The blog is taking a break in a week or so but in the meantime the first of four odds and sods compilations.
How much has the climate changed since you were born?
This year, the Monash Climate Change Hub has been working with ABC Story Lab interactive project, See how global warming has changed the world since your childhood, which allows you to insert your birth date and then see how much the world has warmed since.
If you were told that an Australian politician had published a new book, backed by a solid evidence base, with a highly original take on a major problem the normal response would be to wonder if Barry Jones had a new book out.
If you were told it was actually by a sitting Federal MP you would probably puzzle away for a while, laugh uncontrollably or suspect it might be by the Member for Fenner, Dr Andrew Leigh.
The Australian right wing seem to be embarking on another cultural crusade – this time against what is probably the best weekly news magazine (which the editors insist on calling a newspaper) in the world, The Economist.
The Economist’s crime: reporting Australia and Australian politics in an objective manner. First out of the blocks was The Australian’s Paul Kelly with a ponderous piece on how The Economist didn’t understand Australia and how it was dreadfully unfair to the statesman and visionary, Scott Morrison. That’s not quite what he said but you get the gist.
The Morrison Government’s decision-making is about to get worse – if that’s possible – as Cabinet submissions are apparently to be replaced by PowerPoint presentations.
Presumably the full Cabinet submissions will be available and a few Ministers may read them but the reality is that the use of PowerPoint (PP) will discourage the rest from even attempting to read the executive summary.
There are many significant moments in history – local, national and international – but it is often difficult to recognise them except in retrospect or as part of some invented tradition.
In Port Melbourne one of those moments was memorialised more than four decades ago but the memorial was almost lost and has only now been reinstated.
Last month the Earth got its first day in court in cases against ExxonMobil lodged in New York and Massachusetts in which it was alleged, among other things, that the company misled the public about its product.
In 2010 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, in their book Merchants of Doubt detailed how a group of people obscured the truth on issues from tobacco to climate change – with, in some cases, the same people being involved in both denialist campaigns. Now, nine years later, the story may be coming to a conclusion with the issues litigated in court rather than the more hospitable theatres of the US Congress, the Murdoch media and the Australian Liberal-National Government. Not that Congress is entirely neglecting the issue, of which more later.
If you were a municipal council what would you do if: ratepayers were outraged by massive rate increases and a bloated overpaid bureaucracy (despite Government rate caps); faced a newly-formed, well-organised, well-resourced activist group; and, another activist group who had been trying to get you to adopt better governance systems and policies for a decade or so?
One of the best ways to determine how history will judge a politician is not to tot up what they achieved but to try to evaluate the depths they sometimes sank to as they pursued their careers.
John Howard was enormously electorally successful, after and before he wasn’t, but the depths of his deviousness and cynicism were exemplified by his conscious decision to import to Australia the wedge tactics the George W. Bush administration had developed to prise blue collar voters from the Democrats.
Despite the efforts of the Morrison Government – and parts of the media – the Australian trade union movement is not, and never was, a collection of thugs. Indeed, what is most remarkable about contemporary Australian unionism is that it has a very female face.
If you see a female teacher, a nurse, a social worker, a child carer you are almost certainly seeing the face of today’s union movement. Indeed, at the annual Alan Whittaker commemoration event on Princes Pier Port Melbourne on November 1 it was exemplified by the presence of the ACTU President, Michele O’Neil.
In the age of secular stagnation – although the age’s dawn has not yet dawned on the Australian government – one of the central economic questions is: what has caused productivity growth to decline?
As far back as 1987, Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics, said: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This failure of massive investment in information technology to boost productivity growth became known as the productivity paradox.