The blog is taking a break. In the meantime, a guest post from the Save Albert Park team.
The Victorian government slashed $95 million from Parks Victoria’s budget while promising the owners of Formula One, Liberty Media, a $350 million pit building extension as part of a deal to extend the grand prix contract a further two years from 2035 to 2037.
Amidst the Trump regime’s destruction of valued institutions is the decision that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer track of the cost of climate crisis-fueled weather disasters.
Noaa has provided daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate movements for many years.
Sadly, largely due to the media’s lack of interest in science and the fall in the number of journalists able to cover such a round, one of the most important stories about science – the Trump destruction of science -is largely being neglected.
Fortunately, the specialist media – such as Nature and some commentators – have been reporting just how devastating the impact of the Trump administration has been.
WTF just happened?
Well, the first obvious thing is that Labor just won a massive record-breaking landslide election. The majority might get trimmed back a bit as further counting occurs but it suggests that a third term is possible.
Second, they had the advantage of running against a Leader, Peter Dutton, who was rated Australia’s most distrusted politician by Roy Morgan Research and against a political party women have been deserting since Morrison days.
On April 25 a group of Neo-Nazi protestors booed Uncle Mark Brown’s Welcome to Country at the Melbourne Anzac Day Shrine service. To their credit the RSL promptly said they would continue with Welcomes to Country.
The protestors seemed to come from the same cohort of Australians who opposed the Howard era gun buy backs complaining that the government shouldn’t take their guns away because they might need them to defend Australia. As Keith Payne VC said at the time: “If they want to defend the country they ought to join the Army – if they can pass the psych test.”
Peter Dutton has a very big problem this coming Saturday, election day, he is the most distrusted political leader in Australia as of an April 2025 survey by Roy Morgan.
Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine said that “distrust was at dangerously high levels for Dutton.”
“Roy Morgan’s special survey on trust and distrust in the lead up to the Federal election shows that Coalition Leader, Peter Dutton, has the unwanted and extremely unhelpful, distinction of being Australia’s most distrusted politician – by a significant margin”, she said.
One of the great – and most significant current scientific puzzles – is what’s happening with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and the decline of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
For some time there have been indications that AMOC may reverse itself with wide ranging impacts – for instance bringing a new Ice Age to the Northern hemisphere or at least other less dramatic impacts more widely.
I was approached recently by a TV program with a view to talking about Anzac Day.
I felt that I ought to outline what sort of views the program might expect about Anzackery, Frontier Wars and the Australian War Memorial.
Those views were indications I would pursue for the show. But sadly, the next day the program had reconsidered and decided to take a different approach.
A speech to the Broadmeadows Rotary Club 16 April 2025
When I read Michael Church’s excellent Age article about Glenroy once being thought to become the Toorak of the North it made me think about when we moved from Carlton to South Street Glenroy in the early 1950s. To me it felt like we had gone bush.