Mood:
caffeinatedTopic: election Oz 2007
Author’s general introductory note (skip this if you know this regular weekly column):
This is not a well packaged story. It’s a contemporaneous traverse of the Sunday television free to air political talkies indicating the agenda of Establishment interests: Better to know ones rivals and allies in Big Politics and Big Media.
Indeed it’s the tv version monitoring task similar to what Nelson Mandela refers to here in his book Long Walk to Freedom (1994, Abacus) written in Robben Island prison (where he was meant to die like other African resister chiefs of history in the 19C), at page 208
“..newspapers are only a shadow of reality; their information is important to a freedom fighter not because it reveals the truth, but because it discloses the biases and perceptions of both those who produce the paper and those who read it.”
Just substitute ‘Sunday tv political talkie shows’ for "newspapers" in the quote above.
For actual transcripts go to web sites quoted below except with Riley Diary on 7. And note transcripts don’t really give you the image content value.
Media backgrounder: (and see two postscripts at the end of this post)
Cheap shot of the week
Brown registers high carbon footprint p38 Sunday Telegraph 17th June 2007, (offline?)
This impertinent piece of sophistry sledging Senator Bob Brown who literally risked personal bankruptcy in the Wielangta Forest court victory Green joy at legal victory | Mercury - The Voice of Tasmania to keep directly maybe 24,000 tonnes of carbon upstanding, compared to a trivial 24 tonnes of personal carbon footprint this year.
Picture: 24 tonnes of woodchips in one log in Tasmania's 'timber' industry?
Get real Sharri Markson and the NSW Business Chamber of Commerce (read Coal and Mining Industry) - let's just imagine the number of tonnes of carbon Brown helped saved from rotting under a lake or logged in the whole South West World Heritage Franklin River and forest area of Tasmania - his share of the credit might be say 2 billion tonnes of forest carbon? Do yer think?
..................
Nigel Wilson in The Australian comes up trumps again with an interview with Gerry Hueston, BP’s Australian President with quotes like
“Hueston says the federal task group's recognition of the need for the support of low carbon technologies during the first stages of Australia's climate-change response was important.
"While emissions trading will ultimately provide the primary incentive for the deployment of low-carbon technologies, the demonstration of new technologies at scale are essential in helping to both deliver the structural reductions in Australia's emissions portfolio that will be required, and buffer the economy and Australian households from the inevitable price shocks.
"These forms of direct support will help enhance the elasticity of the energy market, as it seeks to adjust its otherwise capital-intense and long-term fixed infrastructure. The power stations of 2050 are being designed today, so direct support to encourage low-emission technology will leave the economy better placed to absorb a higher carbon price at that time."
Hueston says the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency will be picked first.
The point is that emissions trading is not about replacing power stations but determining what new technologies could be adopted for future infrastructure.”
Hueston: we have a problem with emissions | Business | The Australian
For an oil executive that’s pretty much what SAM news blog posted late last week about the inevitability of guillotining carbon rich products from China or India just like the Ozone Depleting Substances under the Montreal Protocol.
Similarly we have in this same Weekend Australian China the biggest carbon emission problem, says BP
And for the green baiters who say this ignores social well being, consider this potentially historic human rights issue: Offline “Climate change refugees need protection, UN told” p10, Resources section Weekend Australian 16-17 June 2007.
And similarly Climate change refugees: who’s to blame? from Lawyers Weekly, and this from Doctors for the Environment Climate change and Environmental Refugees | Doctors for the ...
10 Meet the Press 8-8.30 am
Winter break – golf broadcast.
Transcript in due course www.ten.com.au/meetthepress
7 Weekend Sunrise, 8.35-40 am Riley Diary -
Congratulations 7 for streaming this on your website (2 week delay?)
Dalai Llama in very cold Canberra. Quite a pop star. Senator Brown of the Greens and Michael Danby of the ALP strong voice for Jewish interests in Australia both prominent in the footage.
website backup materials
http://www.seven.com.au/sunrise/weekend
Sunday 9
Depression story about lawyers, Peter Hayes death. Robert Richter on the OHS situation for lawyers under high stress pressure work.
Faris interviewed. Truth coming out about drug use in the profession. Close to home with my old father, and my determination to be a tea totaller now.
Bloody good story actually. By Adam Shand, surely related to top barrister Shand? “Great access” to barristers for story. Raises whole issue of drug testing.
Oakes interview with Shrek … err Joe Hockey on IR. Sounding grumpy, opposition like?
Hard to keep up with 2 and 9 re Oakes reference to Abbott frothing at the mouth in Hockey interview, Oakes goes feral on Govt for attacking democracy of talking to the community, and being smeared for it. It’s a pretty punchy presentation by Joe Hockey.
Throws to Ross instead of Ellen at the end, almost chuckling at the parody of the whole situation.
Story on 21C singledom orthodoxy – mingles, offals and slobbs – charming.
http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/default.asp
Insiders 2
Gilliard looking well, composed, focused on IR. Looking fit.
Panel: Lenore Taylor, Panel Matt Price, Glen Milne (looking good lad).
Every person segment Qlders. Will be on webcast as missed it.
Jim Middleton for Paul Kelly today. Rudd strong on productivity but missed inflation point. Polling due this Super Monday.
Milne says but for $8K paid no access into Kirribili, unless a Liberal Party delegate.
Discussion on Rudd interview quality with AM’s Uhlmann. It’s a false controversy. Rudd sticks to the trend problem in depressed productivity. Lawyers point about short term improvement in the latest National Accounts. Tiny blemish amplified.
High humour on the panel. Laughing as sign of transition in their subconscious.
Home page is http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/
Postscript #1 late Sunday 17th June 07
The economics lecture of Keating on Lateline recently made reference to this article by Ross Gittins in both the Age and Sydney Morning Herald 2 weeks ago:
Let them eat cake — how the workers' pie keeps shrinking - Business
"WHEN you divide the pie of national income between the share going to wages and the share going to profits, you find the workers' share keeps shrinking and is the smallest it has been.
...If you already knew that, congratulations. You are exceedingly well informed — because that startling fact has received minimal publicity.If the boot had been on the other foot — if it had been the profits share that was shrinking — you would never have heard the end of it. But when it is just the workers' share, economists are not all that fussed.
If we focus just on the "total compensation of employees" (which includes employers' superannuation contributions on their behalf) and "total gross operating surplus of corporations" (the main national accounts measure of profits), we find that, in 1999-2000, the share of national income going to labour was 70.3 per cent, leaving the share going to capital at 29.7 per cent. But by the December quarter of last year, the wages share had fallen to 66 per cent while the profits share had increased to 34 per cent.
That is a shift of a remarkable, unprecedented 4.3 percentage points in just 6½ years.
Let us be clear on what this means. For a start, it does not mean wages have been falling. We are talking about changes in the workers' share of the (ever-growing) pie, not the absolute size of the share.....This explains why the Government can still say that real wages continue to grow. But the fact remains that, if the wages share is falling, workers are not getting their proportional — their "fair" — share of productivity gains.
Why not? Well, because this has been going on since the start of the noughties, it is not likely to have much to do with WorkChoices.
If you break down the wages and profits shares by industry, you find three where the profits share has increased noticeably: mining, wholesale trade and finance.
Mining is no surprise — the prices they receive have gone through the roof. It is more surprising that the wages share has fallen most in the finance (mainly banking) industry. Finance industry wages have not risen nearly as fast as fees and other charges have risen.
But this is not an adequate explanation.
There remains more to this business than we have yet determined — if economists were more interested in finding out."
......and on it goes courtesy of economics champion Ross Gittins. In other words this is definitely not a government for the battler on a wage as claimed by PM Howard. As Gittins points out it's not really resolved the cause but we think quite suggestive it's a government for large shareholders and overpaid executives??
Postscript #2
By George the contest for the seat of Wentworth in East Sydney is gaining intensity, and local Mayor George Newhouse is getting way serious. We are tempted to nominate as an independent just to see if we can influence the result. Having been one of the councillors at the time who voted for the beach side parking meters to finance management of whole of Sydney tourism impacts on one LGA when Kim Anson was a dept head in the late 90ies (to become General Manager - and may still be), we can easily see where Ambitious George is coming from.
We have no doubt it's a very popular move, a real election policy in fact. Here are the swathe of Sunday press clippings in Sydney, and notice Mal Turnbull's faithful stock item - a grant to the local surf club. Trouble is they likey knew some of the victims of the Bali bombing in 2002, the govt it seems were tipped off about, as per recent ASIO leak story (reported here on SAM via The Australian).
quizzical
don't ask
Thirty years ago, on September 11th 1973, general Augusto Pinochet ousted Dr. Salvador Allende's Chilean constitutional government in a bloody coup d'état. During the 17 years of his dictatorship, he coerced Chile into an empire of state terrorism, the most cruel of all forms of terrorism since it relies on the use of authority to commit its crimes. According to official information, during this period 3,197 men and women were brutally assassinated by state agents. This number includes 49 children between the ages of 2 and 16 --one of them, a 13 year-old boy found with 11 bullet impacts on the body and 9 impacts on the head--, 126 women --some of them pregnant--, and some fifty foreign nationals.
In the last day, the US Central Intelligence Agency has released some 700 pages of what it called "the family jewels" secret files detailing, among other things, years of attempts to assassinate the communist Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. And, Dateline can reveal the life and times of a man right at the centre of those attempts. Last month, in Texas, Luis Posada Carriles walked free from a court after US immigration charges against him were dismissed. On the face of it, a fairly unremarkable event, but below its surface is a tale of international intrigue and espionage stretching back for close on five decades. In Latin America, several governments have labelled Posada one of the world's worst terrorists, responsible, they claim, for death and destruction throughout the region. So why, you might ask, is he still free and living in the US? Dateline's David O'Shea has come up with some answers."
special
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