted home to the commodity boom, it doesn’t explain everything. And even if it did, it’s hardly surprising that we do well in commodity booms, because our economy is more heavily focussed on commodities than most others. Good economic management in Australia means being able to exploit such booms.
There’s been a division of political labour in Australia over the last 25 or so years. That is that Labor gets to do the really hard economic reforms, because its constituency is relatively unconcerned about them, and the Liberals get to do the labour reforms, for the same reason.
I’m inclined to give Howard a last go, because while he’s been a reasonable steward of the economic reforms, his labour reforms haven’t had a chance to be imbedded yet. And without those reforms, we’re not well-suited to face the future.

Galaxy’s latest poll in Bennelong has John Howard losing to Maxine McKew. As the PM says – no big surprise there. If it said anything else you’d say the sample was bad, because it would be completely out of line with everything else the polls currently say about the state of the parties’ votes.
Except that the part of the sample dealing with the old Bennelong is out of line with everything else the polls currently say.
Bennelong has been redistributed. According to the Sun Herald “The polls show that while support for Mr Howard and Ms McKew is at similar levels among voters in Bennelong at the last election, Ms McKew enjoys a lead among new voters in the seat.” It’s unclear whether they mean voters in the new areas, or those who’ve moved in, but either way it suggests that Howard has a huge personal vote.
Newspoll on the 1st of May says there is a 10% swing against the government, but in the old Bennelong it would appear that there has virtually been none.
Sitting members generally enjoy some sort personal vote, but rumours are that many current sitting members enjoy personal votes of heroic proportions. These are not generally picked-up by newspaper opinion polls because they ask for generic party votes rather than ones specific to the seat the respondent lives in.
There is another interesting disconnect in these polling figures. The media generally assume that McKew is well-known. But according to Galaxy “Ms McKew has clearly created a very favourable impression, but most voters remain largely unfamiliar with her.
Only one in three claims to know a fair bit about her, a further 37 per cent recall she used to be on television, 14 per cent know the name only and 15 per cent knew nothing about her. ”
This gives Howard an opportunity which he will try to exploit. Most voters aren’t voting for McKew, they’re voting against Howard. If he can paint some of the detail in on her in a way favourable to him then he can pull it back. In fact, he doesn’t need to paint it in on her so much as Kevin Rudd.
Politics is a question of alternatives. At the moment Howard is being judged against a perfect standard, rather than against his actual opponent. Polls like the weekend’s will shake the electorate out of its reverie. Howard should be happy with Galaxy.

Kevin Rudd’s response to the budget is not good enough. He’s claiming to be a visionary, but his promises are all variations on themes that the government has already made its own.
A major theme under Labor is that John Howard has wasted 10 years of opportunity and that Howard is stuck in the 50s. So what is Rudd’s budget response? He promises every school in the country $1.5 million to build a manual arts block. This is a riff on the moves that Howard has already made to promote the trades which is at the same time a step back into the 50s when plenty of schools had manual arts programs. That’s because TAFE hadn’t been invented then, and the Australian economy was much more aligned towards secondary industry.
Now we’re a country where tertiary industry is where the opportunities are.
It’s also worth noting that tertiary industry gives a country better opportunities for high growth because they require less capital, and get a higher return on it. So Howard’s pitch on universities, which feed into the tertiary sector, is actually more visionary and more likely to deliver a country equipped for life after the mining boom.
Undoubtedly Rudd’s promises are just as carefully targeted as the government’s. Trade training always goes down well with blue-collar conservatives, a group that Howard has made his own. And there would be plenty of females 25-40 (a key swing group) who are sweating on a tradesman coming to fix something this side of the New Year. More trade training gives something to both groups.
But why should voters trust Rudd on his education promise? Afterall, trade training is a state responsibility and the reason that we are short of tradesman is because of mismanagement by state labor governments. Coming from Queensland Rudd would know how to play this refrain. We can all sing along with Peter Beattie when he says “I take full responsibility for the problem, I created it, and that’s why I want you to give me a mandate so that I can fix it.” Works well for Peter, will it work for Kevin?