Here's the quote

Lenore Taylor referred to this last night on Q&A, but I see that Michelle Grattan had already quoted it on line:

In all Abbott’s talk about the mandate he will have, it is worth noting his own view in other circumstances. He wrote after the Howard government’s 2007 defeat: “[Opposition leader Brendan] Nelson is right to resist the intellectual bullying inherent in talk of ‘mandates’. What exactly is Rudd’s mandate anyway: to be an economic conservative or an old-fashioned Christian socialist? The elected opposition is no less entitled than the elected government to exercise judgement and to try to keep its election commitments.”

Thanks for explaining that to us, Tony!

I trust the new Labor leader will quote that back at the government frequently with respect to carbon pricing.

The other matter which will make the debate interesting will be the IPCC report due out very soon.  It is expected to be strong, and should make the Labor and Green's position on carbon pricing appear more principled than ever.

If Labor had any sense, they would also be lining up economists to talk about how the "direct action" plan cannot plausibly reach its targets at the set cost Abbott has committed himself to.

I also note this from the LDP's website:  after a lot of dumb skeptic talk about how AGW isn't yet proved, it ends with:

Should the evidence become compelling that global warming is due to human activity, that such global warming is likely to have significantly negative consequences for human existence, and that changes in human activity could realistically reverse those consequences, the LDP would favour market-based options.

I doubt that a libertarian Senator will ever change on this - but if their website is to be believed, they may prefer carbon pricing to "direct action".

Nice graphic

Arctic sea ice delusions strike the Mail on Sunday and Telegraph | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | theguardian.com

The Arctic Sea Ice extent minimum, which is only a short time off, is going to be much higher than last year's record, but as noted in the above article:

As University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins noted last year,

"Around 80% of the ~100 scientists at the Bjerknes [Arctic climate science] conference thought that there would be MORE Arctic sea-ice in 2013, compared to 2012."

The reason so many climate scientists predicted more ice this year than last is quite simple. There's a principle in statistics known as "regression toward the mean," which is the phenomenon that if an extreme value of a variable is observed, the next measurement will generally be less extreme. In other words, we should not often expect to observe records in consecutive years. 2012 shattered the previous record low sea ice extent; hence 'regression towards the mean' told us that 2013 would likely have a higher minimum extent.

And this is nicely illustrated by this lovely gif, which I don't think I have seen before:

Uncle Rupert's election thoughts

My imagined thoughts seem likely to be accurate, given the way he tweeted recently:

He must have really enjoyed the IPA dinner a couple of months ago.   No wonder The Australian has become the Official Journal of the IPA and its pet blog Catallaxy.

Not bad, Jack

I've been looking through some of the comments at John Quiggin's blog, and note that Jack Strocchi's seems pretty reasonable.  I'll extract two bits from it:

The sixth point to make is that there is a paradox at the heart of the AUS polity: the public appear to despise the Centre-Left’s psephologically whilst broadly agreeing with the Centre-Left ideologically. Thus the Centre-Left has been wiped out at both state and federal levels, yet there is no great public enthusiasm for austerity or Hewson “Fightback” program. This is demonstrated by Abbott’s Big Government me-tooism on the subjects of Gonski education, national disability and some kind of national broadband program. He is also reluctant to revisit industrial relations, a traditional favorite of the L/NP Right.  ...

The tenth and final point to make is that the ALP did not really deserve to lose this election. going by the its performance, politicians and policies. Its economic administration was competent, there were no appalling ministerial scandals (apart from leadership tussles which were finally settled), its headline policies were broadly popular. At some basic level the electorate has made a bad decision – especially given that revoking the carbon and mineral taxes will empower the oligarchy. I draw this conclusion reluctantly as I am a fervent populist. I can only hope that the electorate comes to their senses in due course. In the meantime the ALP must work overtime to make themselves fit for government, as they did after the 1975-77 disasters.

Everyone's a winner, baby*

I didn't see all of the election coverage last night:  we were having a meal at an Italian restaurant where the family next to us had a few kids who probably had a combined count of 5 vomits during their stay, with the last one being particularly spectacular.  (The youngest toddler would vomit, then cause the older kids to get sick in sympathy.  I felt sorry for the parents, but nonetheless was happy to see them leave...)

Anyhow, I was home in time to see the Rudd "victory in defeat" speech, which did go on a bit, to put it mildly; and caused tension by making Labor sympathizing viewers wonder if he was ever going to get around to saying he wouldn't lead the party in Opposition.

The Abbott speech was pretty lame, I thought, and the optics of  it most noteworthy for the way in which it seemed that election victory was finally deemed good enough reason for the jettison of his barnacle-like daughters.  (And yes, one was still dressed like Sporty Spice.  Odd.)  From the ABC coverage, the family started heading up the stairs to the stage to join him at the end, only to find he had already descended into the crowd.   Good on ya, Tone, way to keep a look out for what's going on with the family.   I assume the young guy who then gatecrashed the family together on stage happened later - it didn't appear on the ABC.

One good thing about this election result is that I don't think anyone can plausibly claim to be puzzled by it - there really should be a lot less of this journalistic guff about Party X having lost its way and having to have a 12 month period of navel gazing to work out what went wrong  (which happens now whenever Party X loses an election.)   We all know exactly what went wrong - basically, Kevin Rudd and the fractious internal politics of the last 4 years.

At about 34% of the primary vote, this is low for Labor, but who doesn't just mentally tack on the Greens to get a true picture of combined Left leaning vote?  At 8.5%, the Greens are no doubt suffering from the replacement of the cheerful Bob Brown with a woman who naturally looks and sounds perpetually unhappy.   But the combined 42.2% is not that far from the combined Coalition vote which looks like 45.3%. (As to where to position the Palmer vote - God knows.  I suspect it is just a generic protest vote against politics, and neither side can take much comfort from it.)

It was therefore hard to be depressed with the result, because there was the feeling that everyone could claim to be a winner, in one way or another:

#  There were enough seats in Western Sydney and Queensland saved for Rudd to plausibly argue he had helped the party after all.
#  Julia Gillard was gracious in the off stage support for Labor, and her "captain's pick" of Nova Peris worked out after all.
#  The Labor Party won by Kevin giving up the leadership.
#  Mad Clive gets to create what will probably be some wildly unpredictable and theatrical political stories for the next couple of years at least before he has some physical or mental breakdown.

And of course, Tony Abbott gets to hesitate his way on national TV as PM instead of mere Opposition Leader.   For the reasons I have been outlining for years, I don't expect he will do well, and he and his Party have faked their way into government.   We now get to see if my Peter Principle diagnosis of him gets to be confirmed from the loftier position of PM.  (Regardless of what the public thinks, it's already been confirmed to my satisfaction.)

As for my feeling on the Labor leadership - Bill Shorten performed well on his television appearances during the campaign, I thought.  Before that, over the last year or two, I felt he has often seemed too stressed and grumpy, but his professional and personal life has been unusually difficult over the same period.   I still think he is the most appealing of the possible candidates.

* families, particularly those on low income receiving top up superannuation and assistance with school expenses excepted, of course.  As well as those who rely on penalty rates, public servants in Canberra, companies that wanted to decide on long term electricity investments within the next 12 months, car manufacturers and their employees, genuine refugees hoping for family reunion, environmentalists, etc.   Apart from those, the future's looking fine and dandy.
 

Pre-election post election commentary

The polls certainly look bad for Labor.  Or should I say, for Kevin Rudd, given the almost presidential style of this campaign.

On the up side:  the broader Australian public have finally joined me in disdain for Rudd as a politician.  Took them long enough:  I was there in 2006.

On the downside:  seems a fair few people over 35 have started to sort of like Tony Abbott.  I refer to the age factor in this because it seems there is hardly an under 30 year old in the land who he doesn't creep out.  As with Rudd, I predict his popularity, even with the dag demographic, will be but a fleeting thing.  There is every reason to believe he will not keep spending promises, will have some trouble on the international stage (I don't expect him to go over a treat in Indonesia especially),  and even (I've been reading around) have some early ministerial scandals.   Some people have said we may be looking at something like the Fraser government after Whitlam, and there might be something in that, but I expect Abbott to be worse.

There is much speculation going on about how the Senate might pan out.  The arcane system there seems to make it impossible to predict these days.  Last night on the ABC there was talk that the balance of power might be with three odd bods:  the creepy Victorian Senator John Lithgow John Madigan; Bob Katter mate, country and western singer James Blundell, and Nick Xenophon.  (I don't really know what to make of Xenophon - he certainly came across as an unsually lonely character on his appearance on Kitchen Cabinet earlier this year.) 

What a worry.

I'm going to be voting below the line to try to ensure as limited accidental preferences as I can.

 

For those who want to go prepared

senate.io — Australian senate below the line ballot paper tool

This looks like a handy tool.  Instead of pondering for 20 minutes in the local school hall (if it's a nice one, it was probably built by Labor, by the way) whether to put the Legalise Marijuana Party above or below the Climate Idiots Party, you can work it all out at home and print out your personal "how to vote under the line" card.

Neat.

Waste of cyberspace

My.  What a home for aging, bloviating, wannabe culture war warriors  Catallaxy has become.
(Have a look at this comment by someone about foreign aid cutbacks, too.  I won't even link to the comment about all males over 12 in Syria should be killed.) 

Keeps all the wingnuts in one location, though, so it serves a purpose, I guess.

The Coalition and research

Futile research or stealthy censorship?

Ian Musgrave puts the boot into the Coalition's populist stab at research funding yesterday:

Yes, that’s a good idea. We could set up a committee of experts to examine all grants in detail, and get them checked by external experts as well, before deciding on who to give money to.

Oh wait a second, we do that already, it’s called the Australian Research Council.

Now, I’ve been both an applicant and a reviewer of ARC grants, so I can tell you personally that the grant process is no cake run. The competition is fierce and the amount of grant money available is limited. The review process is exhaustive and more than a little harrowing. Only around 20% of all grants get funded, and you have to be exceptionally good for your grant to get up.

 But this part is most telling:

Great, now we have a bunch of auditors telling researchers what their priorities should be, that’s going to work out just fine. Not to mention the cost of having this team doing the re-prioritising. Anyone willing to bet that the amount of money saved by shuffling around grants with funny names that politicians don’t understand will be more than gobbled up by the Commission of Audit team?

Oh, and the funds clawed back from these “wasteful” projects to will be put into “new medical research programs for dementia, diabetes and tropical disease”. Yeah, except that isn’t the ARC’s role at all, that’s a completely different funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council or the NH&MRC.
I suppose it would be too much to expect that the Coalition would actually understand how research is funded in Australia.

This is hard to see as anything other a cynical attempt to defund topics the Coalition doesn’t like.

 It reminds me of the Howard government's poor judgement in stopping small funding for Australian contribution to dangerous asteroid hunting.

I am curious (yellow)

What scientists can see in your pee

Quite a lot, as it turns out, and it's all on line now: 

"Urine is an incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds going into our toilets," noted David Wishart, the senior scientist on the project.

Wishart's research team used state-of-the-art analytical chemistry techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to systematically identify and quantify hundreds of compounds from a wide range of human urine samples.

To help supplement their experimental results, they also used computer-based data mining techniques to scour more than 100 years of published scientific literature about human urine. This chemical inventory—which includes chemical names, synonyms, descriptions, structures, concentrations and disease associations for thousands of urinary metabolites—is housed in a freely available database called the Urine Metabolome Database, or UMDB. The UMDB is a worldwide reference resource to facilitate clinical, drug and environmental urinalysis. The UMDB is maintained by The Metabolomics Innovation Centre, Canada's national metabolomics core facility.

Looking back at the history of improving health

Life expectancy history: Public health and medical advances that lead to long lives. - Slate Magazine

It looks like this is the start of a series of posts about this fascinating topic.  Some of the things mentioned you would have heard before, but it's always interested to see snippets of information showing how the popular imagination about something is really quite inaccurate.  Like this:

One of the best tours of how people died in the past is The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the Little House on the Prairie books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!

Jericho as with Pascoe

Coalition costings: we finally get them and they're just political fluff | Business | theguardian.com

Greg Jericho makes a very similar assessment to Michael Pascoe's about the Coalition's costings:

Six billion dollars over four years. Or, given the total revenue over that time will be about $1,657bn, that’s about 0.36% of the budget over those years. Not a lot of room for error.

But they were about attacking waste. There was oodles of it, don’t you know. So how did they end up $6bn better off?

Well, today Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb, in a laughable 22-minute press conference, announced they will be cutting the growth of the foreign aid budget by $4.5bn, rephasing the water buyback scheme from over four years to over six years (a saving of $650m over four years) and a further 0.25% efficiency dividend for the public service to get $428m.

Those three measures account for 92% of the improvement of the Liberal party’s budget bottom line.

Talk about taking the tough choices. Cutting the growth in foreign aid. Who knew that was the biggest waste in government spending!

As Jericho then points out, the ridiculous thing is that Abbott is also trying to straddle the fence of whether or not the "commission of audit" will mean further cuts.

It's all pretty ludicrous.

Update:  by the way, surely the re-assigning of rail money to road construction indicates a pretty ad hoc approach to working out which infrastructure project is most beneficial?  I have complained about this a few times recently - everyone's saying it's important to put money into the "right" form of infrastructure, but making a trip to work, say, 15 minutes faster would seem something pretty hard to assess for its economic consequences.  

Update 2:  John Quiggin sounds the warning about the "commission of audit".

Pretty accurate, Waleed

Abbott's adoptive strategy on policy

Waleed Aly goes through the remarkable list of Labor policies and initiatives which the Coalition has come to endorse.  He concludes:  

 All this is a testament to the brutal efficiency of Abbott's opposition. He's quite prepared to bludgeon the government with an argument he later rejects. It's shameless, but it works because he does it with confidence and a straight face.

As I have been saying, it is also very similar to what Rudd did in  2007.  He picked up on one or two things the public did want changed (Workchoices in particular, but also - and people forget this - closing the "Pacific Solution") but overall he just ran a populist campaign as the softer, kinder John Howard. 

Tony Abbott would not admit this, but he has, on the face of it, turned out to be running as the stable Labor Party.  (His one distinguishing populist, and more wildly wrong headed than Rudd on Workchoices, policy is on carbon pricing.)

In both cases, it's the shamelessness of the approach that leads me to not respect it.  If they are going to ultimately support a policy, do so during the term of Parliament, not at the last minute.

And with Abbott, with his completely opportunistic, uninterested and unprincipled  approach to climate change, I could never vote for him.

Kevin's turn

Kevin Rudd with Annabel Crabb tonight was clearly more relaxed and comfortable than "Hah.Hah.Hah" Abbott, especially in the first half of the show.   There's no doubt that, despite his terrible reputation for being a difficult boss, he is close to his family, and there is no reason to question his assessment that he considers them his closest friends.   His daughter seemed, quite frankly, smarter than the Abbott daughters. (For one thing, she doesn't dress like Sporty Spice all the time, like one of Tony's daughter does, where ever she is.*)  And he has a nice dog: seeing him interact with it was definitely a humanising touch.     

But in the "one on one" with Crabb, there were plenty of flashes of the old fakery and over calculation in answers, and there is every reason to suspect he would still be a boss capable of making people very, very nervous.  It strains credulity to believe that he is felt worse about losing his 1996 campaign to become an MP than he did about the 2010 loss of leadership.  (Then again, maybe he was spectacularly emotionally immature in 1996, and had improved in that regard by 2010.  Who knows - he's a very hard man to judge on his self-reportage of his emotional state.)

I think he is obviously significantly smarter than Abbott, and can judge better who to take advice from.  On the other hand, it would seem his problem has always been over confidence in his own abilities, and it is very difficult to know how much more carefully he would listen to advice before making decisions if he were to be PM again.  He certainly failed to give a good impression of change  in the way he came up with what appeared to be (even if they weren't) ad hoc ideas in the course of the campaign.   I really think it was the way he announced these, without any explanation of how they had been decided upon, which started his leakage in the polls. 

But tonight, overall, he came out better than I expected.  I particularly liked his daughter's story about there being a good chance he would be sitting up reading a book at 4 am she arrived home as a teenager: it confirmed his nerdiness, but also made him seem a bit more human.    I think he probably would be a better PM this time around (in the unlikely event he wins government) as a result of his time on the backbench.  Keeping in check the old urge to make decisions quickly on the assumption that he is the smartest person in the room may be his burden for the rest of his life, though.

*  Too bitchy?  :)

The Joke

A pretty devastating assessment by Michael Pascoe of "Hockeynomics":

Remember all the times shadow treasurer Joe Hockey furrowed his brow, shook his jowls and growled that Australia had a budget crisis? Turns out he was only joking.

Either that or his “costings” disclosure is a joke. Or both.

After all the huffing and puffing, Hockeynomics is only proposing a $6 billion improvement in the budget’s cash bottom line over four years. In light of the past four years of hyperbolic fiscal posturing, this is genuinely astounding.
 
Even if you take year three and four budget projections seriously (and you really can’t, as everyone should now know), that works out to be an average improvement of $1.5 billion a year on a $400 billion budget – all of 0.375 per cent. It’s not even a rounding error. A half-decent Queensland storm can blow that away in half an hour.

By way of comparison, Tony Abbott is blowing $1.8 billion on reviving the novated lease/FBT tax lurk enjoyed by a minority of new car buyers, let alone an even smaller minority of voters. Consider the massive percentage increase in the Coalition’s budget improvement goal that could be obtained by implementing just this one tax policy based on principle and equity instead of subsidising a few salary packaging firms. Hey Joe, do the math.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/hockey-closes-campaign-with-a-joke-20130905-2t7ab.html#ixzz2dzkZVqdk

Thanks for the "so late it's useless" fact checks, Peter

Is Tony Abbott's $350 carbon claim hot air?

It's worth reading anyway.  (And watching the video on "can the GST be increased without the States consent".  Short answer:  yes.)

Trying to cheer myself up

Local intelligence

I cannot explain how, but entirely by accident, in the course of work this morning, I learnt which street, and pretty much which house, in Brisbane barking mad billionaire wannabe politician Clive Palmer lives, and it's only a suburb or so away from me.

Should I drive by his house on election night?  Is he having a party I can gatecrash?  Does he have a child easily kidnapped?  (A joke, a joke, Federal Police!  Mind you, he does remind me a bit of the mad furniture shop owner in Raising Arizona, who was willing to forgive on the return of the babies.  [Still a joke!  Seriously!])

Quite a surprise anyway.

Update:  I see by Googling that the street he lives in has been noted in the Courier Mail more than once.  My intelligence was less of a coup than I realised.  

Jericho on costings

Policy costings about more than the final figures - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A good explanation from Greg Jericho here of the games being played with "costings".

We need to know the final number, and it's great to know that it is accurate, but we still need to know how they arrived at that number.

The problem is many editors and news directors have focussed on the number and not the assumptions and parameters that determined the result. The ALP also fell for this old way of thinking when last week they announced that the Liberal Party had a $10 billion black hole.

In reality what the ALP had demonstrated was not that there was a black hole, but that if you used the assumptions and parameters previously announced by the Liberal Party the savings amounted to only $21 billion as opposed to the Liberals' announced $31 billion.

Both numbers are right. But we have no idea why they are different, because we have no idea how the Liberal Party arrived at its final number.

To use the running analogy, at best we know the vague distance they ran, but little else.

The ALP over-egged their case, but when the Treasury and the PBO released statements pointing out that the costings released by the ALP were not the actual costings of the Liberal Party policies, the media for the most part took that as meaning the ALP's $21 billion figure was wrong.

The Treasury and PBO had said no such thing. They had merely announced that the costings depend on assumptions and parameters. Do we know the assumptions or parameters of the Liberal Party's policies?

Nope.

His explanation of the difference the Parliamentary Budget Office has made is important too, but I won't reproduce that here.

The quiet economists

I have been rather annoyed with the general silence of economists on the issue of the Coalition approach to climate change in the lead up to the election.

As far as I can tell, there is virtually no economist who thinks "direct action" is a better longer term plan for achieving its stated goal than pricing carbon. The evidence is strongly suggestive that the carbon pricing is having an effect already on reducing electricity consumption.   The Coalition's Greg Hunt used to champion carbon pricing, until he was told he had to come up and sell with an alternative simply so that Abbott could have a different from policy from Labor.  Government seeded clean energy financing has been underway in other countries - I have not heard any economist talk about whether that has been considered successful or not.

As I have argued recently, there is plenty of room to be skeptical of long term economic modelling of the effects of climate change; but shorter scale economics modelling of how to be push society in a cleaner energy direction can be expected to make sense.

So why are the great majority of  economists who support carbon pricing sitting on their hands on the topic during the election? 

Still don't like him

Tony Abbott, and his daughters, were on Kitchen Confidential tonight. 

I'm thoroughly sick of the PR use of his daughters throughout this campaign.  Transparent as a tactic, I hope this is the last we see of such persistent manipulative use of children in politics.

As for Abbott himself:   sad to say, but his psychological make up only came out of the interview as being shallower than expected.  He's quite open about not being able to be open any more, confirming my oft stated assessment that he was more likeable as a somewhat contrarian Minister, than as the  the um-ing and ah-ing,  self censoring, constipated looking Leader that he is now.  [And that awkward "hah.hah.hah' laugh - maybe it's natural, but sounds very self aware to me.]

Left the seminary because a mate of his from Uni was getting to travel overseas and sign up really big contracts?   I thought souls were meant to be more important than money, but there you go.  (Actually, isn't it said that he did not fit into what he considered virtually a "gay" seminary culture, but I suppose it is too much to expect him to be too open about that on national TV.)  He made  mention of feeling his education (making a specific mention of his Rhodes scholarship) was being wasted.  Actually, he has had a career in which his economics qualifications have made little contribution, and his colleagues have said he has no natural interest in the topic.  Turns out it was wasted after all... 

He re-confirmed his upset at Gillard's misogyny speech, yet once again, he gives not the slightest indication that he recognizes his own provocative echoing of "died of shame", or years of not-so-subtle references to Gillard's childless status.   He accepts that he sees more "shades of grey" now than when he was a university conservative hard man.  Yet his political message over the last three years has been built around exaggeration and confrontation.

The funny thing about him is that he appears to be an introspective man, yet the explanations that he come up with about himself seem to fall well short of reality.

I hope he loses the election due to his policies, and the interview confirms that there is no particular  character reason for the public to regret such loss.

Who's that successful and visionary business leader again?

I had to remind myself about Roger Corbett, who is getting a lot of attention for having criticised Rudd and Labor (and praising Tony Abbott) on Lateline last night.

Oh that's right: he would be the Chairman of Fairfax who in 2004, as Eric Beecher told us last year, was confident the company would be the media "envy of the world":

After listening to my prognosis that the company faced a potential collapse of its traditional business model — I sketched out what I described as a “catastrophe scenario” under which The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age would lose much of their classified advertising in coming years — the Fairfax board studiously ignored my plea to implement overlapping strategies as “insurance” against that possibility.

One director, in particular, became quite agitated about what I was saying. “I don’t ever want anyone coming into this boardroom again,” he told his colleagues as he held up a copy of one of Fairfax’s hefty Saturday papers, “and telling us that people will buy houses or cars, or look for jobs, without this”. He then dropped the lump of newsprint onto the boardroom table with a thud.

That board member was Roger Corbett, now the chairman of Fairfax. He spent 40 years as a retailer, never worked in media or journalism, holds a handful of shares in Fairfax, and was paid $412,000 last year by the company. On the day he was appointed Fairfax chairman in 2009, Corbett presented a glowing picture of the way his company was handling its task. “The decisions taken in the last few years by management and the board have, I believe, put Fairfax in a position which is envied by media companies around the world,” he said.

 Gina Rinehart.doesn't like him either.  How easily I forget these things.  I wonder how she feels about him today after last night's performance?

Update:  the fact that Corbett worries about the ABC "crowds out" Fairfax, and thinks Workplace laws are holding up the economy, does make him more likely a Coalition sympathiser.  At least he does acknowledge a need for greater tax revenue, though.   But my real annoyance with him is the inappropriateness of expressing his highly partisan views as member of the Reserve Bank Board in a crucial part of the election campaign cycle.

Update 2:  so, he's actually a member of the Liberal Party, but it wasn't mentioned last night?  And the story ran this morning without that being mentioned?  Great job, media.

Update 3:  Actually, it occurs to me that it was also an obvious failing on Kevin Rudd's (or his team's) part too.  When asked about it yesterday morning, the first thing Rudd should have said "well he's a member of the Liberal Party, what do you expect him to say about me?"
 

Hopping to church in Luxembourg

Here's a charming story from the BBC about a centuries old hopping parade in Luxembourg.  Watch the video too.

Speculative physics in Nature

Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time : Nature News

Haven't had time to read this yet, but looks interesting...

A fair summary from John Quiggin

John Quiggin's take on the Coalition and Tony Abbott in this election campaign is pretty accurate, I think:

The case put forward by the LNP is based entirely on lies and myths. These include the claims that
* Labor has mismanaged the economy and piled up unnecessary debt and deficits
* Australian families are ‘doing it tough’ because of a soaring cost of living
* The carbon tax/price is a ‘wrecking ball’, destroying economic activity
* The arrival of refugees represents a ‘national emergency’
None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny. 

Then there’s Abbott himself. After 20 years in politics, I can’t point to any substantial accomplishments on his part, or even any coherent political philosophy. For example, I’m not as critical of his parental leave scheme as some, but it’s totally inconsistent with his general political line, a fact that his supporters in business have been keen to point out. On climate change, he’s held every position possible and is now promising, in effect, to do nothing. His refusal to reveal policy costings until the second-last day of the campaign debases an already appalling process. He treated budget surplus as a holy grail until it became inconvenient, and has now become carefully vague on the topic.

Economic failure and climate change

As an antidote to Tony Abbott talking about claimed long term economic benefits of removing carbon pricing to justify its removal, I would suggest people read this post by Michael Tobis and the comments that follow, particularly as to how they relate to economic modelling and climate change.

Tobis has been banging on about this for some time, but it seems to me that not many people pay attention.

I find him quite convincing.   Just as I would not expect an economist working in 1913 to have a good set of predictions about the global economy in 2000, even if there was no great intervening issue like climate change, I just do not see how it is plausible to trust modelling that is trying to anticipate economic costs of a 100 year change to climate that will have greatly varying local effects around the globe.

Now, its true:  environmentalists use modelling to justify carbon pricing.   So how fair is it to criticise the likes of Abbott when he uses economic arguments against carbon pricing?

It is fair, for a couple of reasons:   climate change will have much longer term effects than a mere century.  Some of those effects that are very plausible/ likely in the longer term are simply obviously disastrous - work out what 2 or 3 m of sea level rise around your favourite global cities is going to do to them, for a start.  But on the shorter scale as well, changes to the hydrological cycle are likely to have some very serious effects, and soon, and common sense suggests that they are not readily capable of effective adaptation.  The effect will also hit the poorer countries hardest.  Have you noticed the flooding in India and China this year?  You can only build so many useful dams in a country, even if it is rich.   Is there anywhere in Western Queensland you can build a decent drought fighting dam that won't evaporate at a furious rate?

[And even if the unlikely assumption that climate sensitivity is only 1.5 degree for a doubling of CO2, you still have the concern about what ocean acidification is going to do to the food chain in the oceans, with recent work indicating that krill in Antarctica may collapse, and a very uncertain future for pteropods as well.  There is no good way to really guess the knock on consequences of the failure of very large elements of ocean food chain like that, I reckon, although scientists are trying.]

Criticisms of economic modelling to show that other economic modelling is flawed therefore misses this whole point. It misses the common sense of the situation.

So ridiculous exercises by small government/libertarian poster boy Topher, for example, are not just a waste of time; they are a dangerous waste of time.   At least Greenies who use economics poorly to get to the right political response anyway can't be accused of that.

The future of taxes

Why taxes would rise under Abbott

Ross Gittens does some useful number crunching about why the tax take has to increase somewhat if either side wins the election.

Should Labor or the Coalition wear the most blame for not being up front about this?   This gets confusing.  Labor has run a scare campaign on Abbott and the GST.  Abbott & Hockey deny emphatically that it is at risk.  But then, Abbott and Hockey have run, of course, a 5 year scare campaign on the deficit and their ability to get back to surplus faster than Labor.  Yet they do not face up to the fundamentals.

I think the best outcome may be that either Abbott or Rudd gets replaced in the next term, and the new leader gets realistic on this.

Folks are dumb where I come from....

Rudd fails to rally voters in his home state

Well, how harsh should I be?  It's not as if I supported a return of Kevin Rudd, and I have puzzled many, many times over why he was ever popular in Queensland.   The State is not exactly renowned for supporting urban quasi-intellectuals.   Did they think his "folkiness" was genuine?

Anyhow, after first encouraging Labor's party machine that Kevin was going to do well in Queensland, people polled here have decided they don't like him much after all.

What's more, they are apparently looking at voting in fairly significant numbers for Clive Palmer's nutty rich man act, and he seems to have taken over the "Eccentric Politician We'll Vote For Because We Don't Like Politicians" role from Bob Katter.

If they collectively have 15% of the vote, their preferences are going to be pretty important, and the article claims that more of those voters claim they will preference Labor.  Especially those voting for Clive Palmer.

This is all very peculiar.  But the State that continued voting for Joh endlessly has always been a bit of a political mystery.

Barry's depressed, with justification

Barry Jones: the 2013 election and the death of rationality

The article is taken from a lecture, and so wanders a bit, but his end take on Joe Hockey seems particularly accurate:

I have watched, with some pain, election telecasts being given by the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, somebody who I have always had some regard for, balanced, recognisably human, and not a fanatic, with touches of self-mockery.

He could have taken a more subtle, nuanced approach in his pitch, saying, perhaps, “while it is true that Australia has had some outstanding successes, such as the AAA rating and 21 unbroken years of growth, nevertheless there are some worrying indications that…”, and go on from there.

Instead, he plays the catastrophist card, that the past six years had left the Australian economy as a smoking ruin, and the rest of the world is looking to see when Australia will turn the lights back on. Catastrophic? Disaster? Tsunami? The clear suggestion is that practically every nation, with the possible exception of Somalia, is performing better economically than Australia.

Does Joe Hockey really believe what he is saying? I hope not.

Uncertainty Queen's failure

Well, there you go.  Tamino has a good post about that "ENSO masks global warming paper" paper, and points out that Judith Curry has mis-read it spectacularly.  

I predicted that she would soon be shot down, remember.

The biggest mistake Julia Gillard made

...was in not promoting hard the argument that a fixed price for carbon permits for an introductory period is not a carbon tax.  

Listening to Rudd agree with journalists that this was a mistake only confirms this.  He gets no traction from saying that - people who have been brainwashed into thinking its the worst thing ever done by a government are not interested in his half baked apology for it.  

Labor would doubtlessly have been better off by arguing it is not a tax, and not a broken promise.

Let them eat oysters

To Live, the Oyster Must Die 

I had read before that oysters used to be the food of the poor in England, but I didn't realise it was quite to this extent:

As the population of London boomed, doubling again and again from the 16th century onwards, these little nuggets of protein became an irresistible way for the fishermen of anywhere within reach of the capital to make a living....
 
The oyster boom expanded as industrialisation accelerated, with oysters fuelling industrial Britain’s industrious workers. Modern machinery made them easier to catch, store and transport, and oysters became the signature food of Victorian Britain.

“The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir; here’s a oyster stall to every half dozen houses. The streets lined with ‘em. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation,” remarks Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.

That was published in 1836, and Londoners were only just getting going. In 1864, they consumed 700 million oysters. That’s five oysters a week, every week, for each man, woman and child in the city.

The same was true elsewhere in Britain, with predictable results. Oyster fishing began to collapse in Scottish waters in the 1870s, and had all but ceased there by 1920. In the 19th century, fishermen discovered a 200 by 70 mile oyster bed on the seabed between England and Germany, and had cleaned it out within decades. 

And we have still not learned from our mistakes. In the 1970s, fishermen found oysters in the Solent, the channel between the Isle of Wight and the South Coast, giving hope that the industry could be reborn sustainably, but we ate them all instead.

Of course...

Tony Abbott willing to break emissions pledge over funding hole

Malcolm Turnbull on, I think, The Drum last week, called Abbott an "intelligent skeptic" on climate change.

No: Abbott is not smart enough to take sensible policies to reduce CO2 seriously.  He is the triumph of political opportunism and shallowness over making a genuine attempt to deal with an important issue in a sensible way.

Turnbull should be appalled at this, but there is a possibility, I suppose, that he could still be leader if Abbott implodes.  His keeping quiet might therefore be good in the long run.  At least, I hope so.

Update:   I had forgotten how outspoken Turnbull used to be on this issue.  From 2009:

....the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion "climate change is crap" or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, its cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world.

Now politics is about conviction and a commitment to carry out those convictions. The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is "crap" and you don't need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing. After all, as Nick Minchin observed, in his view the majority of the Party Room do not believe in human caused global warming at all. I disagree with that assessment, but many people in the community will be excused for thinking the leadership ballot proved him right.

Remember Nick Minchin's defense of the Howard Government's ETS was that the Government was panicked by the polls and therefore didn't really mean it.

Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it.

His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with "Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but....."

Yes, that's the pathetic political calibre of the  man about to be PM, apparently.

Politics and singing noted

It seems that Rudd got good reviews for his campaign launch speech, but with Newspoll doing another leap, this time in the wrong direction, no one can envisage the possibility that Labor will win.

But I did think the Abbott attack ads I saw while watching X Factor last night with my daughter were pretty good.  Even on a very soft interview on Insiders yesterday, Abbott still hesitates and ums and ahs like there is no tomorrow whenever a journalist asks an even mildly difficult question.   This makes for pretty good ads, for Labor.

Speaking of X Factor:  it's a very good show for parents to watch with pre-teen daughters, I reckon.  It leads to easy conversation about the inappropriate dress, make up and song choice of teenage contestants, and the silliness of raunchy choreography.   This year is better than last year:  there are far fewer tattoos on display in the judging panel, and on stage, and there are fewer contestants about whom I cannot comprehend why they are still there.

I have only seen a bit of The Voice - I thought it was pretty awful in comparison.  The X Factor has more likeable judges (it's not even clear this year that they have one in the role of "contrary and hard to please" judge), and (I think) less of an intrusive concentration on the personal lives of the contestants.  Now if only the show could fire the person who applies eye make on all of the females with a trowel, it would be perfect. 

This year, the star is no doubt Dami Im, whose amazingly powerful voice seems so incongruous coming out of a modestly proportioned Asian body.  And she's just married, Christian (I think - she has made brief reference to singing in Church), almost certainly free of tattoos, and appears a very genuinely nice person with a very happy husband. What's not to like?

My wife said she has seen on TV that she has had lots of publicity in Korea now too, due to her performances here.    Barring a nervous breakdown, or a vocal cord catastrophe, they may as well hand her the recording contract now and finish the show early.   But the producers probably have an entire store room full of short female skirts, and eye make up in 44 gallon drums, that has to be used up, so it won't happen.

Physics of interest

I wonder how many readers are actually interested in my posts pointing towards odd physics papers that I usually don't fully understand myself.  Who knows, but here's some examples of recent physics stories I liked for their novelty:

*  Great title here: Can the Higgs Boson Save Us From the Menace of the Boltzmann Brains?

I can't be the only person who thinks of the Futurama episodes with giant floating brains whenever I hear "Boltzmann Brains", can I?

In any event, the paper notes that one of the simplest present explanations for the universe carries with it a serious "Boltzmann Brain" issue, and asks whether there is a way around it.   The answer seems to be:  maybe.   Here's co-author Sean Carroll giving an easier to read explanation of the paper.   I should have read that first.

*  The Economist, of all places, notes a paper that argues that dark energy, causing an acceleration in the expansion of the universe, does not exist at all.  Instead, the universe is just getting heavier:

In Dr Wetterich’s picture of the cosmos the redshift others attribute to expansion is, rather, the result of the universe putting on weight. If atoms weighed less in the past, he reasons, the light they emitted then would, in keeping with the laws of quantum mechanics, have been less energetic than the light they emit now. Since less energetic light has a longer wavelength, astronomers looking at it today would perceive it to be redshifted.

At first blush this sounds nuts. The idea that mass is constant is drilled into every budding high-school physicist. Abandoning it would hurt. But in exchange, Dr Wetterich’s proposal deals neatly with a big niggle in the Big Bang theory, namely coping with the point of infinite density at the beginning, called a singularity, which orthodox theories cannot explain.

Dr Wetterich’s model does not—yet—explain the shifts in the shapes of galactic clusters that the Dark Energy Camera, SuMIRe and ACTPol are seeking to clarify. But perhaps, one day, it could. Dr Wetterich is a well-respected physicist and his maths are not obviously wrong. Moreover, his theory does allow for a short period of rapid expansion, known as inflation, whose traces have already been seen in the CMB. Dr Wetterich, however, thinks this inflation did not happen just after the beginning of the universe (the consensus view), for he believes the universe had no beginning. Instead, a small static universe which had always existed turned into a large static one that always will exist—getting heavier and heavier as it does so. There was thus no singularity.

Probably, this theory is wrong. As Cliff Burgess of Perimeter Institute, a Canadian theoretical-physics centre, puts it, “The dark energy business very easily degenerates into something like a crowd of people who are each claiming to be Napoleon while asserting that all the other pretenders are clearly nutty.”

 I like to think that God has given us a direct clue to this, by ensuring that from middle age, a mass increase takes place in nearly all human bodies for no obvious reason.   So goes the universe too, possibly.

*   Someone from CERN complains that the LHC has not come up with any significant surprises for the Standard Model of physics, which is very annoying for physicists.  Here's the abstract:

The first three years of the LHC experiments at CERN have ended with "the nightmare scenario": all tests, confirm the Standard Model of Particles so well that theorists must search for new physics without any experimental guidance. The supersymmetric theories, a privileged candidate for new physics are nearly excluded. As a potential escape from the crisis, we propose thinking about a series of astonishing relations suggesting fundamental interconnections between the quantum world and the large scale Universe. It seems reasonable that, for instance, the equation relating a quark-antiquark pair with the fundamental physical constants and cosmological parameters must be a sign of new physics. One of the intriguing possibilities is interpreting our relations as a signature of the quantum vacuum containing the virtual gravitational dipoles.

 As with many papers on arXiv, you should read the introduction, which paints a comprehensible summary of the problem before venturing into scores of equations and terminology which are hard to follow.

*  Someone (I have no idea who)  from Hungary seems to think he has found a way that you can get Einstein's results without Einstein-ian physics.  The paper has a charming title:  A simple minded question: Do we live in the four-dimensional spacetime? and starts in a very modest fashion: 

The author of the present paper is not sure that the following ideas are worth for publication or they are more similar to a somewhat lunatic conception.

 I don't really follow the argument at all, but have only looked at the paper quickly.  Still, if this is ground breaking new physics, you read it here first.

*  If you are interested in the "fine tuning of the universe" issue, Catalyst on the ABC had a pretty good 30 minute summary last week, which features some short interviews from some of the big names in physics.   There are the more extended interviews with them here, I think, although I haven't watched them yet.

I saw from the show that Paul Davies, who moved from Adelaide University to Arizonia State University (he seems to showing greater affinity for "dry and remote" as he ages) finds a sort of backwards causation causation appealing, although I don't really understand the mechanism he thinks might work.  As Frank Tipler's similar idea, that the future God causes the past, seems to have sunk under the experimental finding of the mass of the Higgs boson, I should look up what Davies is saying on the topic.

That was un-necessary

I liked a couple of recent articles about the [lack of] merit in much modern writing.

The first, in the Fairfax Good Weekend magazine (get your digital subscription now, and be hip and fight the Murdoch hegemony, like me) is about a spate of 20-something "hyperconfessional" women writing autobiographies, sometimes making much money in the process.   The question is - should any 25 year old who has done nothing extraordinary really think they should be writing autobiography?   The obvious answer is "no":

Summerlandish reads like an engaging blog; the prose is restless and flecked with Gen-Y pop-culture references, as if Carrie Bradshaw wrote it after a night in with a bottle of Prosecco and The O.C. box set. She has the "cute girl with the dirty mouth" routine down pat. A certain audience will love it. But good or bad, the question remains: is Summerlandish necessary? Are any of these 20-something memoirs necessary? If acclaimed British singer Adele, 25, could turn down a seven-figure book deal because she felt she was too young to say much of anything, what do these Oscar-less, Grammy-less writers think they can offer the world?

The other article was in The Guardian, by a publisher who wishes people (be they successful authors or not) would just stop writing for a while:

According to Google, some 130m titles have been published since the first books took form on the desks of monks. This overwhelming catalogue is today being supplemented at a rate never before seen in the history of the book. Another industry statistician, Bowker, reports that nearly 1.8m new titles were published in 2012, an increase of half a million in just three years. As the constant thrum of laptop keyboards in coffee shops across the nation testifies, nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be an author. And, according to the New York Times, 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them. New technology plays its part here. So too, perhaps, does writing's attraction as a way of asserting one's existence in a world where the traditional terrain for being acknowledged by others – the workplace, family or neighbourhood – is increasingly under strain.

But if writers today are ubiquitous, readers seem an increasingly endangered species. A recent survey revealed that one in four Americans had read not a book in over a year. Again, technology is a significant factor in this (electronic Scrabble entered my life like a new drug a couple of years back). Bye-bye bedtime novels.

Paradoxically, the deluge of writing itself contributes to declining readership. It's not just that if you're writing then you can't be reading. It's also that the sheer volume of what is now available acts as a disincentive to settle down with a single text. The literary equivalent of channel surfing replaces the prolonged concentration required to tackle a book. Condensed capsules of digital communication are infecting all forms of reading. But books, the longest form that writing takes, are suffering disproportionately in the reduced attention spans of readers.

I sometimes have a creative story telling urge, usually while thinking idly in the shower.  But for as a long as I can remember, when I am thinking about story ideas, my mind rushes back to past books or movies I have liked a lot, and gets stuck in reverie about how good they were.  I don't seem to have anything resembling a truly creative gene, and it puzzles me how people develop the skill to come up with engaging, realistic characters in interesting plots. 

 

Some novelists do it via continual drawing on life experiences (either their own, or of others in their circle - I remember reading a biography of Evelyn Waugh and thinking that people he had met could more or less be assured of turning up, not necessarily favourable, in some fictionalised form in one of his books sooner or later.  And his contemporary Graham Greene had a ridiculously complicated personal life that provided lots of source material.)

 

Writers in the field of science fiction and fantasy perhaps have the harder task of coming up with characters who have to react to things which have never happened anywhere to anyone real, and I suppose that may mean that when they do characters well, they deserve special credit for their feat of imagination.  It's just a pity that fantasy generally leaves me cold, and science fiction is not all that well known for well detailed characters.

I would like to be able to do science fiction, if only because I find myself dissatisfied with nearly all of it these days.  But the skill set is not there, I'm sure.

And anyway, it probably is true - too much of everything is being written these days...

 

 

Disagreement with the Uncertainty Queen

Learning From the Hiatus | Climate Abyss | a Chron.com blog

Judith Curry's "blown mind"about the recent paper on the East Pacific being behind the hiatus in global surface temperatures has been criticised as in error by conservative climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon.  His post above contains a detailed look at the issue, and is not all easily understood, but his strong belief that Curry is wrong is clear.

I still expect others to weigh in on this.     

But it's a dis-aster

Life is much better under Labor after all, says study

From the above article:

Politicians of both persuasions will always, during election campaigns, claim that they know "families are doing it tough".  But that's just politics.   John Quiggin had a column recently about the false perceptions that flourish and why, and ended with this:

Another possible explanation of the ‘doing it tough’ perception arises from inconsistent responses to price variation. Despite sustained low inflation and falling interest rates, many Australians perceive themselves as facing ‘cost of living’ pressures. Over the past decade some highly salient prices such as the retail price of electricity have risen sharply, but consumption continued to grow until recently, driven largely by the increased use of airconditioning. By contrast the cost of telecommunications services has fallen , but households have responded to lower prices and the availability of new products by increasing their total expenditure. It is easy enough, though misleading, to see this as a story of ever-increasing bills for everything.

Despite all of these partial explanations, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ‘doing it tough’ perception is nothing more than a manifestation of some of our less appealing human propensities: envy and chronic dissatisfaction. This can be seen all the way up the income scale, to the point of British bankers who complain that they can’t live on a million pounds (roughly 2 million dollars) a year.

News media have an obvious commercial interest in telling stories that make their audiences feel victimised, and politicians have made the judgement that telling voters the truth is too costly. At current rates of growth, incomes will double by 2050, but we will doubtless still be living on Struggle Street.

Amazingly, too, I note how little attention there has been in the media (and how unsuccessful Labor has been in talking about) the reductions in government family support the Coalition is committed to (such as ending the School Kids bonus) while at the same time promising that families will be $500 a year better off because of the carbon tax going.

Families, do your maths! 

Introduced last year, the bonus provides eligible families with $410 a year for each child in primary school and $820 for each in high school.

 If you intend voting Coalition, you probably think you are "doing it tough" and that your electricity bill is a dis-aster.  Yet if you have kids at school, this one item alone shows, what the Coalition "gives" is going to be more than taken away.   

Good news

Remember the awesome trailer for Gravity?  The movie has opened in Venice, to pretty much ecstatic reviews.

It's a must see for me....

Labor policies people might like, if they ever heard about them

Amongst all the "it's a disaster!" analysis coming from News Ltd and Fairfax and now even Lenore Taylor at the Guardian (Lenore, pull yourself together!), it seems to me there are some policy things that are more Labor than Coalition, and which most common sense people would support, with little need for explanation:

1.  an emphasis on high speed rail from Sydney to Canberra, and then perhaps Sydney to Newcastle.  The Sydney to Canberra route is particularly apt - the distance seems too short for a plane flight, it takes too long to get through the outskirts of Sydney in a car, and people are always going to need to travel there.  If the train connected to Sydney Airport, it would be perfect.  Why doesn't someone commit to that, at least?

2.  the commitment to bring some Navy ship construction forward at Williamstown.   Everyone thinks we should be able to build ships, don't they?  It's manufacturing, it's a bit high-techy; it's the next best thing to having an aircraft industry.

3.  the support to the car industry.   Everyone sensible likes the fact that we can design and build cars, and I gather that lots of countries give support to car builders in one way or another.   The Coalition presumably thinks it is quite OK that we attempt to emulate New Zealand, which is trying to build an economy on making frozen food, soap and Hobbit films, as far as I can make out.  The way the Coalition is going about the FBT has let them off the media scrutiny hook on this one - it's a disgrace.

The other odd thing is that ideas which Rudd has flown seem to be being treated in media talk as if they would actually happen - the Northern Territory tax reduction, and the wholesale removal of the Navy from Garden Island.   In fact, these were kite flying exercises and don't need to be treated all that seriously.  There is plenty of scope for them not to happen at all, or on reduced scale.

But no, it's a disaster.

Pretty much how I see it

From The Economist:

The choice between a man with a defective manifesto and one with a defective personality is not appealing—but Mr Rudd gets our vote, largely because of Labor’s decent record. With deficits approaching, his numbers look more likely to add up than Mr Abbott’s. Despite his high-handed style, Mr Rudd is a Blairite centrist. A strategic thinker about Asia, he has skills that will be useful, especially as Australia has to balance its economic dependence on China with its security dependence on America. It would be nice if he revived his liberal approach to asylum-seekers. And, who knows, he may even live up to his promise to be less vile to his colleagues.

An upset possum

The Possum who runs Pollytics is very cranky about the reporting of the costing issue yesterday.  It is fun to read an argument between two furry animals:

Surely the problem that Possum alludes to is the "sound bite-ese" which is used in all political reporting, but particularly at election time.  That elevates an exaggerated bit of rhetoric into an unqualified claim, and both sides of politics both use it, and are victims of it, all the time.   (Even Malcolm Turnbull, who has been happy to repeat a claimed  $90 billion plus estimate for the NBN many times, completely without running through the questionable assumptions.)  But this time, an out of context Rudd made some public servants worry that people might think they had been used inappropriately, and they made it clear they hadn't.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Coalition is playing silly buggers with paper that is already in their hands gets ignored in headlines.

Free Advertising

Having paid for a digital subscription to Fairfax, I have put the App on the Samsung and iPad at home. 

I had previously used the apps without paying for the subscription, and found the advertising intrusive and the navigation a bit annoying.

The subscription makes it a much, much better experience, and my wife is happy that she a supply of suduko.

Go on. Do it.

Headlines, headlines

Fairfax has had its fair share of "it's a disaster for Rudd!" headlines this campaign too; often with the headline sounding more extreme than the article itself.

And Tim Colebatch, who I have been quoting a lot over the last 12 months, actually said at the Hockey/Bowen press club debate on Tuesday that he assumed Hockey would be Treasurer. 

So is it much surprise that he is running a "it's an absolute disaster!" column today about the costings issue yesterday?

It's interesting this self fulfilling prophesy business.  I suggested a couple of times at places like John Quiggin's blog that if you keep talking down how Gillard is a failure, of course you're helping the public perception of that and assuring a Labor loss, even when you think the Coalition would be the true disaster.

It's also interesting how clearly David Koch on Sunrise this morning was doing what I would do - telling Hockey, who has transformed himself into a unlikeable s*#% for the purpose of getting government, that the real problem here is that the Coalition is sitting on papers which they claim support them, and could release them anytime to support their argument.  The Coalition is hiding its assumptions, except, it would appear, to selected friendly journalists.

Mind you, Rudd himself did this in 2007.   He faked his way into government, and Abbott and Hockey are doing exactly the same this time.

I was unhappy in 2007; I am very unhappy now, because the Coalition will seek to disassemble some decent policies and replace them with crap ones.

The Coalition trusts Rupert, but not you?

So, according to The Australian, Treasury is perhaps a bit peeved that Rudd is using some figures they did before the election was called to contradict Coalition costings of savings.   But, says Treasury, their work wasn't a true costing of Coalition policy: it was more a hypothetical exercise and different assumptions would give different results.

OK.

But here's the thing:  The Australian is saying it has seen the Parliamentary Budget Office costings on public servant cuts that Abbott and Hockey are refusing to release.  (Maybe next week you'll some of their work?):

The costing, seen by The Australian, assumes that natural attrition would see the size of the federal public service cut by 6,000 positions by June 2014 and another 6,000 by September 2015.

So who leaked this to The Australian - the surest source of a sympathetic account for the Coalition that is possible?

I think I should assume that the Coalition is leaking to Rupert what they won't give directly to the public.

How ridiculous is that?

It is done....

Inspired by the appalling standards of the Murdoch press (and, I have to admit, the paywall that kicks in after 30 visits in a month) I have just for the first time ever paid for a digital news subscription to Fairfax.

Go on, join me.  Keep alternatives to Murdoch alive (at least while ever Gina isn't telling them what to write.)  

But please - don't pay for the AFR with their Murdoch escapee Stutchbury.  He should not have been let into the place.

New subscribers will be sent my entertaining video "Hey Kids! Make your own Tony Abbott Voodoo Doll!" in time for the election.

Short answer: no, they don't

Do Hockey's clean energy cuts add-up? | Business Spectator

Read it for some explanation of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and how Coalition claims of where money will be saved is on very, very shaky grounds.

Andrew's band of twits

Cooling ocean blamed for hiding missing warming | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

You have to wonder:  does Andrew Bolt take pride in being the ringleader for a band of followers who don't have a clue about science, and  aren't bright enough to even realise they don't have a clue about science?

Read some of the comments following the article for illustration.  It's gobsmacking.

Mind you, I reckon Judith Curry is about to get some heavy smackdown from other climate scientists for her [mis] interpretation of the implications of the study, too. 

Sometimes, it's quite OK to not understand

Millard Fillmore's Bathtub has noted this letter from the Financial Times:

From Mr. K N Al-Sabah.
Sir,
Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad!
Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.
But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!
Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!
Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the US!
Gulf states are pro-US. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi.  And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!
Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day.
K N Al-Sabah
London EC4, UK

Which is a relief.  I mean, my lack of knowledge of the geo-political significance of this civil war is now fully justified as being one of those things just a handful of my fellow citizens probably understand.  (And note, the letter doesn't even mention Russia backing Assad.)  

History to drink to

Gin and tonic kept the British Empire healthy: The drink’s quinine powder was vital for stopping the spread of malaria. - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise the full extent of quinine's historical importance:

Quinine powder quickly became critical to the health of the empire. By the 1840s British citizens and soldiers in India were using 700 tons of cinchona bark annually for their protective doses of quinine. Quinine powder kept the troops alive, allowed officials to survive in low-lying and wet regions of India, and ultimately permitted a stable (though surprisingly small) British population to prosper in Britain’s tropical colonies. Quinine was so bitter, though, that British officials stationed in India and other tropical posts took to mixing the powder with soda and sugar. “Tonic water,” of a sort, was born.

Still, tonic water was basically a home brew until an enterprising Brit named Erasmus Bond introduced the first commercial tonic water in 1858—perhaps not coincidentally, the very same year the British government ousted the East India Co. and took over direct control of India, following the so-called Sepoy Mutiny, a violent rebellion and counterattack. 

Bond’s new tonic was soon followed by Schweppes’ introduction, in 1870, of “Indian Quinine Tonic,” a product specifically aimed at the growing market of overseas British who, every day, had to take a preventative dose of quinine. Schweppes and other commercial tonics proliferated both in the colonies and, eventually, back in Britain itself.

And another bit of quirky history from the article:

Quinine proved as critical to the battle over the Pacific in the second world war as it had to the struggle over India. As Amy Stewart notes in her new book, The Drunken Botanist, Japan seized Java, the home of huge cinchona plantations, from the Dutch in 1942, cutting off nearly all of the Allied supply of quinine. The last American plane to fly out of the Philippines before it fell to the Japanese carried some 4 million quinine seeds. Unfortunately, the effort was largely in vain: The trees grew too slowly to provide sufficient quinine to the Allied war effort.