It’s possible Kevin Rudd may have been behind a community campaign to independently support him, going on photos supplied by a reader. Apparently signs that weren’t official ALP signs,  supporting Kevin went up without being authorised. The authorisation was written on in pen later on in the day when the lapse was pointed out to the returning officer. (more…)

Independents can be independents, until they have to exercise power. Then they seem to remarkably quickly coalesce into what looks like a political party of sorts. Or at least that appears to be the case of the three men in a tub – Katter, Oakeshott and Windsor.

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Quickly now, in 3 seconds answer this question: does your family have private medical insurance? If you know the answer, give yourself 5 points. Now another quickie (no cheating, by looking at your will or asking your accountant) Do you own any properties? If you got that right, you get another five points and hit the jackpot.

You have now scored better than the Greens candidate for the Senate in the ACT, Lynn Hatfield Dodds, who, according to an article in today’s Canberra Times, could not say whether her family had private health insurance, even though she was holding forth on the topic.

Shocked? It gets worse, this time from the ACT Labor government. They were going to buy Calvary Hospital for $77m, but it got messed up and fell apart. Now it turns out (I’m don’t know whether to laugh or cry) that they paid Price Waterhouse Coopers to look into the ACT government finances, and it turns out the ACT government already owns that hospital. So I guess that was $77m that would have been down the drain.

That’s the level of informed knowledge among our political elite here in the capital, and I hope it gives you comfort. That is, you can never now be disappointed at any other politician’s or government’s ignorance.

It’s like when I used to teach high school mathematics, and soon learned that it was impossible to underestimate the abysmal level of knowledge of my students or their total lack of interest in the subject. Now Science Daily News tells me students don’t even understand what the = sign means. It seems they treat it more like a running thing, as on a calculator.

It is surely not OK for government accounts to be so complex, convoluted or opaque that the government has to hire a consultant (I don’t want to know how much they were paid) to tell them what they own.

Another big negative for the Greens candidate was her spiel about how cutting the public service here would hurt the ACT economy, bla bla. Anyone who has ever been near the public service in Canberra knows that it is top heavy and bloats the whole local economy. Sad that the Greens can’t point that out and call for a bit of reform instead.

One would never get to the bottom of it, but I would venture to guess that much more than the equivalent of the wastage of Building an Education Revolution gets wasted on general salaries every year. But who’s counting?

CODA: an excellent presentation today by an environmental epidemiologist said that today’s climate change is happening at 30 times the rate after the last ice age, when wine was indeed grown in England.

Joseph Stiglitz probably can’t be called a babe, he’s too hairy, too old and much too wise. But to me he’s an intellectual babe, and hearing him speak at the ANU this week was as rewarding as I expected it to be.

The Canberra Times article said the audience, which must have been at least 1000, included many top policy officials, academics, and pollies. I sure hope they were listening and taking heed, because his pleasant, gently humourous discussion of the GFC both reinforced and extended received wisdom on the topic.

As a reminder, Stiglitz is a double Nobel Prize winner, former head of the World Bank, and now a Columbia prof. He also co-authored a book on the 3 trillion dollar war in Iraq.

But it was a question at the end that resonated most with the crowd of insiders, and we joined in the big clap at his answer: he was asked how long Australia could continue to be properous if we depend on exports of coal, and how this might be affected by climate change.

He said what we all know deeply: that the underpricing of risk in the GFC was much less than the underpricing of natural resources. Therefore a price on carbon is a ‘no brainer’.

He advocated taxing bad things, as incentives are the one thing economists agree are important. Taxing good things just doesn’t send the right messages.

From this perspective, higher oil prices, which are coming, quicker than you will want, are a good incentive, as burning oil is bad and preserving it for more important products than driving cars needs to be incentivised.

Obvious conclusions to draw are that a) light rail right down our east coast is both necessary, critical, and affordable (from a future perspective) and b) carbon taxes are the only sensible way to go, because as Stiglitz responded, the earlier you get used to the pain of taxing coal the easier it will be to adapt, and besides, it raises revenue for alternatives. (double duh!), and c) basing our economy on endless growth and consumption is insanely suicidal.

Today Russia burns, Pakistan soaks, wheat crops fail. Are we really so arrogant to believe our turn won’t come, and that we don’t need to change our addictions?

Julia Gillard has had appalling polling figures this last week. Nielsen shows her losing, Galaxy has it 50/50 and only Newspoll has her ahead. All this when a week ago she apparently had a 6 point margin over the opposition. Could the  Weekly photoshoot have anything to do with this? (more…)