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  • ALP factions no match for squabbling libs

     

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    People still talked about the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange The realities of government killed off Labor’s socialist objective.

    To have your voice heard in the Hawke and Keating governments, you had to be an economic rationalist. No room for old commos there.

    The objective remains in Labor’s platform as a reminder of the halcyon days of the party being on the Left. It’s not worth getting rid of because most ALP members have forgotten it exists.

    What distinguishes the average rank-and-file ALP type or even those who have risen to great heights is they want to see the country run efficiently with an eye to helping the weakest first.

    It’s more of a trickle-up theory of economics as against the trickle-down theory much loved by the Liberals. They believe, for example, if you make Clive Palmer even richer, the rest of us mortals will be better off.

    In the Labor Party, socialism’s demise makes it hard to work out the differences between the Labor factions.

    These days it depends on personalities and who you mixed with when you were young. Old personal loyalties count for a great deal when choosing a faction.

    But Labor factions have been around for a long, long time. They love to have the odd stoush but they know who the real enemy is. When election time comes around, they pull together. The party organisation, whichever faction may be running it in any given state, is always ready to fight.

    Not so in the NSW Liberal Party. The factional war there is more bitter than any the Labor Party has witnessed. And it’s not about political extremism, it’s about which brand of extreme Catholicism will come out in front. It’s about whether the left or right-wing factions of Opus Dei will control party preselections. When this lot fight, they know who the real enemy is.

    It’s not Julia Gillard, it’s Alex Hawke or David Clarke.

    The Liberals can’t use the faceless men tag about Labor faction chiefs any more; they have their own brand.

    While Gillard’s elevation may have taken the Liberals by surprise, the fact that an election was in the offing was obvious. If Kevin Rudd had stayed on, an election would probably have been held in October or November.

    The media has focused for six months at least on Labor’s decline in the polls. You had to be living under a rock not to know that Queensland and western Sydney were Labor’s weakest links.

    If your organisation was in any way effective, candidates would have been selected in western Sydney seats a year ago. They would have been doorknocking for months. Their names would by now be recognised in these suburban centres.

    In NSW, federal Labor is inhibited by the damage to the Labor brand by an unpopular state government. Just a few weeks ago a by-election was held in the seat of Penrith. The biggest anti-Labor swing — 25 per cent — was recorded. Penrith is within the federal seat of Lindsay, a seat the Liberals could win with a swing of 6.3 per cent. The Liberals didn’t select a candidate there until July 13.

    In 40 years of elections scrutiny, I have never seen a stuff-up of this magnitude. The selected candidate is one Fiona Scott. She may in fact be a genius, but if so she is a hidden genius. Her party minders have kept her under wraps so well that no one has yet been introduced to her. A hell of a way to campaign, you might say, but the situation in the nearby seat of Greenway is even worse.

    The candidate there was selected on July 17, the day the election was announced. The swing required here is 5.7 per cent but the Liberals, so intent on the factional war, couldn’t get a candidate selected until the second half of July.

    Labor’s vote in western Sydney is very soft. The voters are unhappy about boatpeople, they are bewildered at Labor’s lack of a climate change policy. It is a giant mortgage belt where interest rate increases really hurt.

    Labor’s faction wars can be pretty nasty affairs but candidates get selected on time and nothing gets in the way of campaigning.

    In the NSW Liberal Party, the machine has stopped working. The warriors have taken aim at internal targets with unerring success. It will not save the state Labor government but it might allow Gillard to scrape home.

    4 comments on this story

  • Big Solar: The Sun’s Rising Power

     

     

    Falling prices have been one reason for this explosive growth. Chinese companies have entered the solar panel market and gained a market share of more than 50 percent.

     

    Priceless competition

    Cheap Chinese manufacturing and massive governmental subsidies have more than halved prices for solar panels since 2008. Shi Zhengrong, CEO of one of China’s biggest solar panel manufacturers, Suntech Power Holdings, even massive state subsidies in many European countries like Germany, Italy, or Spain have created a huge market. European companies, once market leaders, are struggling, but consumers have happily bought into the price slump.

     

    But growing competition and state subsidies aren’t the only driving forces behind the current solar boom. Technological advances are equally important. While most established European companies see their market shares melt away, America’s First Solar managed to nearly double its share in 2009.

     

    The company’s secret: cheaper technology. First Solar’s thin cadmium telluride panels are less efficient than traditional silicon-based panels, but the Arizona based company has managed to produce them at significantly lower costs.

     

  • Plan to pipe water from PNG to Queensland

     

    “There’s a huge demand for [water] in Australia and there’s a huge supply up here which is untapped,” he said.

    Despite the huge construction costs, Mr Ariel believes it would be cheaper than desalination plants and water recycling.

    “The advantage that this project has is the sheer volumes of water available,” he said.

    “It’s available all year round. It doesn’t require expensive dams.”

    Mr Ariel says the pipeline could provide six gigalitres a day to be used for consumption, irrigation or pumped into the Murray-Darling river system.

    He says he is confident he would be able to reach agreements with the thousands of PNG landowners who would be affected by the pipeline.

    Tags: business-economics-and-finance, environment, water, water-management, water-supply, qld, brisbane-4000, papua-new-guinea

    First posted 1 hour 36 minutes ago

  • Abbott wants dole clampdown

    Abbott wants dole clampdown

    AAP July 27, 2010, 8:10 pm
    • 36 comments

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    Reissuing to clarify 4th par.

    By Cathy Alexander

    SYDNEY, July 27 AAP – Everyone on the dole could have half their payments quarantined for spending on essentials if the coalition wins the election.

    Opposition leader Tony Abbott says he would like to extend an existing scheme under which the federal government quarantines welfare payments to people in the Northern Territory.

    Half of each payment is set aside for food, rent and other essentials; the money cannot be used for alcohol, gambling or cigarettes.

    The scheme was originally brought in for the NT’s indigenous communities and is now being extended to cover up to 20,000 Territorians.

    Mr Abbott says if the scheme is good for the NT, it’s good for the country.

    “If it’s right and just in the Territory … why not elsewhere?” he said in a speech to the Sydney Institute.

    “It should produce a better life for long-term unemployed people,” he said, adding that it would also reassure taxpayers that welfare payments were being put to good use.

    Mr Abbott said if he won power at the August 21 election, the coalition would review the NT scheme in July next year with an eye to extending it, possibly to more regions or possibly “more generally, right across Australia”.

    This was the type of reform that “real economic conservatives” should engage in, Mr Abbott told the audience of about 200 people at a Sydney hotel.

    His dole quarantining proposal is likely to be unpopular with some social and welfare groups who argue the NT scheme is paternalistic, doesn’t work, and takes away people’s right to control their finances.

    Mr Abbott also flagged that the coalition would like to reform the tax system in line with recommendations Treasury chief Ken Henry made in his tax review.

    Dr Henry came in for some praise from Mr Abbott, who said the economist had devoted most of his professional life to thinking about improving the tax system, so his recommendations on tax should not have been ignored by the government.

    Dr Henry’s suggestion that the tax-free threshold be raised to $25,000 and personal tax rates be made lower and flatter “should be considered a priority once budget surpluses are big enough to afford them,” Mr Abbott said.

     

  • Labor rejects food security concerns

     

     

    Concerns remain

     

    The Coalition’s spokesman on food security, John Cobb, says Labor has dropped the ball on agriculture policy, including quarantine and research and development.

    “We are not a country that puts foreign ownership to one side, we allow it,” he said.

    “But I think there is a case to look at the amount that any one entity from overseas owns, I don’t have a problem with that.

    “I think there are a lot of things we can do about food security and we will be announcing more of those next week.”

    Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan is chairing a Senate committee inquiry into food production that will report on August 23.

    “At the present time there’s no differentiation between private investment and sovereign investment,” he said.

    “In other words, other countries’ sovereign wealth funds buying our assets and then excluding us from access to them.

    “We need to put all this on a register, we need to lower the trigger point for reporting of foreign sales and we need to consider this as part of our sovereignty, strategic investment in Australia.”

    Senator Sherry says that all foreign governments, or any company owned by them, must get approval from the FIRB before making a direct investment in Australia, “whether it’s for one dollar or a billion dollars”.

    According to farmer advocate Richard Bovill, if foreign interests take too great a share of Australian farms, the nation may not be able to cope with future food demands.

    “Foreign investment in Australia is an open book – we have a fear of the potential of the Chinese, but we shouldn’t isolate the Chinese,” he said.

    “The fact is the model in Australia allows anybody to come in and acquire our assets, to exploit basically those people who are vulnerable in Australia.

    “That’s the scary thing. That’s what we should be looking at.

    “We do the basic commodity production – we grow the grain and the milk and mine the minerals and allow everyone else to control the value-adding and the downstream processing and all of those things that actually create real wealth – we sell those opportunities to everybody else.”

     

    ‘Real concern’

     

    And he says the concerns have nothing to do with xenophobia.

    “If foreigners want to come and buy up Australia, we shouldn’t be concerned about them buying up Australia.

    “We should be concerned about the fact that we’ve let our agriculture in Australia deteriorate to the point where Australian farmers cannot participate in that sale process – that’s the real concern.”

    He also accuses Labor of neglecting the sector.

    He says the Government has overburdened the dedicated minister, Mr Burke, by assigning him the additional and onerous sustainable population portfolio.

    “You can’t have a regional strategy for regional Australia if you don’t understand good agricultural policy,” he said.

    “Unfortunately I think, politically, Labor has never been close to agriculture and it’s been very clear in the actions of this Government that they’ve made agriculture a very low priority. Maybe because they believe farmers don’t support the Labor Party.

    “But many, many other people in rural communities do support the Labor Party and Labor is letting those people down, because without viable farming communities you can’t have a viable regional community.”

    Tags: food-and-beverage, government-and-politics, rural, federal-elections, australia

     

  • Justine Deserts promises of 2004 and 2007

    Justine's press releaseThere is no better place to use that fire than right here in federal parliament, representing the people of Richmond. I want to work with all levels of government and within the community to make sure their needs are met. I have always said that I will put the community first. Forget the buck-passing and politics—I am here to do a job, and that is to represent Richmond. So I look forward to working with anyone, in a bipartisan fashion, to find new opportunities and to deliver for the people of Richmond…
    …Richmond reflects the challenges of an ageing population—20 per cent of people living in Richmond are aged 65 and over. This fact alone means there is enormous pressure on our health and social services. Health services and access to aged care facilities are vitally important to people living in Richmond. I will be making sure that our elderly people get what they need, including access to health care services; an after-hours GP clinic; a bed in a nursing home, if they need one; access to home care services, if they want to remain in their homes; and safe, affordable public transport—in particular, a long-term commitment must be made to the restoration of our XPT train. Many locals are very positive about federal Labor’s long-term commitment to restoring the train…

    She repeated these promises in the 2007 campaign, reiterating that it was a priority for her second term.

    Obviously that fire has gone out in the 2010 election campaign, because she washed her hands of the issue.