EcoRadio

Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

  • Labor facing by-election annihilation

     

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    State Labor has leaked polling showing it expects to cop a record swing of up to 27 per cent this Saturday. The by-election also comes amid a backdrop of two ministers quitting over scandals.

    Premier Kristina Keneally has only bothered to visit the electorate four times thus far, while Mr O’Farrell has been there on more than 20 occasions.

    The Premier has said the demands of her job have stopped her visiting more but there is no doubt Labor probably does not want to see her associated with a large loss.

    She told The Daily Telegraph this month she expected a “very big swing” in the seat. “What’s concerning is they continue to raise with me what Karyn Paluzzano did and what’s been interesting is people will even say to me, ‘she was a good local member but she lied’,” she said.

    The by-election is being closely watched by federal Labor strategists, who acknowledge that Mr Rudd himself might be an issue, despite it being a State seat.

    A senior Labor source revealed internal Labor polling had shown many voters were now fed up with the Labor brand generally, both at a federal and state level, which could have serious implications for the Federal Government in NSW when it goes to the polls later this year.

     

  • Revolving door costs taxpayers millions

     

    One employee, understood to be Graeme Wedderburn, a former chief of staff to former premier Nathan Rees, was terminated after working 10 months but received $139,000 rather than the standard $35,500. Mr Wedderburn’s contract stipulated that he would be paid half of his annual salary if he was dumped.

    The second, who worked for seven months, received $96,000, $74,300 more than the guidelines.

    Mr Achterstraat said the Department of Premier and Cabinet should follow its own rules when spending taxpayer dollars. “The rules are clear on severance pay. There should be no special deals,” he said.

    ”The severance pay guidelines are a bit like the salary cap and like a salary cap they work best if everybody knows the rules and everyone sticks to them.”

    The report found most terminations followed the 2007 election – despite there being no change of government – the resignation of Morris Iemma in 2008 and the rolling of Nathan Rees last year.

    The director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Brendan O’Reilly, rejected the recommendation that severance should be paid only according to the guidelines, saying he intended to keep his right to make exemptions ”when appropriate”.

    Yesterday Ms Keneally said there were now no staff on a special deal. ”Nobody in my government has those sorts of arrangements,” she said.

  • Mining giants push demands on Rudd over resources super profits-tax

     

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    Miners to launch new anti-tax ads The Australian, 10 hours ago

    The statement concluded by stating that “at present, there is no formal acknowledgment from government that these key issues will be addressed”.

    But while the government remains committed to a 40 per cent tax rate, the Prime Minister confirmed just hours after the meeting today that it might be prepared to budge on transitional arrangements that were “particular” to certain industries affected by the tax.

    “On the different qualities and different circumstances of let’s call it `sections of the industry’ it’s quite plain that we will be considering with different parts of the industry their respective requests for transition arrangements which may be particular to their industry,” Mr Rudd said in a press conference held before question time.

    “Whether we respond positively to that is a separate matter, but that is currently the negotiation process that Martin Ferguson is directly engaged in.” 

    His comments came as Tony Abbott attacked the government for not considering more flexible tax rates for different parts of the resources sector as part of its consultation with the miners.

    The Liberal leader is maintaining his opposition to the 40 per cent resources super-profits tax and criticism of the government for its lack of consultation with the miners before announcing its detailed proposal.

    Mr Abbott said the consideration of a flexible tax for different minerals should have been addressed before the announcement on May 2 of the new tax.

    “This is a good question and it’s one that the government should have thought about before it made its decision,” he said this morning.

    “I mean, this is a government which decides first and thinks later. Again, it’s no way to run a country.

    “And this idea that the Prime Minister is somehow going to demonstrate how tough he is by having a great big fight followed by a great big backflip is just crazy.”

    Mr Abbott’s comments follow on from question time yesterday when Opposition MPs tried to target the government over the level of consultation it engaged in before pushing ahead with the tax.

    Mr Rudd hit back in question time today, seeking to portray himself as a reformer pitted against an anti-reform Coalition.

     “This is a debate between those who support the reform and those who oppose reform,” he said. “Those who support reform believe a profits-based regime for the future is the right way to go.”
     
    Mr Rudd sought to link the Coalition to the interests of mining magnates and billionaires like Clive Palmer, and to those who were opposed to change in the industry.
     
    “The Leader of the Opposition stands alone with his new best friend, the pin-up boy of the Liberal and National Party, Clive Palmer.
     
    “Mr Speaker, they (the opposition) will simply take a position in this debate which is subservient to the likes of Clive Palmer in pursuit of a sectional interest, in pursuit of an individual who bankrolls the Liberal National Party in Queensland.”
     
    Earlier, spelling out his position on mining taxation reform, Mr Abbott said he thought the existing regime was “fine”.

    “The better the mining industry does, the more tax it pays. It pays more tax through royalties when production goes up. It pays more tax through company tax when profits go up. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it should stay.”

    The Rudd government is now negotiating “generous transition provisions” looking at different resource sectors in different ways.

    Mr Ferguson said today the petroleum sector, minerals sector and low value resources sector, including sand and gravel, had argued against uniform transitional arrangements for the government’s proposed resources profits tax.

    “They are each arguing that there is no one-size-fits-all model,” he told ABC Radio.

    “What I am doing is actually taking on board the generous transitional arrangements that we indicated we’re prepared to think about and working them through with the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and treasury and actually thinking about what are the potential nature of those transitional arrangements.

    “We’re not talking about different tax rates there will be headline rate of 40 per cent.”
     

  • Govt under scrutiny over mining tax ads

    Govt under scrutiny over mining tax ads

    Yahoo!7 June 16, 2010, 9:30 pm

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    The Rudd Government is facing an inquiry into its broken promise on political advertising.

    7News can reveal a public servant who recommended the advertising watchdog be dissolved is now being paid a small fortune to do the job himself.

    Auditor-General Ian McPhee will front a Senate committee in Canberra tomorrow to publicly detail his concerns about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s back flip.

    Earlier this year Mr Rudd dumped a system which proposed advertising campaigns be scrutinised by the auditor-general independently.

    He has since passed the role onto a committee of former public servants, including advertising review author Dr Allan Hawke.

    The way in which Mr McPhee was swept aside by Dr Hawke’s review has guaranteed a new controversy.

    Dr Hawke is career bureaucrat and former chief-of-staff to Paul Keating. His review led to Mr McPhee being dumped from the independent role.

    Dr Hawke took 18 days and was paid $60,000 to recommend a new panel to oversee government ads, which he now heads.

    He works four days a month for $175,000 a year.

    The move came despite Mr Rudd’s “100 per cent guarantee” promise before the 2007 election that government advertising would be independently reviewed.

    In an explosive letter, copied to Mr Rudd, Mr McPhee said the government review “seriously misunderstands” his role.

    He said it contains “a number of inaccuracies” and “generally softens” the rules removing “rigour and discipline in this sensitive area.”

    Mr Rudd suggested Mr McPhee was uncomfortable being the umpire of government advertising

    “The Auditor-General in fact wrote to me and indicated that he regarded this as potentially in conflict with his position,” Mr Rudd said.

    Other politicians, like Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, see it differently.

    “Make no mistake, the government has sacked the independent umpire on this,” he said.

    “The Australian people have every right to think this stinks.”

    Greens Senator Bob Brown has a bill before parliament to reinstate the auditor-general’s role, as the $38 million taxpayer-funded mining tax ad blitz continues to flood our screens.

    “It’s again an example of the executive government simply changing the rules to benefit itself,” Senator Brown said.

     

  • Wanted: Some belief in a leader

     

    Of course, we also wanted a leader who believed in things and would stick to his guns. A leader we could respect. A leader who, if he went on and on about something being really important, wouldn’t just ditch it when the going got tough.

    A big part of Rudd’s problem is inexperience. As a result of that inexperience and bad advice he has seriously underestimated the electorate. He thought he could stay popular by appearing to pander to our whims.

    Turns out we have no respect for a leader who merely gives us what we say we want. Somewhere inside us there is a semi-conscious understanding – probably born of our experience as children – that we need a leader who sometimes imposes on us things we don’t fancy but he knows are for our own good.

    The tyro politician’s error is to assume success is simply about never telling us anything we don’t want to hear. That’s the appearance but there’s a deeper and more complex reality.

    In the months before the 2007 election, Labor’s focus groups detected public dissatisfaction over the rising cost of living. Rudd tried to capitalise on this disaffection by expressing great concern about the issue and implying – without actually promising – there was something he could do about it.

    This was the origin of two of the early setbacks in Rudd’s term as Prime Minister, the failures of Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch, the first bits of evidence fostering the public’s growing (if unfair) conviction that Rudd is all talk and no action.

    Guess what? If you conduct focus groups today you’ll find much dissatisfaction over the rising cost of living. It is, I suspect, an almost permanent state. The cost of living is always rising – but so too are wages and pensions. We have genuine cause for complaint only when the rise in prices is outstripping the rise in our incomes. And though that happens from time to time, over the past 10 or 15 years wages have grown a lot faster than prices.

    So our unceasing complaint about the rising cost of living – always changing its focus, from the cost of petrol to interest rates to the price of electricity – is just another case of us wanting to have our cake and eat it. We wish we lived in a world where prices never rose but incomes rose as they do now. Dream on.

    Our problem is not with the rising cost of living but with our efforts to keep up with the rising standard of living. We worry about every price rise because, in our unceasing attempt to keep up with the Joneses (who strive to keep up with us), we over-commit ourselves. When you spend all your income – perhaps more than your income – you always feel poor, always have trouble making ends meet, no matter how high your income.

    Politicians who imagine this kind of foolish selfishness defines the electorate underrate us. We’re looking for politicians who, in their concern to protect and advance our interests, demand more from us.

    Rudd thinks we went cold on his emissions trading scheme because his opponents gave us an exaggerated opinion of what it would do to our cost of living. But Hugh Mackay, the noted social researcher, has a roughly opposite take: having been convinced by Rudd and others that our greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced, we expected to be asked – even compelled – to change our behaviour.

    When cities were running out of water, we had to stop using water in certain ways. Few resented this and almost all complied. The more we complied the more convinced we became of the seriousness of the problem and the need for strong action.

    With climate change, however, no immediate demands were made on us. This was partly because of Rudd’s misguided fear that making demands on us would make him unpopular.

    Mackay makes the psychologist’s point that our changes in attitude don’t last unless they’re quickly and strongly reinforced by a change in our actions (a truth that doesn’t fit easily with economists’ aversion to moralising, compulsion and even voluntary action, in favour of mere changes in prices).

    Now, thanks to his great misstep in abandoning his trading scheme, Rudd lacks the moral authority to be believed even when he assures us the mining companies’ claims that the resource tax would damage the economy are self-serving scaremongering.

    Ross Gittins is economics editor.

     

  • PM may end up dumped in a ditch

    PM may end up dumped in a ditch

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    Simon Benson Blog Icon Arrow

     

    Simon Benson

    Monday, June 07, 2010 at 11:25pm

     

     

    KEVIN Rudd is in serious trouble. And it’s not the electorate he should be worried about.

    It’s a cabal of powerbrokers and his own MPs.

    According to the mathematical principles used to remove Morris Iemma from office in NSW, the PM should already be a goner.

    In 2008, when the NSW Labor powerbrokers Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar (these are the same blokes now shoring up Rudd’s leadership) first came after Iemma, his popularity was in the mid 30s – around where Rudd is now.

    Labor’s primary vote was 35 per cent and Iemma had three years to run to an election.

    Federal Labor’s primary vote is now an appallingly low 33 per cent. And Rudd has not three years, but three months.

    Some suggest there is no precedent for a move on the PM. Nonsense. The only precedent is that it hasn’t happened in a first term.

    The other difference is that Iemma was still popular among his backbench – the majority were personally loyal.

    Rudd has the added problem that the majority of his caucus don’t like him.

    The mood of the caucus last week was described as solemn.

    That was a polite understatement. They are filthy. That many of them stand to lose their seats after just one term is causing many to start talking about alternatives – not after the election – before.

    With a swing of just 1.4 per cent, Labor could lose 14 seats and Government – and that is before we consider the mining seats. Based on yesterday’s figures of a two-party preferred vote of 53/47 in favour of the Coalition, they could lose double that.

    While it is just talk, talk has a way of being put into action.

    Julia Gillard is being spoken of in the corridors for the possibility of a move to her before an election.

    Arbib, the wiley senator and former NSW party boss was the major powerbroker who put Rudd into office. Bitar is the party’s national secretary.

    Both are now Rudd’s closest political advisers. But Arbib, at least, has already started talking up Gillard. Not explicitly but enough to get tongues wagging.

    Just as they have to take responsibility for the abysmal state in NSW, both must take responsibility for where Rudd, and Labor, are in the polls.

    That is something neither will want to do. If there is risk they could wear responsibility for an election loss after one term, they would switch to Gillard in a heartbeat.

    Rudd’s problem is that he is not only running out of time to turn things around, he may soon find he is running out of true friends.