Fun facts with Fielding

Senator Steve Fielding is organising a climate change briefing, and is inviting the entire senate!

I can’t see how any responsible senator could vote on an emissions trading scheme without listening to what the world of science has to say on the issue.

Sen. Steve “the fact-finder” Fielding

Giving the seminar will be prominent climate-change denier and chief scientist for News Corp., Professor Bob Carter. To keep with this theme, I am organising a few briefing sessions of my own, that I invite you all to attend:

1. The holocaust, with David Irving
2. Evolution, with Sarah Palin
3. Accounting standards, with Kenneth Lay
4. How to organise informative seminars, with Steve Fielding

You get the picture.

The swine, the swine!

Just when you thought that the media hype surrounding the swine had died down, along comes reliable Joe Hildebrand.

UP to 10,000 New South Wales people could die of swine flu in a two-month period – more than double the rate of all other deaths – unless there is mass vaccination, experts warned.

Source: news.com.au

A quick glance down through the article reveals that the “expert” is actually a nine-year-old kid, and the “new modelling” was based on a game of hopscotch.

Meanwhile, the federal government is reportedly ordering 21 million vaccinations, to be delivered after the flu season is finished.

However, according to startling new modelling performed by experts at the North East Institute, the government could be wasting their money. Unless we act now, Joe Hildebrand’s scare story could in fact be blown out of the water. Allow me to demonstrate.

Using the popular disease vector modelling program Pandemic, we can see that if the swine flu takes hold, our population could be decimated with only 41 people remaining after three months!

If you want to be one of the remaining 41 people, I suggest it’s time to start reading this site. Bon voyage!

Politwitter

The Twitter bandwagon is well and truly in full swing, with hip characters such as Big Kev, Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey, Kate Ellis, Nigel Scullion and Tony Burke all getting in on the action. However, I believe that this time they have bitten off more than they can chew, and will soon be breaking one of the number one rules of politics.

Politicians are elected by the people, for the people. While in practise they are generally serving the interests of their party, they also have historically kept in touch with the electorate and been generally approachable. To raise an issue with a politician, all you need to do is write them a letter.

Letters written to a politician will be answered; in fact it is unthinkable that no response would be received to a letter written to the office of, say, Malcolm Turnbull. Sure, it much be a response from a lackey, but you still feel loved. With email, the same applies (with the obvious exception of the Rev. Fred).

Now with Twitter however, these pollies are eliciting thousands of messages from Middle Australia every day. Many of these tweets have pressing questions crammed into their 140 characters, and yet the vast majority will go unanswered.

This is a dangerous game to play, people. If my question isn’t worth 140 characters, then your policy surely isn’t worth my vote.

Fitzgibbon: gone!

549 days into the Rudd government, we have the first ministerial casualty: Joel Fitzgibbon. After selling national secrets to China and NIB, he has been forced to step down in order to avoid having to listen to Julie Bishop’s incessant whine in his ear.

Of course, the Rudd government had already overtaken the Howard government’s 487 days in power without ministerial dismissal, and to beat the new record you would have to go back to the Whitlam government which took 939 days to sack Jim Cairns.

Now that the Rudd government has gotten past this important milestone, let’s hope we can start the ball rolling. It’s scandal season!

The war on bikies

With the recent media hype surrounding bikie violence, I have been contemplating delving into the fray myself. Thankfully, I was spared the effort by Nick, whose excellent article was published by newmatilda.com, as the leading story no less!

Before he brought his new laws to State Parliament in a surprise move on Thursday, Rees had lamented the possibility that he may not be able to ram them through the legislature at the speed of light, because if hurriedly drafted they might be subject to pesky judicial review.

Quit or die

The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them is if they follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow, and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide

- Senator Charles Grassley, Iowa

This kind of “guts or glory” hyperbole is the missing link in Australian politics, and has been for some time. Despite Big Kev’s careful placement of such words as “shitstorm” into recent interviews, it is quite apparent that Australian politicians are still a long way from suggesting that senior executives should top themselves.

So where did we go wrong?

I was born during the reign of Malcolm “pants-down-in-Memphis” Fraser. Soon after we had Bob Hawke, with his famous “any boss who sacks an employee is a bum” America’s Cup victory speech. Keating’s insults were by and large limited to big words that noone else could understand, and Howard was too busy looking over his shoulder at Costello to come up with any truly brilliant pieces of invective.

Big Kev cannot and will not save us; his vocabulary is strictly limited to statements such as “we’ll be very cross with companies closing down after taking our subsidies”.

None of these figureheads of Australian politics come even close to the levels of potential controversy achieved by our good friend Senator Grassley.

Australia doesn’t want political correctness any more. We’ve had the Keating years, we’ve had the apology to the stolen generation. We all acknowledge that we are living in a diverse and exciting society where everyone has an equal place. Now let’s get back to calling apples apples.

Top finance executives who steer their companies towards collapse and then take multi-million dollar payouts should not be encouraged to kill themselves. It should be mandatory. Compulsory corporate seppuku, that’s what I’m talking about.

Furthermore, in order to raise the capital required to get these companies spending again and restart the economy, each business should hold a charity-style shareholder’s auction. The winning bidder will be able to nominate the method by which their overpaid office-bearer dispatches him/herself from this plane of being.

We could even sell the rights to the live auctions (and subsequent deaths) to Channel Ten.

I look forward to my proposal being debated during the next session of parliament.

Mr (Greg) Gregory Eugene SMITH, SC MP

The Shadow Attorney General:

This type of crime shows an anger and ignoring the normal rules of society by just disgracing people’s houses, by graffiti and shop windows and that.

I couldn’t have put it more good myself, but.

Solar bonanza

The draft Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment Bill 2008 proposes that all renewable small generation units (up to 1.5kW) installed between 1 July 2009 and 30 June 2012 can create 5 RECs per MWh.

What does this mean? Essentially, instead of receiving $2,700 worth of renewable energy certificates when you install solar panels/solar hot water on your roof, you would get around $13,600! This assumes that the system is generating power approximately 8 hours per day, 300 days per year.

So, if you’re about to install some good old-fashioned renewable energy on your house, wait! And if you’re thinking about going into business, this is one area where sales are going to be a piece of cake. I think we’re about to see a proliferation of high-prices solar panel installers.

Turbull, targets and trading

Malcolm Turnbull has hotted up his attack on the Rudd-Wong emissions trading scheme this morning, with in an interview on AM.

You see, what Mr Rudd has done and this is a characteristic of the Prime Minister, he has completely lost sight of the real objective.

The objective is to reduce Australia’s CO2 emissions. It is not to have an ETS. The object is to reduce emissions and so he’s has come up with an incredibly cumbersome, economically damaging so we are told by industry, ineffectual so we were told by people concerned about climate, Emissions Trading Scheme which seems to disappoint everybody.

There is almost unanimous criticism of it.

I think Turnbull has really hit the nail on the head here. Rudd’s ETS is not going to do anything for the environment. Therefore, it has already failed to achieve the objective. What then is the purpose of having an ETS at all?

Some would argue that the target can be ramped up after 2020. It would be just as easy to put in another soft target in 2020 and continue to do nothing.

It looks like Big Kev’s trading scheme is simply designed to make it look like he’s taking action on climate change, while he sits back in the Lodge with his team of public servants burning the midnight oil putting together committee reports and creating enough hot air to heat St Petersburg.

Meanwhile, Parliament House is consuming electricity by the bucketload. Maybe the government should lead the way and start to tidy up their own house, so that others may see the benefits of the available technology.

On the other hand, maybe we should just focus on convincing China to cut their emissions. After all, they will probably own most of Australia soon enough.

Barack Obama: the first 587 hours

Everyone seems to get quite excited about what politicians have achieved in 100 days, as if this is some magical milestone on which to judge their entire existence. Hogwash! It’s not even a prime number.

My model is the first 587 hours. So here we go.

Hour 1: Obama takes office. There was some kind of stuffup.
Hour 24: Obama re-takes office. No stuffups this time.
Hour 216: Obamicon.Me records its 500,000th Obama icon. Most of these are attributed to Duncan.
Hour 587: Prominent and world famous blogger Stu chronicles the first 587 hours of Obama’s presidency.

So far, nothing too interesting has happened. I’ll see you after 8191 hours of office!