Mr. Toyoda Goes To Washington

They Should'a Had Me There (But They Didn't)

The Toyota hearings happened in Washington DC where they 'summoned' Akio Toyoda to front for the company that bears his family name.

In his opening remarks, Toyoda said that "I love cars as much as anyone" and that he is a "trained test driver" able to expertly evaluate cars. He said the company's mottoes have always been "Safety, quality and quantity" but during the past decade of the company's rapid growth, "these got confused". He promised a return to the basics.

In Japan, when there are product safety or quality problems, the head of the company will take full responsibility and apologize (which Toyoda did several times today) and that's the end of it. The company moves on, consumers make their decisions about the product, but it's almost unheard of for authorities to dig into the company until some cover-up or mistake or purposeful action which caused the problem is found.

A questioner revealed during the hearing that NY's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has brokered a deal where Toyota dealers will go to owners' homes to pick-up recalled cars and trucks, fix them and deliver them back to the owner, with Toyota reimbursing the owner for any rental or train or taxi costs incurred while the car was out of service. When Inaba and Toyota were asked if this program will be made national, it was obvious either they were avoiding the question or knew absolutely nothing about it (hard to believe).

When one member tried to find out if the new brake override software will be installed in all affected Toyota vehicles in the US, Toyoda just said, "I don't know".

When another representative talked about how much she likes her Toyota Camry hybrid but doesn't trust it now, Inaba jumped with, "You have an American car!"

Inaba was just trying to promote the fact that Toyota employs 200,000 people in the US (which Toyoda mentioned twice in the first minute of his opening statement) but the exchange was terribly confused and became hostile.

Many members did not like the answers they got today, and had no reluctance telling Toyoda and Inaba just that. One member, trying to be friendly, jokingly told Toyoda, "You can brag about this at home. You've been questioned by a congressional committee!", but it was obvious Toyoda didn't know what to make of that statement.

And so it goes, and so it went.

For one, as a long-time working interpreter between Japan and the Anglo-phone world, I wished I was there to pinch hit for these poor guys, because being bi-lingual and bi-cultural, I would have had a few things to say to these American law makers.

Number 1 on my list would have been that the US government is now a major shareholder of Toyota's rivals, GM, and Chrysler. Whether they like it or not, they are today; and as such they are in a conflict of interest if they are trying to present themselves as on some kind of higher moral ground. Quite frankly, from an outside third party, this all looks like an attempt by the US government to scare people out of Toyotas and into GM and Chryslers. Clearly this conflict of interest leads Toyota to believe this is a kangaroo court.

Number 2 on my list is that if they really thought the Toyota handling of the crisis was as lax as they claim to believe, then they should by all means explain what exactly are the laws in America that cover such things. The recall of vehicles by any company actually happens as a voluntary action to fix something. If indeed Toyota had not done any recalls, then there might be a case for insinuating there was something criminal. Seeing that Toyota is recalling vehicles voluntarily, which part of this act shows Toyota *isn't* taking responsibility for its products?

Number 3 on the list would be, at which point does the US Government require legislation and regulation to do with recalls that *it* would find satisfactory? Without such guidelines - and they do not exist - isn't it the case that the utter lack of regulation is to blame? And seeing that there isn't and blame-throwing is the game, isn't the Senate indulging in a bit of grandstanding at Toyota's reputation's expense? How does the US Government propose to repay damages?  

Number 4 on my list would be the fact that Toyota has built factories in the USA and used parts in the USA. If it's the Senate's collective wisdom to say that this has been unwelcome, and clearly,  the tone of questioning in the room strongly suggests that it is, then perhaps Toyota were gravely mistake in the American system of capitalism. Perhaps the US government has two sets of rules, one for companies they feel are domestic, and another for foreign companies that found factories. Is Toyota to understand that the US Government in practice endorses this double standard, without writing it down? Isn't this how racism and sexism works in America? How can Toyota not be sure that the US government isn't targeting Toyota not because our vehicles are unsafe but because it helps you buy votes to demonise the Japanese as you have done in your history so often?

Number 5 on my list would be how much campaign contribution has been paid into their respective Senators' coffers by GM and Chrysler and Ford? And just how much would it take for the senators to back off and apply the separate domestic rule? Because people at Toyota and in Japan in general believe that this whole Senate hearing is a scapegoating process that can only help Toyota's rivals in the market place. What assurances can you give Toyota that your  individual campaign funding does not include and has never included monies from GM, Chrysler and Ford?

Number 6 would be to lay down the implicit threat of shutting American factories. If Toyota is so unwelcome in the American market place, it is willing to move its factories to Canada or Mexico - countries under the NAFTA agreement - and close those factories and with them the 200,000 direct jobs. Toyota understands that the USA has a 10% unemployment rate, so maybe we won't find growth in this country any more. Certainly by the un-conciliatory tone of this hearing leads us to believe we should do this as soon as possible.

But no, none of this got mentioned. So I'm writing it here instead and I doubt anybody in Japan's going to read it, and I sure as hell won't be asked to be the interpreter for Toyota, so that's that. All in all, I strongly felt I should've been there, even though I have absolutely nothing to do with Toyota; which, I really don't.

The whole thing pisses me off endless. It's a good thing I'm not the Governor of the Bank of Japan, Toshihiko Fukui, because I'd be busily dumping US treasury bonds as fast as I can.

Courage And Funds (But Mostly Funds)

Really Helps If Your Wife Works For The Funding Body

Here's Tom Zubrycki in the SMH going on about how governments need to spend more money to support film makers like... him. Last I checked, he seemed to get a nice chunk of change out of the funding bodies at a semi-regular rate that would make most film makers in this country, well, envious.

The state agencies have a key role, so do the public broadcasters. They should set aside their fixation about ratings and be proactive in supporting and nourishing a vibrant documentary sector. One idea would be to reinstate the half-hour documentary slot - perhaps along the lines of Inside Australia, axed by SBS but which produced many memorable documentaries and gave many filmmakers a break.

At the other end of the spectrum there is the feature documentary. It hurts to make cut-downs to suit requirements of schedulers and sales agents, when these films are sold-out at festivals. My plea is for flexibility from schedulers to allow for the occasional feature-length documentary slot at prime time.

Recently the ABC screened Australian feature films, such as Samson & Delilah, on a weekend evening. Would it not be a good idea to feature documentaries in similar slots?

I recall a meeting at Paddington Town Hall of independent filmmakers many years ago; it must have been the late '70s or early '80s. I remember it as noisy, fiery and passionate. We voiced our indignation that apart from a couple of exceptions, our films were not picked up by television. We could get our films screened at the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op cinema in Kings Cross, and even the Opera House for a while. The tide of protest worked and the ABC opened its doors.

None of us expected, however, the ABC and SBS would gradually set the agenda for the documentary sector as a whole and leave filmmakers with fewer options to get our films commissioned. This is still the case, with new pay channels such as National Geographic.

Don't get me wrong. We are pleased public broadcasters are commissioning our ideas but is this concentration of decision-making good for the industry, for diversity?

Dude, do we even care? Somebody's always footing the bill. Better the commercial bodies than the Screen Australia mob who seem to preferentially fund Tom.

But there's more:

It's here that agencies such as Screen Australia have a vital role to play. We must radically expand the special documentary fund. Without its support, it is extremely difficult to produce documentary work unconstrained by the imperatives of the broadcasters. Ironically, many films supported through this ''back door'' end up being sold back to the broadcasters that rejected them in the first place.

The fund is one of the few places filmmakers can get support for projects largely shot overseas with no obvious Australian connection.

As filmmakers, we've been good at holding up a mirror to our own society but increasingly we're driven by a curiosity about what's happening outside our borders.

It's all very self-serving but I guess that's the nature of speeches given when they hand out an award. Pardon me if I find this much less than courageous.

Commercial Whaling Proposal

Negotiating An End To Scientific Whaling

The long standing bone of contention between Australia and Japan might shift into a new gear as of this proposal.

The draft deal would lift the ban on commercial whaling, while reducing the total number of whales killed each year by ending so-called "scientific" whaling.

There are indications key nations support the deal and it could succeed.

Conservation groups are angry and want Australia to use its position to fight against the proposal.

The deal has been issued by a "small working group" of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which includes Australia and Japan.

It is a draft deal which has not yet been approved; it is understood Australia will not support it.

Currently, commercial whaling is banned but countries can hunt whales in the name of science. Up to 1900 whales are killed each year.

The proposal would lift the commercial ban. Japan would legally be able to hunt whales without relying on the "science" justification.

The pay-off is that the proposal says the number of whales hunted would be significantly reduced from current levels.

The new deal would appear to allow for the hunting of minke whales, fin and humpback whales in the southern hemisphere.

It would come into force on November 1 this year.

Last week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced his government would take international legal action against Japan if it did not agree, by November, to end whaling in the Southern Ocean.

The federal government appears to have left open the option of a deal which would see Japan phase out whaling, which could see the practice continue for some years.

Sources say the proposal is gaining support internationally, with the US and New Zealand disposed to support it.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett met conservation groups in Canberra on Tuesday to discuss the issue. Australia is due to make an alternative proposal to the IWC within days.

One dreads to think what Australia is going to offer in exchange.

Here's a more detailed article.

The draft, released by International Whaling Commission support group chairman Cristian Maquieira, said: "This effort represents a paradigm shift in the way the Commission will carry out its mandate. The commission will establish caps of takes that are within sustainable levels for a 10-year period."

The IWC proposal said its aim was to reduce the number of whales culled under the scientific loophole which it admits has led to an increase rather than a reduction in the number of whales killed since the moratorium was put into place in 1986.

<edit>

The draft proposals, drawn up by an IWC working group that included Japan and Iceland describes as "critical" the quota limits for commercial hunting.

"Since the imposition of the commercial whaling moratorium in 1985/86, over 33,000 whales have been killed by whaling under objection, reservation and special permit – whaling over which IWC has no control,” it said.

“These takes have been increasing each year. In 1990, just over 300 whales were taken; in 1995 there were around 750 whales taken; in 2000 they were around 1,000 whales; and over the last five years takes have been between 1,700 and 1,900 whales," it said.

The proposal will go next month to an IWC working group meeting in Florida and, if approved, will be voted on at the annual meeting in June. If it is passed with at least a 75 percent majority, the proposals will becothe regime for over-seeing whaling and whale conservation.

So in other words, the IWC is going back to its proper mission of brokering numbers.

Basically, you have 2 groups with mutually exclusive ends, fighting it out on the IWC each year. The Anti-Whaling lobby has taken the agenda to the extreme and basically won't let any commercial whaling resume, so nations interested in whaling have to come up with legitimate excuses to go whaling. South Korea says each year it plans on having more accidents where they hit whales. Iceland is threatening to leave the IWC, as is Norway. Russia is quiet but still goes on campaigns for whaling. And then there's Japan, the nation that seems to attract the most vitriol because clearly its claims of scientific whaling' seem the most unlikely - Although I don't see how it's any less unscientific than planning to have more accidents, but nobody gets on South Korea's case about their accidental whaling program.

Hence you have the crazy folks of Sea Shpherd chasing the Japanese scientific whaling fleet and throwing smoke bombs and stink bombs and getting hosed and getting run over by whaling boats and what have you. It's pretty unomcompromising on the anti-whaling lobby side. They're saying zero and nothing else, and they're staked to that as a moral position.

Then the whaling nations ave their claims too - mainly on the basis of cultural practice, but also because the International Whaling Commission has effectively turned itself into the International Anti-Whaling Commission that nothing can get negotiated beyond whether it's possible to even contemplate commercial whaling.

It's getting mightily sticky as a diplomatic topic too because now Kevin Rudd is saying he will sue Japan in some international court over the scientific whaling, although on the basis of just what international law remains to be seen. The Japanese are doing 'scientific' whaling under the provisions for such things under the IWC agreement so they're not exactly breaking rules there. Australia's insistence that the whaling is happening in Australia's territorial waters is just as dodgy because Australia's claim over the territorial waters is just a claim.

Meanwhile the popular claims that whaling is bad because it's cruel is fraught with problems. I doubt Australia's beef industry would like it if say, India came in hard with claims that cows are sacred and therefore should not be eaten. You can see just how far that argument would fly in Australia, so people really ought to get off the cruelty-to-animals line as the basis of anti-whaling arguments. If you think that's spurious, then let me tell you the Japanese think the anti-whaling arguments are just as spurious.  Maybe that's what the Japanese should do: Pay India to complain about the beef industry in Australia. God knows they have a few *ahem* beefs with Australia already.

At this point in time it's clear that the 4-6 nations that want to undertake commercial whaling:

• will seek to undertake whaling no matter what


• don't care how anti-whalers feel about it


• are not persuaded by moral/ethical/fluffy-emotional arguments


• have their own data and stats to support their case for whaling


• but will abide by proper agreements.

Unless Australia's really going to war with these countries over whaling, then maybe it should negotiate *something*. So what could that something be? It seems that it's a plan to let whaling go back to being legit in exchange for strictly controlled numbers. In other words, both parties give up something. The anti-whalers have to give up their demand for zero as the number, and the whalers have to reduce the number towards zero.

People who are not willing to make any compromises won't like it, but there's enough political realism to the notion that allows all the nations involved to come to a detente. It's certainly better than the stupid annual stoush that is the IWC meeting in May each year. Ideals are fine, but if there are people who are diametrically opposed to your ideals, then it's time to get a little real.

News That's Fit To Punt - 23/02/10

China As The Next Dubai

Here's a joyful little article.

The township of Huaxi in the Yangtze River Delta is a proud symbol of how Chinese communists embraced capitalism to lift 300 million people out of poverty during the past three decades.

Its leaders took a farm community with bamboo huts and ox carts in the 1970s and transformed it into an industrial and commercial powerhouse where today many of its 30,000 residents live in mansions and most have a car. Per-capita income of 80,000 yuan ($13,000) - almost four times the national average - allows Huaxi to claim it's China's richest village.

Huaxi is also emblematic of the country's construction and real estate boom. Communist Party officials there are building one of the world's 30 tallest buildings, a 2.5 billion yuan, 328-metre tower. The revolving restaurant atop the so-called New Village in the Sky offers sweeping views of paddy fields, fish ponds and orchards.

Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, says China is overdoing it. "It does not make sense for China to build more empty buildings and add to capacities in industries where you already have overcapacity,'' Faber told Bloomberg Television. "I think the Chinese economy will decelerate very substantially in 2010 and could even crash.''

Huaxi has an even more ambitious project coming up: a 6 billion yuan, 538-metre skyscraper that would today rank as the world's second tallest. The only loftier building is the new Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The rest of the article explores how China's economy is a bubble that's waiting to burst. When it bursts, you can bet your bottom dollar and the fair few above it that the commodities market will collapse and with it, Australia's shares, and then property and then its much-vaunted banking system. There's a chain reaction waiting to burst Australia's property bubble right there. Mightn't be such a bad thing if it didn't come with massive loss of jobs and all the ugliness that would entail. One thinks the current situation is merely a prelude to the dam walls bursting and this time Australia's right in the way of the on-coming flood. Oh joy.

Although this column flies in the face of this article in the same paper here.

The central bank has already got a head start on inflation, lifting its key cash rate by 75 basis points late last year while most developed nations held their rates at record lows. RBA Governor Glenn Stevens last week made it clear rates had further to rise this year should the economy strengthen as he expected.

Indeed, mining is a major reason for the RBA's upbeat economic outlook as insatiable demand for Australian commodities from China and India fuels a surge in investment.

In today's speech on "Mining Booms and the Australian Economy," Mr Battellino said past booms had not lasted more than 15 years before petering out. He dated the start of the current boom to 2005 but said this episode could last longer.

"On this occasion, the growth potential of countries such as China and India suggests that the expansion in resource demand could continue for an extended period, though this will depend at least to some extent on the economic management skills of the authorities in these countries, not to mention our own," he said.

He noted that mining investment as a share of gross domestic product was much higher in this boom than in the past and that the boost to Australia's terms of trade had been much larger. Both the price and volume of Australian exports, like iron ore and coal, had risen strongly during the current upswing.

So, until the wheels fall off China, we stand to make a lot of money, I guess.

More Fear And Loathing In China

Here's an interesting article.

China has so far survived the global economic downturn with hardly any of the agitation many once feared it might cause among unemployed workers or jobless university graduates. The economy grew at a very robust-sounding 8.7% last year and is predicted by many to be on course for similar growth in 2010.

Sweeping changes are due in the senior leadership in 2012 and 2013, including the replacement of President Hu Jintao and of the prime minister, Wen Jiabao. But if a struggle is brewing, signs of it are hard to spot. An unusually high-profile campaign against organised crime by the party chief of Chongqing municipality, Bo Xilai, has raised eyebrows. Some speculate that it is part of a bid by Mr Bo, who is a Politburo member, to whip up popular support for his promotion to the Politburo’s all-powerful Standing Committee in 2012. An online poll by an official website chose Mr Bo as the “most inspiring voice” of 2009.

But Andrew Nathan of Columbia University in New York does not see this as a challenge to the expected shoo-in for Xi Jinping, the vice-president, as China’s next leader, despite Mr Xi’s failure last year to garner the leading military post analysts thought would form part of his grooming. Li Keqiang, a deputy prime minister, still looks set to take over from Mr Wen in 2013.

Against this backdrop of political stability and economic growth, the most credible interpretation of the government’s recent hard line is that the forces pushing its leaders towards greater liberalisation at home and sympathetic engagement with the West are weaker than had been hoped. Nor is there any sign that the next generation of leaders see their mission differently. As Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based political analyst, puts it: “The argument in policy-making circles where reform is concerned is ‘how much more authoritarian should we be?’ not ‘how do we embark on Western-style democracy?’”

Hmmm. It really comes down to control and China's Communists are trying to retain their Totalitarian stance on civics while trying to go capitalist on the finance which is inevitably leading to these kinds of issues. It would be nice if China could come off the ledge a bit and be more tractable but the Communist Party is essentially using the threat of the West to keep its control going which in turn means it benefits greatly from being intractable.

I guess it's a kind of massive irony that the free market world has come to depend so much on what is essentially a 1930s-style totalitarian regime.

Climate Change Articles

Another cool entry in The Economist.

Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you'll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What's truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

There's this really cool one in the SMH.

If there were a typo in The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, would that nullify the theory of evolution? If an email were stolen from one lung cancer specialist that showed frustration with tobacco lobbyists, would this prove that all cancer specialists around the world were in a conspiracy to destroy cigarette companies? If a tennis ball is filmed only after it bounces and is moving upwards, does this disprove the law of gravity?

Obviously the answer is no, no and no. Yet the deniers of climate science desperately hang on to a few drops of so-called proof to claim the entire ocean of evidence is flawed.

These minor errors do not invalidate the work of scientists from around the world who are screaming from their combined rooftop that human activity is warming the planet. Hundreds of scientists from more than

100 countries whose work is peer-reviewed by hundreds more are apparently all in a global conspiracy to make us pay more for electricity. The insects they study that are migrating earlier or travelling higher up mountains due to enhanced global warming must be in on the conspiracy, too.

Do people who question climate change science do so in other areas of their lives? Do they refuse a doctor's advice when seriously ill? Do they question aeronautical engineers before they board a plane? Or do they mistrust science only when it points to global catastrophe?

Witty dude, this guy.

Cate Blanchett Says...


... The arts is more than just another industry. Here's the link.

Anyway, what else do we know, and have studied and measured? We know that countries with strong cultural identities demonstrate greater social cohesion and on and on and on. Basically, all sorts of studies have been done, key-performance indicators, measured and indeed graphed.

But there is more. We do more than all that. We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

What I'm saying I don't think anyone would deny, and yet no one seems prepared to constantly value that we give people the chance to make sense of the experience of their lives, their brief lives, and the tool to communicate that unique sense in another person or people.

This insistence on the importance of experience itself is a feature of these witnessing books and these witnessing lives, an insistence that history is not a concept or a force, but the brief, limited, unimportant lives of ordinary men and women involved in the business of just getting from one day to the next, just this, repeated a million times over.

Nice shot, Cate, but it isn't terribly convincing.

This country is about growing stuff and selling it, or digging stuff up and selling it or about building houses and living in it while we keep jobs to do with growing, digging or building. The rest of Australia is just servicing these simple needs. Anything above and beyond that, like a cultural industry is for wankers and should not be tolerated. Such pretensions are considered part of the old world and are considered part of the evils of the class system and more toffee-nosed wankers getting by without doing a hard-day's work growing or digging or building. That's the Australia I know, and that's the way most people want to keep it as far as I can tell; so Cate, your observations are falling on deaf bogan ears.

You're lucky you don't get killed like you were some stray dog in Leichhardt, like this poor sod.

Money Blues

Greenback As Reserve Currency
Here's a cool column about money.

The all-pervasive US dollar is essentially the world's pricing marker for all leading goods, commodities and trade.

Given that, it can be argued that the world's currencies in effect derive their pricing by and large from the US dollar.

They are "de-facto derivatives" of the US dollar.

In this light, it is difficult to see how any of these currencies can usurp the underlying US dollar reserve in the foreseeable future, if at all.

Interestingly, none of the proponents are offering any notion of "sound" money as an alternative, but rather a redistribution of the current currency pie.

In effect the same game but a different split of the spoils.

But herein lies the dilemma: all the fiat currencies rest on essentially the same operating model.

An argument that the US dollar is doomed is an argument that the fiat currency model is doomed.

Instead, these non-reserve currencies are likely to face collapse first. The US dollar will be the last to go; a US dollar collapse would drag all into the abyss.

Maybe the real argument being presented by the pundits is whether imminent doom is awaiting the fiat currency system.

On this question, history is not very kind. It teaches us that all fiat currencies eventually reach their intrinsic value, zero. Some sooner than others, but the same fate awaits all.

So perhaps it is time to actually question and debate the nature of the money we currently use. One thing is for sure, the debate will eventually occur.

Yes. But it seems everybody who says fiat money is bad wants to tie currencies to something - most often gold - that you get the feeling that it's gold pundits wanting their assets to inflate in value in some proportion to the scarcity of gold.

Of course in the mean time, the Chinese are selling of US bonds.

CHINA sold $US34 billion ($38 billion) worth of US government bonds in December, raising fears that Beijing is using its financial muscle to signal that it has lost confidence in American economic policy.

Figures from December show that, following the sale, China is no longer the largest overseas holder of US treasury bonds. Beijing ended the year with $US755.4 billion worth of US government debt, compared to Japan's $US768.8 billion.

Since the subprime crisis that began in the US grew to engulf the global economy, China's leaders have repeatedly expressed concerns about US policy. December's $US34 billion sell-off made only a tiny dent in Beijing's total holdings of US assets, which amount to well in excess of $US1 trillion when stakes in American companies, as well as treasury bills, are taken into account.

But the news intensified concerns about China's appetite for bankrolling ever-widening American deficits. The Premier, Wen Jiabao, told reporters last year: ''We have made a huge amount of loans to the United States. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I'm a little bit worried.''

When Timothy Geithner, the US treasury secretary, visited China last June, he sought to reassure his hosts. ''The US is committed to a strong and stable international financial system,'' he told them. The Obama administration fully recognises that the US has a special responsibility to play in this regard, and we fully appreciate that exercising this special responsibility begins at home.''

But Allan Meltzer, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said China's bond sales should be a wake-up call for Washington. ''The Chinese are worried that we have unsustainable debt levels, and we do not have a policy for dealing with it,'' he said.

China's sales contributed to a record drop in foreign holdings of short-term debt in December. Net overseas holdings of short-term bills fell by $US53 billion.

So doesn't this mean that China is actually not a believer in the Greenback? It's been said fr years that the day the Japanese sold their US bonds was the day a lot of this system was going to unravel. Japan for its part has held on to their US Bonds essentially to keep the whole mess going, even when it's put a big hole in its own economy to do so. The smart thing would have been to sell those bonds in the early 1990s. That would have burst quite a few bubbles around the planet along the way. By not doing so, Japan really played nice and is paying the price now.

You can see why China would want to sell out while it could... but what are they going to hold instead?

Let The Bubble Burst?

Property Bubble Talk

I expect banking shares to be in trouble when the property bubble bursts. Here's an article that says the Australian property bubble is looking to burst at some point.

Yet on Wednesday one of the unpalatable and less obvious side-effects of Australia's inflating house prices - now deemed by the Economist magazine to be overvalued by 50 per cent - became clearer. The rise in the number of Australian households who are in so much difficulty with their mortgage repayments that they are facing selling up - or being sold up - is continuing its ascent beyond the 200,000 mark reached in November. By this year's end, some 270,000 Australian households will be in severe mortgage stress.

Defaults on mortgage repayments will rise to 35,500 by December - considerably above the present yearly total of about 28,000 households.

All in all, the report produced by the Sydney consultants Fujitsu predicts that by the end of this year some 637,000 Australian households will be under some form of mortgage stress.

No one knows how Australia's housing asset bubble will end. But new American research points to an unexpected and unnerving phenomenon for banks caused by a wave of more belligerent borrowers caught in a property bubble burst.

Many are now more likely to lose their emotional attachment to their homes and walk away, tossing the keys to the bank, even if they have the capacity to keep making mortgage repayments. One published estimate found that 17 per cent of all Americans who default on their mortgage repayments no longer choose to try and tough it out - they walk off.

Except in Australia, you sort of wonder if the terms of the mortgages allow people to walk off. I thought I was being a little bearish when I last read some papers that indicated that the Sydney real estate prices could fall 40%. If The Economist thinks it's over valued by 50%, then it could easily be a 33% drop. So expect it to go down 33-40%.

Most of the people who bought properties this side of 1998 are going to be quite peeved when the bubble bursts. If they got locked into unrealistic mortgages to support unrealistic house prices they bought into, the backlash and recriminations and blame-throwing is going to be something fierce. Which explains not only how the First Home Owners' Grant helped to shore up prices, but why they couched the policy in such a way so as to help the Baby Boomers keep their property values up through the early part of the GFC. Now that those policies are being wound down and the stimulus is being wound down, things could get interesting.

I'm actually not looking forward to seeing this one shake out. The way it shook out in Japan was totally ugly.

Rubbishing Pop

Crap For Consumption

Here's a corker.

Stravinsky famously noted that "most art is bad". He didn't go on to point out that this is the almost inescapable consequence of its genesis, for art - real art - is not about rehashing the tried and true, but rather of smashing the rules and creating something never seen before, most examples of which must inevitably fail.

The new new is not the last new improved. No painter today would be congratulated for painting an impressionist masterpiece. This is not to try to invert our sense of success. Failure is failure, and true artists are excruciatingly aware of their mistakes and miscalculations.

These same observations cannot be made of what is sometimes referred to as popular culture, the sort of thing you find when you turn on the television or radio, or turn up at the local leagues club. While art is the province of the unexpected and the challenging, and likely to provoke incredulity and even rage, popular culture is the domain of the familiar, the mawkish, the sentimental and the trite and bears the same relationship to culture in general as a McDonald's hamburger does to food.

You might think I'm trying to draw a distinction between high and low art, but I'm not, because there is no low art, there's just rubbish. Rubbish with its own stars and award ceremonies, rubbish with a sense of its own importance even, but rubbish nevertheless, being foisted on the rest of us in all the myriad ways people working for the great corporations of the world can come up with to flog us their crap.

..and so it goes, on a true tirade against the populist entertainment branch of culture. It's a great read. The blistering attacks on the middle ground are merciless. It feesl great to read, even though um, I do my work in entertainment.

Such snobbery, such dismissive contempt can only come from somebody who works in theatre as opposed to say, cinema. It's easier to be snobby about the arts when you live at the rarefied end eating mist and living on fog. It's easier to diss pop music if you're a classical musician; It's easier to diss comic books if you're a painter; It's easy to diss jazz ballet if you're a classically trained ballet dancer; and so the list goes for the canonised artforms we are willing to accept as authoritative epicentres of our culture.

Then again, pop culture doesn't help itself. Take Television. TV is always made for the demographic and everybody has to admit before they write anything that in Australia, the median demographic consists of 14year old girls living in the outer suburbs of our major cities. She is ignorant and not terribly bright, but she has hours to burn and so she watches the most TV of anybody. And so most things on TV are made to please her; and you have to admit it would be a losing proposition to try and win over her viewership with something cultural.

Equally, radio has the same issue and so we get ...Kyle Sandilands. Need we say more? Yet this phenomenon stretches across all the arts.

If an artist wants to make a living out of their art, they have to win a portion of a market that is spending money and this is why the market may not ever get the best out of the artist - they're busy trying to please somebody, most likely not you. It's a tough proposition. So this bit was very interesting:

Must art be relevant? Topical? Educative? Uncomfortable? Perhaps not, but when it cannot be any of those things because the sponsor won't like it, then we're in trouble. And we are in trouble. The dumbing down process we have been experiencing now for many decades has been successful, as is clear in everything from the inability of people to retain more than a couple of soundbites to guide them through the intricacies of democracy to the complete ignorance of the scientific process recently demonstrated in the so-called climategate scandal.

People read less, understand less and retain less than they did even 20 years ago. The mindless pap of undemanding popular culture is as responsible for this as the fast food industry is for the obesity epidemic. We are becoming a culture of fat, stupid know-nothings bombing the rest of the world into submission in wars we only understand in the comic book morality of Kiefer Sutherland's 24.

It's a little sad that what started as a great aesthetic slap across the face devolves to an argument about morality. I would contend that the arts have naught to do with bloody morality. The claim that society's dumbing down is at fault is also disingenuous. The market is what it is. If somebody spend money on something for entertainment, they are right to expect to be entertained. The truth is that society has become stingy about art - especially the high-falutin' variety - simply because it doesn't deliver the expected service.

Let's face it, I love Glenn Gould, but not everybody who plays Bach is Gould. I love modernist painting, but not everybody who attempts it is Picasso. So, it's a brash, brave argument but ultimate faulty. The punters do get a say in what gets made for good reason. Even the crap of American/Australian Idol has some meaning in it - even if I can't spot what it is either. Heck, even McDonalds has utility.

Absence Of Adults

Politics By Permadolescents

Here's an article by Peter Hartcher in the SMH.

Tony Abbott is trying to restrain Barnaby Joyce from blurting nonsense, but who will restrain Tony Abbott?

The opposition leader has shown that he can't tell a kiwi from a kangaroo, a plus from a minus, wreckage from recovery.

In a fundamental error, he has told Australians that we would do well to follow New Zealand's lead in managing our economy.

''There are other countries which have chosen a different path, and there is no evidence that their response has been any less effective than ours,'' Abbott told ABC Radio National yesterday.

''For instance, in New Zealand they have tried to reform their way through the global financial crisis under the new government's leadership, and they seem to be doing pretty well. What Mr Rudd chose to do was to spend his way out of the crisis.''

''He's wrong,'' said the ANZ Bank's chief economist in New Zealand, Cameron Bagrie.

''We became the unlucky country. We're doing better than the US, Britain and Europe, but we're not Australia.''

As the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said in December: ''The crisis and the follow-up of the crisis . . . has been really well managed by the Australian government.''

Indeed, guess which country the conservative Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key, is holding up as his model? ''Our vision is to close the gap with Australia by 2025,'' Key said.

Which is bad enough, before we even come to Abbott's so-called policy for curbing emissions. Anyway, the article goes on to point the stupid disconnect between the amount of money being spent in the stimulus and why it was spent. More interestingly, it closes with this:

As the opposition pursues Peter Garrett over implementation of a part of the government stimulus, Abbott's remarks raise the question of whether he understands the policy choices that decide not details but the fate of nations.

Where are the grown-ups?

Indeed. Although it is hard to say just what exactly *is* grown up in Australian politics at any given time. I guess Abbott and Joyce aren't it.

You get the feeling that the Coalition and conservatives the world over are trying to make a whole pile of post-hoc arguments for the sake of something to rally around. The world had a GFC thanks to unbridled de-regulation of the banking sector and absence of proper oversight. In order to stop the massive collapse of the global economy, governments around the world assumed the bad debts to save the system so that we didn't have another great depression.

Suddenly, the conservatives around the world are taking this rather silly tack that the government debt that these governments took on to save the day, are actually the problem.

Take this article here on the 'Tea Party' movement.

One thing that became clear in Nashville however was that the 600 or so solid conservative types, mostly middle-aged and many of them women, who shelled out $549 for a ticket to attend were not interested in minor modifications of Mr Obama’s health plan, budget or cap-and-trade legislation. As a name that harks back to the Boston Tea Party suggests, they see themselves as revolutionaries, or counter-revolutionaries. They want to “take back” an America which they say has been going wrong for generations as successive administrations have bloated the federal government and trampled on the constitution and the rights of states and individuals. Many of those attending said that Mr Obama’s election and big-spending, deficit-expanding first year had been a sort of negative epiphany. “Suddenly I’m awake,” said Kathleen Gotto from Colorado Springs, who had not previously been involved in politics.

<edit>

For all the talk about practical electioneering, some of those in Nashville teetered on the edge of the extreme and wacky. Thus the newly awakened Ms Gotto said she was researching Mr Obama’s family records for evidence that he was not eligible to be president. Mr Tancredo denounced the “cult of multiculturalism” and accused immigrants of swamping America’s Judeo-Christian values. “This is our country,” he declared to wild cheers, “Take it back!” Andrew Breitbart, the founder of a news site (Breitbart.com), railed in a speech against the hostile “mainstream media” in hock to the far left. At one point he had almost the entire audience on its feet, turned to the reporters and cameramen at the back of the room, pumping fists and yelling “USA, USA”

And the mind boggles. By the way, check out that photo at the top of that link. It's like a remote viewing window into the world of Whitopia where paranoid white people go on about encroaching US Federalism and International conspiracies to limit their freedoms and other insane delusions parading as fact. I guess they do have something to be scared of - their conservative politicians have pissed off a lot of folks around the world.

You read between the lines of these non-arguments and you get the picture of bunch of people who are shocked that a black man is in the White House and just realised their political consciousness was about race after all. It's enough to creep you out.Isn't this a repeat of 'One Nation'? Great Scott Batman, Sarah Palin is America's answer to Pauline Hanson! In fact, Pauline and Palin are almost anagrams of each other! You gotta laugh.

Well, if one thing is for certain, the media won't be able to lay off the catnip-like allure of Sarah Palin, and so her anti-intellectual, ignorance-is-strength persona is going to be shoved into the face of America by their media for a long time and drag down the tenor of US politics for years to come. Unless of course an adult comes along and pulls her into line, or she grows up an gets herself educated.Somehow I doubt that's about to happen.

Whatever the case, American politics is in for a rough ride having unleashed the genie of idiotic homilies in the guise of Sarah Palin.

I guess what looks fucked about Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce is that these private school grads are driving the discourse of the nation into the ditch by simply being so simplistic, just for the rhetorical effect. What happened to all that vaunted Private School education? There's no telling where the money went - and as such you'd have to say their parents wasted their money.

More to the point, in such delicate times you'd think Abbott and Joyce would have the better sense not to indulge in this kind of politics. Perhaps this is asking too much.

Emissions Tirading

Malcolm Turnbull's Column

Here's something in the SMH from deposed Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Turnbull.

At their core, these bills are as much the work of John Howard as of Kevin Rudd. We, as Liberals, believed in the superior efficiency of the free market to set a price on carbon. The Rudd government's approach has broadly embodied the same principles, although there were problems with its initial design. But extensive modifications made in May and November made it a scheme that appropriately balances environmental effectiveness and economic responsibility.

Alternatives such as direct regulation or subsidies will be far more costly. Under a market-based mechanism, like an ETS, there is a clear, transparent and immediate incentive encouraging investment in lower emission technology.

Industries and businesses, attended by an army of lobbyists, are particularly persuasive and all too effective at getting their sticky fingers into the taxpayer's pocket. Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale. Having the government pay for emissions abatement, as opposed to the polluting industries themselves, is a slippery slope to higher taxes and more costly and less effective abatement of emissions.

Most large emitters have committed to substantial reductions over the next decade. Many have already acted. The EU has had an ETS since 2005. China has committed to a 45 per cent reduction in emissions per unit of output by 2020. Japan has pursued lower emissions and higher energy efficiency for three decades. Our commitment is equivalent to a 21 per cent reduction.

The notion that this ETS would put Australia in front of the world is, sadly, completely wrong. We start way behind because our per capita emissions are so large, because our sources of energy are so overwhelmingly dependent on burning coal. This legislation is the only policy on offer which can credibly enable us to meet our commitment and the flexibility to move to higher cuts when warranted.

The ETS is far more in the great traditions of modern liberalism than any other available policy response.

I'm not a big fan of the ETS as proposed by the Howard Government or taken up by the Rudd Government.It doesn't aim high enough, it doesn't do enough, it hands out too many freebies to polluters and so on.

Thus, it is high time the government did set up a framework for setting the dollar value for carbon emissions. Even if flawed, the ETS that got negotiated between Labor and the Liberals under Malcolm urnbull represents the best compromise possible given the divergence of views.

It is stunning to note that the Greens would not negotiate to pass the ETS on the grounds it would be ineffective; which is the same kind of logic as killing the mongoloid baby because it's not perfect. I understand the ETS is flawed, but not having anything is even worse, and this is exactly where the Greens have delivered the discourse.

In the mean time, the ignorant heartland of the Nationals and the highly misguided yet motivated idiots of the Liberal Right have scuttled the deal from the far right side, you would think the Greens would at least re-consider the position rather than continue to grandstand by not negotiating, and thus let nothing happen. It begs the point of what exactly they are in the Senate to do. One would have thought the point of the Greens would have been to be in the thick of designing a good policy for the environment.

We know the point of the Tony Abbott leadership is to scuttle the ETS once again and go to the polls with the Climate Change denial as platform. Therefore it is ethically incumbent upon the Greens to show a bit of gumption and maturity and negotiate the passage of the ETS through the Senate. It's time to live up to their name instead of their ideals. Politics after all, is about the possible. This may be the issue that kills the Greens, much as passing the GST killed the Democrats.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/02/10

SMH's Most Commented

Here's the top-most-commented page wherein it is argued, the MacBank employee got off too lightly.

No one with a heart can help feeling sorry for David Kiely, the hapless Macquarie stockbroker caught viewing near-naked images of Miranda Kerr on his work computer. Needless to say, it would be grossly unfair for Kiely to be disciplined more severely than normal by his employer simply because he was unlucky enough to be caught doing so live on Seven News, in a clip that has now amused millions of viewers around the globe.

What's more, these kinds of sexually provocative images of women are so ubiquitous that it's completely understandable that many are left thinking, "What's the big deal?" With rather more sexually explicit images regularly confronting us all on billboards and the magazine stands in convenience stores and petrol stations, it might be hard to work up too much outrage over a picture of Kerr directing a gentle come-hither look over her modestly shielded naked breasts.

But that doesn't mean that Kiely's behaviour should be dismissed as the harmless manifestation of red-blooded maleness, or that objections to it should be decried as ''wowserism'' or over-the-top political correctness. At a time when business leaders are wringing their hands over the dearth of women in finance and executive management roles, it's worth considering how sexually explicit images of women affect us, and what kind of message they send in the workplace.

Got that? The semi-nude picture on Kiely's personal monitor at work  - which just happened to go out to the public by his own stupidity - is a symbol for the unreconstructed sexism everywhere. What does this Cordelia Fine woman want? She's not a wowser but she presumably wants more public humiliation for David Kiely. Like, yeah, that'll be politically correct.

Personally, I find the Feminist wowserism to be just another kind of wowserism, probably because it always seems to emanate from White women with status and money.

If the Obama election told us anything, it's that when both gender and race are talking points, gender issues get overstated in order to push race issues to the back and the people who argue this most vehemently are white women. Make of that what you will, but the SMH sort of misses it by lining it up with this one:

The second top-most-commented page is this one:

There are two pragmatic tests to ascertain the real level of racism in a country. Namely, the level of ethnic-motivated crime and the amount of inter-marriage between ethnic groups. Australia has a low level of ethnic crime and a high level of inter-marriages between all races, including indigenous people.

There is racism in every country. But Australia is not a racist nation. Certainly not when compared with societies where racism is, or has been, rife. The myth of Australia as racist has been promulgated by alienated leftist academics in Australia, who just happen to be employed in universities that are examples of tolerant multiculturalism at work.

From time to time a litany of journalists, actors, directors and the like join in the Australia-is-racist chorus. There is invariably a spike in such collective apologia around Australia Day. Among the voices heard this year was Warwick Thornton, the director of the widely acclaimed film Samson & Delilah.

Thornton told ABC TV News on January 24 that the Eureka flag will be like the swastika in 20 years' time. In other words, according to Thornton, Australia is so racist it is just two decades away from Nazism, or at least fascism. Yet Thornton, who has an indigenous background, is a successful Australian whose work has been supported by the taxpayer through Screen Australia. His brilliant career, so far, suggests that Australia is anything but in pre-fascist mode.

So Gerard Henderson, a well-to-do middle-aged white guy with money and status is telling us that Warwick Thornton is wrong when he says Australian society is racist.

Again, I think Warwick Thornton not being the white suburban guy with all the social perks  that go with it, gets to make the call; not you, Mr. Henderson. The rest of the article is just you saying stuff that you find ideal. The real world is far from your ideal.

The utter lack of humility by both Cordelia Fine and Gerard Henderson makes me gag. Maybe it's just the way columns have to be - stupidly single-minded and oblivious to the nuances of what is being argued.

I just thought I'd point that out before people sort of got the impression from the SMH that Australian society isn't racist at all but were decidedly sexist to the point of no redemption.

Malcolm Turnbull Fighting On

This is tragic.

Giving his first parliamentary speech since losing the Liberal leadership in December, Mr Turnbull indicated he would cross the floor to vote with Labor when a vote was taken on the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

Mr Turnbull was scathing of the Coalition's new direct-action policy, which aims to provide financial incentives to industry for reducing carbon emissions.

"We all know ... that industry and businesses attended by an army of lobbyists are particularly persuasive and all too effective at getting their sticky fingers into the taxpayer's pocket," he told Parliament today.

"Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale.

"And there will always be a temptation for projects to be selected for their political appeal."

A handful of Liberal MPs, including treasury spokesman Joe Hockey, were present in the chamber during Mr Turnbull's speech.

The government allowed Mr Turnbull an additional 10 minutes to complete his speech as other MPs, including climate change sceptic Wilson Tuckey, wandered into the lower house ahead of a maiden speech by first-time MP Kelly O'Dwyer.

Mr Turnbull said his strong and long-standing personal commitment to an emissions trading scheme prevented him from voting against the government legislation.

(edit)

"Prudence demands that we act to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and do so in a way that is consistent with, and promotes global action to do the same," he said.

"All of us here are accountable, not just to our constituents, but to the generations that will come after them and after us," he said, adding it was Parliament's job to legislate for the nation's long-term future.

It was positive that both sides of Parliament had agreed to at least a 5 per cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, he said.

"But it is not enough to say that you support these cuts, you must also deliver a strong, credible policy framework that will deliver them."

Without a strong climate change policy, Australia could not expect other countries, such as China and India, to heed the call to tackle global warming, he said.

Mr Turnbull said his arguments in favour of the ETS now were "no different to those I have made and stood for, for the last three years".

Schemes, like that proposed by Mr Abbott, which would give millions of taxpayers' dollars to selected new technologies, were "neither economically efficient nor environmentally effective" compared with a market-based approach.

It's really weird it's come to this, but weirder still, Tony Abbott is getting a lot of loony support for his Claytons Climate policy. There are a lot of wishful people out there, trying to wish away the cumulative consequences of humanity's actions.

How Bad Guys Win

Swish Group's Reverse Takeover


Pleiades gave me a heads up about this interesting story:

Phoenixes and vampires both have the habit of rising from the dead – and the Swish Group is now back on the ASX having previously collapsed owing crew in Australia and the US a great deal of money. Some, but not all, of the directors have changed. Carey Peter Stynes continues, and Marcus Georgiades now sports the title of Chief Executive Officer.

In a series of complicated deals executed over November and December, the creditors (who were owed millions ) will received a minimum of $550,000 to be split between them.

Another company, Planet Wwhich acquired the assets of Swish for $450,000 while it was in voluntary administration, will be bought by Swish for $1.2 million in newly-issued shares in a manouevre known as a reverse takeover. An additional $300,000 will be raised in issued shares.

I know some people that got ripped off by Swish Group. There's a crew out in Philadelphia that shot a Bollywood film that never got paid. There are companies and crews in Sydney that never got paid for work they did in January 2008. Even the City of Sydney was put out by the way they pushed their agenda through without paying for anything.

That $550,000 is such a tiny fraction of what they owe it's not funny. I don't see how a bunch of directors can run up an enormous tab, appoint their own liquidators, run some dodgy deals, pay 2c in the dollar or so and end up being able to keep their shirts - houses even! - and get their company back without being encumbered by debt. How can ASIC allow this?

If this is the way business is done in Australia, I tend to think there's no such thing as a just law that serves us all - there's only the law to protect the privileged and to punish the weak and disenfranchised. The kind of corporate laws that allow this kind of shenanigans are not worth the paper they're written on.

I'm really appalled by this outcome.

Toyota In The Crosshairs

This Year's Economic War

Toyota's no friend of mine, but it is the brightest star on the Japanese industrial sector, and it didn't get there for nothing. You kind of have to respect that. The way the American media's been reporting it, you'd think they were fly-by-night operators selling cheap sell-through generic product. You'd think that as a corporation they've committed genocide.

Let's go from the obvious bits. No conspiracies, no drawing of long bows. Toyota's being hit hard by the American government because it's the biggest competitor to the American Government which now owns Parts of GM and Chrysler. So they've gone and seized upon the recent recall and turned it into a media-hype event where even the Transport Secretary says "don't drive them" and then restates it as "If you have problems take it to your dealer."

If that isn't setting up for panic amongst owners, I'd think the owners were insensitive or brain dead. But you know, you have to look at it is what it is. GM and Chrysler are in such a bad state that the only way to get the American buyer back to buying American is to scare them out of their Toyotas.

For the record, here's this entry here about the sudden unwanted accelerator claims that started all of this.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is often called upon to referee disputes between car owners and an automaker. In the cases listed below, consumers complained that their cars accelerated unexpectedly. Toyota blamed misplaced or improper floor mats, but the consumers disagreed. After interviewing the drivers and company representatives, the NHTSA sided with Toyota.

Here's something from the Financial Post up in Canada.

There can be little doubt that Toyota, the world's greatest auto maker in recent years, has become the victim of much more than another typical out-of-control All-American media frenzy. When top-line political gamesman such as U.S. Transport Secretary Ray LaHood, Congressional pit bull Henry Waxman, and conniving United Auto Workers executives start piling on, this is clearly much bigger sport that the usual ritual public lynching of auto executives, a routine occurrence in Washington. The attack on Toyota, at this time of U.S. economic weakness and populist excess, is fast turning into a great American nationalist assault on a foreign corporation, an economic war.

The White House has denied any such motivation on the part of the United States. But that denial lacks credibility. While it may be technically true that President Obama's team didn't explicitly reach a decision to target Toyota, nobody in this crowd needs a presidential order to turn the Japanese auto giant's Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) problem into a national industrial advantage for the United States. The owners of union-dominated Government Motors can spot a strategic economic opportunity without waiting for the memo from head office.

California Congressman Henry Waxman swung into action, using recent anecdotal reports of sudden acceleration as a pretext for extended assaults on Toyota and its management. The UAW has joined the project as part of its campaign against Toyota's closure of a unionized California plant.

Wednesday you could practically see the calculating wheels spinning under the hood of Mr. LaHood's cranium when the transportation secretary told a committee that Toyota owners should simply "stop driving" their Toyotas. He later claimed to have misspoken, but then said much the same thing. If Toyota drivers are worried, they can take their vehicles to a dealer where, as Mr. LaHood knows, there was nothing the dealer could do since it is expected to take weeks if not months for Toyota to "fix" the alleged cause of Toyota's alleged sudden acceleration problem.

Toyota shares continued their SUA plunge Wednesday, ending just below $74, down from recent highs of $92. The company has lost $23-billion in market capitalization since the crisis began.

At this stage, there is little hard data on whether Toyota actually has a sudden acceleration problem.

So I'm not alone in this observation. I keep saying that this in no way affects my sense of the Toyota brand. If it were a choice between a Toyota, a GM, a Chrysler, I'd happily stick with the Toyota. I'm not abandoning my long-held beliefs about the brand on the say-so of a media circus in America. I get it that there are a lot of people that want Toyota to fail. Like GM, Chrysler, the US Government, and probably Hyundai as well; but in all likeliness the media beat up is exactly that - a beat up.

I've been saying for some weeks that maybe this is Toyota' prelude to closing factories in America. On the basis of the White House-led media-circus, I'd be inclined to suggest they move those factories to Canada and Mexico on the double. Move those jobs right out of America and then see what Mr Obama makes of that Sudden Accelerator move.

Dr. George Miller Says...

He Says We're LAZY

Went to the doc today to get loaded up on cough mixture and antibiotics. I'm a little cranky about it all. So I come home and find that I've received my weekly ScreenHub newsletter.

Well what do you know? Dr. George Miller thinks we're lazy. This was in the ScreenHub newsletter:

George Miller popped up to promote the sequel to Happy Feet and share his unique interpretation of the history of Australian cinema.As the ABC noted, he said, "In NSW, in Australia, I do believe we've been too lazy. We've let others steal the march and now it's changing... "

Hollywood Reporter added an international edge: "Now we have the most advanced motion capture studio in the world down at CarriageWorks -- it is huge. There will be a huge amount of production going through there, if we can keep it in this country."

Dr Miller admits he was inspired by WETA and Peter Jackson in New Zealand.

"I don't think we would have even attempted this had I not seen what they did in Wellington..

"They've got the best talent pool in the world. Look at what they've done. Avatar, District 9 are two of three films nominated for visual effects.

"Wellington is a tenth of the size of Sydney and that economy has shifted dramatically. We go down there to get work done. That can be done here."

"This is an absolutely wonderful moment to be in the industry. Everyone thought cinema was dead and then we get the kind of movies you're seeing now. And we've got the ability to make them..."

<edit>

But we are left to wonder at that word "lazy". If Miller fronted up to the average Australian screen creator and said "Geez, you're lazy. If you weren't we would have an industry like New Zealand.." he would get a smack on the schnoz.

After which he would be told that the reason why we don't have our own Peter Jackson is not because of the government.

The picture of the New Zealand industry that John Barnett painted for us on Wednesday is rather more acccurate, and a lot less positive.

"In a time of worldwide recession the Box Office has defied the statistics and has grown everywhere, including New Zealand – but the Box Office for NZ films has declined to pitiful levels...."

Maybe NZ filmmakers are just lazy too.

Umm, yeah. Lazy is one good description. Try incompetent. The Government tried its hand at development for a couple of decades that brought about the debacle that was the FFC. They were pretty diligent in picking all those box office losers.

But maybe it is laziness. All that box-ticking application press that is entrenched in the development sector of the industry is just intellectual laziness in the extreme. Had they done their homework, the FFC and the AFI would have uncovered more viable talent. That it didn't, and instead nurtured a generation of box-office-losers speaks volumes. Yes, that would be laziness for sure.

Film Industry Swings And Misses

iiNet Court Case

The other news of the day of course it how iiNet beat the rap and won their case against them alleging that they were responsible for their clients' piratical downloading behaviour.

The Australian film and television industry has lost a case against a major internet service provider whose customers downloaded pirated movies and television programs.

The case against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court by a number of applicants including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network.

The legal action followed a five-month investigation by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The companies claimed iiNet infringed copyright by failing to stop users engaging in illegal file sharing.

But today the Federal Court in Sydney ruled in the internet service provider's favour.

Justice Dennis Cowdroy said it was "impossible" to find against iiNet for what its users did.

"It is impossible to conclude that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement ... (it) did not have relevant power to prevent infringements occurring," he said.

The judge ordered the studios to pay the court costs.

Bummer. To be perfectly honest, I can't really make a case that illegal downloaders are hurting Australian film makers per se because the films that have been made are such also-rans that it's hard to justify they charge the same sort of moneys as say Hollywood fodder. That being the case, this was a suit brought by distributors of one media against the apparent alternative distributor that is breaking their monopoly of distribution for allowing these pirated films to flow freely.

You can see that the distributors had a case on the basis of the copyrights infringed, but once again they've failed to couch the issue in a way that would stop the piracy.

It's been this blog's contention for awhile that the Cinema ticket itself has become overpriced and that this has changed the priority the public places on the cinema experience, as opposed to say, the gaming arcade experience or the music experience or even the console game experience.

Put another way, the disposable income of the market can only be split in a limited number of ways. By insisting on a high price, the Movie industry is insisting on a greater share of the disposable income pie. If the audience agrees with it, then you have 'Avatar' Box Office receipts. If they don't it's bit-torrent downloads of such dog movies as 'All About Steve'.

To be brutally honest, not everything made for the screens deserves a marquee price at the exhibitor's end. The audience is saying "no, we don't think 'All About Steve' or 'Funny People' or anything with Ricky Gervais in it, is an equivalent experience of joy/pleasure/fun when compared to 'Avatar'."

The quick answer is it's not iiNet's problem that the market thinks your product is worth only a pirate download. You should make much more of 'Avatar' and much, much, much fewer of 'All About Steve' et al. The bottom line is that Hollywood, like the Music business before it has been disrespecting the audience/consumer for a long time and is now paying the price for it, by getting disrespected right back.

Putting A Price On Carbon

10 Bucks Per Ton?

The Department of Climate Change isn't buying Tony Abbott's plan.

The analysis, prepared by the deputy secretary of the Department of Climate Change, Blair Comley, says that rather than reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 as the policy claims, it would lead to an increase of 13 per cent.

Mr Comley, an economist who was instrumental in designing the Government's emissions trading scheme, says the Coalition policy underestimates the cost of each tonne of carbon for which taxpayers would pay businesses that reduce emissions.

On Tuesday, Mr Abbott unveiled a policy he said would cost $3.2 billion over four years and more than $10 billion by 2020.

At its core is an emissions reduction fund worth $2.6 billion over four years.

Polluting businesses which chose to reduce emissions could apply for grants from the fund and they would be paid between $10 and $15 for each tonne of carbon they saved.

Here's the follow up to the Coalition's Climate Change policy.

The Coalition's scheme is not all good news for our farmers.

First, farmers will be paid $10 for each tonne of carbon dioxide stored in soil. But $10 is a very low price. Under the government's carbon emissions trading scheme, farmers would be paid two to four times more than the Coalition's offer.

Second, while the focus on storing carbon in soils is welcomed, farmers will not be paid to restore native vegetation on degraded land.

Under the government's scheme, farmers would be paid to plant trees on degraded land and in areas of high conservation value.

Farmers would get an extra income and would help improve the health of degraded river systems in the Murray-Darling Basin, fix land degradation across the south-west of Western Australia, improve water quality in the catchments of the Great Barrier Reef, and address overstocking in our vast rangelands of northern Australia.

The advantage of the government's scheme is that farmers would be paid to optimise terrestrial carbon across the country and it puts a cap on carbon pollution.

But neither side of politics has adopted a cap deep enough to drive the industrial transformation.

The NSW Government pays $25. I don't think $10 cuts it, do you?

The bottom line perhaps is that the Coalition don't believe in Climate Change for reasons that satisfy their own prejudices and not much more, but have cobbled together a policy because they know the electorate have been convinced about it and therefore must come up with *something*/*anything* to mollify a demand.

Here's another critique.

The central element of Abbott's policy is a new Emissions Reduction Fund. A Coalition government would allocate $11 billion to this fund over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020: it would start at $300 million in 2011 and grow to something like $2 billion by 2020.

The fund would give grants to businesses for projects to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Participation by polluters would be entirely voluntary. If businesses chose to do nothing and continued increasing their emissions in line with current trends, they would not face any penalty or cost.

The Coalition reckons its fund will "buy" 140 million tonnes a year worth of reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 2020.

A reduction of that size would indeed meet the Federal Government's target of reducing Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent by 2020.

But the Coalition has used back of the envelope calculations to arrive at its 140 million tonne by 2020 estimate of greenhouse gas abatement under its policy. The calculations are based on estimates from industry lobby groups eager to get their hands on the grants.

Real-world experience with similar schemes suggests these estimates are highly ambitious.

It goes on to say:

The Federal Government's Department of Climate Change has calculated that the current cost of each tonne of carbon abated under this scheme is around $40. Inflation would lift that to $50 a tonne by 2020.

At that price, the $2 billion in Abbott's fund in 2020 would buy only 40 million tonnes of abatement, a long way short of the 140 million tonnes the Coalition has estimated.

I did some calculations of my own based on commercially available project components and couldn't come up with better than $75 per ton unless I had a dedicated, bulk/ mass capture solution. The hidden cost of carbon capture whether it is in trees or slabs of limestone or what have you, is that you then have to transport it somewhere for storage. So $45-$55 per ton for capture makes sense, but it doesn't include shipping & storage and GST. Even the Federal Government's $40 figure is probably based on a hypothetical efficiency gained from scale.

But that's just the numbers. The best understanding of it is here:

The two most reputable market-based policies for cutting emissions are carbon taxes or "cap and trade" schemes like the Rudd Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Both impose a carbon price on emitters.

Cap and trade schemes fix the quantity of emissions and let the market determine the carbon price. Carbon taxes set the carbon price and let the market determine the quantity of emissions.

Abbott's scheme is effectively a "negative carbon tax." This means it is the worst of both worlds: it does not fix the quantity of emissions nor does it impose a carbon price on polluters.

This means central planners and business lobbyists rather than market forces will determine where emissions reductions are to be pursued. That is hardly likely to deliver the lowest-cost abatement.

And it is a remarkable approach for an avowed pro-market politician.

Magic Pudding indeed. To think that we were so close to an ETS only 2 months ago. The mind boggles.

Lord Monckton Is A 10 Point Idiot

"Stupid Is As Stupid Does, Forrest"


Here's The list, once again, thanks to Paul Sheehan. Sheehan thinks these 10 points are so far-reaching in their ramifications that the Greens are not willing to debate them.

I'm not a Green, but let me try it on.

1. The pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.
Polar bear numbers have surged since hunting was largely banned in the 1970s. When Tim Flannery predicted that polar bears would be extinct within 25 years, he was challenged by Dr. Mitchell Taylor, the polar bear expert for the Canadian federal territory of Nunavut, which covers most of the polar bear's Canadian habitat.
Mitchell wrote in 2006: "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present… it is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria."
A counter perspective: Last year, at the latest meeting of the world's peak polar bear study group, the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group, scientists reported that eight of the 19 sub-populations of polar bears were declining, compared with five declining populations in 2005. Of the other 11 sub-populations, three were stable, one was increasing, and there was insufficient data to describe a trend in the remaining seven.
Polar bear populations rebounded dramatically after over-hunting was restricted in the 1970s, but the threat posed to polar bears now is completely different - a loss of the sea ice habitat that is essential to their survival.
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "There are five times as many polar bears now than there were 40 years ago."

Okay. The destruction of the habitat isn't the only thing going on with the Polar Bears. They are also being protected more vigorously across the Arctic Circle. As with Timber Wolves in National Parks, their numbers may be on the rise due to reduced Human hunting. They may even be rising because the increased warmth may be a better environment for the Polar Bear. The Polar Bear numbers alone do not disprove Global Warming. Nice Cherry-pick, but it's a cherry-pick all the same.

2. President Obama supports building nuclear power plants.
Last week, in his 2010 State of the Union address last week, when the President said, "That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country", his speech was greeted with applause.
A counter perspective: After the applause, President Obama continued: "It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced bio-fuels and clean coal technologies. And yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America."
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "China is going to be the emissions king, not America."

I guess this is aimed at the Green Party tradition of opposing Nuclear Power. China might become a greater emitter than the USA shortly, but neither of these things in o themselves mean we shouldn't have some kind of emissions trading scheme. Judging from Peter Garrett's about-face from a lifetime of artistic railing against the Nuclear Industry, it seems to be a ground that the Greens may have to give up to make one claim stick. In any case, this point isn't really something that says Climate Change/Global Warming is not true.

3. The Copenhagen climate conference descended into farce.
The low point of the gridlock and posturing at Copenhagen came with the appearance by the socialist dictator of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-capitalist diatribe drew a cheering ovation from thousands of left-wing ideologues attending the conference.
A counter perspective: According to the website of the Department of Climate Change in Canberra: "The Copenhagen Accord is a welcome step forward on climate change action. The Accord… is the first time there has been agreement to keep global temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius, and to take responsibility for action to realise this target. A transparent system to track progress was also agreed, which is key to getting the environmental outcome we all need."
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss:  "Copenhagen was the left's attempt to collectivize. It involved a massive transfer of wealth from the West… But you have to carry the people with you, which is why in the draft treaties put forward you never see references to 'election', 'ballot', 'democracy'. It is non-existent in the process."

I don't see how Copenhagen was the "Left's attempt to Collectivise". Note the pernicious language of the right wing fascist who thinks anything they disagree with must be an attempt to "collectivise". Is Mr. Stalin alive? Where does this stuff come from? It's this kind of language that gives away the unreasonable-ness of Monckton's position. He's not being a Climate Change 'sceptic', he's being a nasty little fascist pretending to be a Climate Change 'sceptic'.

Copenhagen was a mess and not much positive came out of the process for the First World. But it can be argued that nothing much good came out of it for the BRIC economies either. To try and couch the failure of Copenhagen as a Left Wing pusch that failed says more about Monckton's political leanings than science.

4. The reputation of the chief United Nations scientist on global warming is in disrepair.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is being investigated for financial irregularities, conflicts of interest and scientific distortion. Last month, the IPCC was forced to admit that the claim in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis. The scientist who originated the claim, Dr Syed Hasnain, works at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based institute where Dr Pachauri is director-general.
TERI, which won substantial grants in part on this baseless claim, used to stand for Tata Energy Research Institute, because it was funded by the Tata industrial conglomerate, which stood to claim about a billion dollars in tax credits under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism.
A counter perspective: Dr Pachauri has denied all allegations made against him. No charges have been laid. Since becoming head of the IPCC in 2002 he has been an outspoken advocate for international action and co-operation to mitigate the affects of global warming. In 2007, he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC.
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "Pachauri is being investigated by the [UK] Charity Commission. He faces the possibility of going to prison."

Hmmm. So Monckton says guilty as charged when most of the allegations are inference. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be tried in that court. I think the proper thing to do in a democracy is stick with "innocent until proven guilty". Besides which, even if he were guilty of some crime somewhere along the way, it doesn't detract from what he is saying about Climate Change. It's only ideologues who believe that the guilty cannot speak the truth. Again, this line of reasoning says more about the pettiness of Monckton who is resorting to a smear and an ad hominem attack on a scientist in order to make the claims of the other scientist look disreputable. It's a cheap shot.

One could easily ask, "what kind of stupid system makes this child-molesting Monckton a Lord?, and just why should we believe anybody who is accused of molesting children?" It could be asked, just to smear him, but it wouldn't be a fair question.

5. The supposed scientific consensus of the IPCC has been challenged by numerous distinguished scientists.
The IPCC assumes that CO2 concentration will reach 836 ppmv by 2100, but dissenting scientists contend that for the past nine years CO2 concentration has been on track to increase to 570 ppmv by 2100, which would almost halve the IPCC’s temperature projections.
A counter perspective: The website of the Department of Climate Change in Canberra offers this measured assessment of the scientific consensus behind the IPCC report: "The IPCC [report] provides a rigorous assessment of the published and peer-reviewed research on climate change and was compiled by 1,250 expert authors from over 130 countries… All IPCC reports are subject to extensive expert and government review."
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "Lord Stern [author of the Stern Review] is mad. That's the technical term for him… There are leading climate scientists, like Professor Richard Linzen of MIT, who do not believe a word of the [IPCC] global warming argument."

He says numerous distinguished scientists but he doesn't name who they are except Richard Lindzen. He of the conservative George C. Marshall Institute?

Lindzen has contributed to think tanks including the Cato Institute and the George C. Marshall Institute.[32] In a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine, Ross Gelbspan made allegations that Lindzen described as a "slander" and "libelous."[33][34] Gelbspan claimed Lindzen "... charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels and a speech he wrote, entitled Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus,[35] was underwritten by OPEC."[36][32] According to Juliet Eilperin the fact that Lindzen was paid expenses, "doesn't mean he's on anybody's payroll. He charges for his speeches, but so do prominent scientists who disagree with him about climate change."[26] According to Alex Beam of the The Boston Globe, Lindzen said that he charged expenses and expert witness fees in the 1990s but had not done so since.[37]

The distinguished scientists that are in the payroll of oil companies are challenging the IPCC findings? You don't say! Then he launches into an ad hominem attack on Lord Stern. So again, I ask (rhetorically), "what kind of stupid system makes this child-molesting Monckton a Lord?, and just why should we believe anybody who is accused of molesting children?" Once again, it could be asked, just to smear him, but it wouldn't be a fair question.

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price in poor countries.
After western environmentalists succeed in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions, with some scholars estimating the death toll at 20 million, or more, most of them children.
A counter perspective: The claim that millions have lost their lives as a result of the withdrawal of DDT is hotly contested among scientists. Speculation over the number of deaths caused by the withdrawal of DDT ranges from thousands to tens of millions. The dangers of DDT are well established. The majority of major environmental organisations continue to oppose its use. In many countries, DDT is no longer effective as mosquitos have built up an immunity.
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "After DDT was virtually banned, deaths from Malaria went from 50,000 a year to one million a year. Over 40 years, until the ban was basically lifted, 40 million people died, and most of them were poor children."

DDT? My goodness, how has this example got anything to do with Climate Change? The claim itself is hotly contested, and trying to build an argument out of such a claim is just not right. As in not correct. As in mistaken. As in not the right thing to do. But he does it anyway.

But even allowing for the argument to be, Politicisation of science being a problem, how is this the Green's problem when scientists on the payroll of energy companies and oil companies go and make counterclaims to science on the basis of politics? isnt this more of a problem with the so-called Climate Change 'Sceptics' and their version of science that oddly fits in with the necessities of those who pay them?

I don't think the Green owe Lord Monckton an explanation until Lord Monckton explains where Richard Lindzen gets his money from and if he can be trusted at all.

7. The bio-fuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.
Diverting huge amounts of grain crops to bio-fuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations. The decision by the Bush Administration in the US to produce ethanol from corn was a disaster for countries like Mexico where corn is a staple food. The United Nations has warned that diverting sugar and maize for bio-fuels could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger worldwide.
A counter perspective: Bio-fuels provided 1.8% of the world's transport fuel in 2008. The development of bio-fuels will lead to new forms of fuels using materials, such as algae, which will not impact on the world food supply.
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "Millions have died already because of the bio-fuels scam. It has cut the supply of food to fuel cars that don't need it and taken it from people who do."

It is true that biofuels compete with food grains and therefore is not a good idea over all. I don't know if you can therefore say millions have died because trendy Lefty city-dwellers in the first world chose bio-diesel over petrol cars, because I doubt there have been that many bio-diesel cars put into the market around the world. So this one is a piece of incendiary exaggeration - the kind of exaggeration that might sit well with an extremist agenda.

8. The Kyoto Protocols have proved meaningless.
Global carbon emissions today are significantly higher today than they were when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced. Even the climate scientist who has done more than other to mobilise global concerns on global warming, James E. Hansen, has criticized the Kyoto Protocol for promoting a cap and trade system which he regards as no more than an inefficient variant of the status quo.
A counter perspective: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or Kyoto Protocol, was adopted on 11 December 1997 and entered into international law in 2005. So far 187 states have signed and ratified the protocol, creating an international structure for global co-operation on global warming policies.
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "Since Kyoto, global carbon emissions have gone up 40 per cent."

I don't think the failures of Kyoto protocol ergo means it isn't worth trying to curb emissions. To pretend that the failures of Kyoto and Copenhagen mean that we ought not are willfully misreading those failures in their favor. If this pathetic level of argument is what Lord Monckton is bringing to town, he should have saved himself the carbon emission and stayed in England. Seriously.

9. The United Nations' global carbon emissions reduction target is a massively costly mirage.
A counter perspective: From the Department of Climate Change: "The science indicates that stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm), or lower, will reduce the risks of severe climate change and support our aim of limiting the average global temperature increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius. At a 2 degree temperature rise we will certainly need to adapt.
"Without effective global action on climate change, temperatures in Australia could rise by around 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  The results would be catastrophic… As set out in a number of authoritative resources, such as the Stern Review and the Garnaut Review, the costs of inaction far outweigh the costs of action now."
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "The cost of mitigation of rising temperature is orders of magnitude less cost-effective than adapting to the changes in  temperature. It is a colossal waste of money."

Says who? Says Lord Monckton. He just asserts it without actually giving evidence that the "cost is a colossal waste of money". He has no alternative plan, he just throws it out there. If I were the Greens' I'd laugh at the immaturity of Monckton saying "the reduction target is a costly mirage".

At best, this is a guess and a half-baked opinion based on how he wants it to be. But of course if somebody with an imposing title of Lord says it, we should take it on board. I think not. Which bring me to the next and final bit...

10. Kevin Rudd's political bluff on emissions trading has been exposed.
The Prime Minister intimated he would go to the people in an early election if his carbon emissions trading legislation was rejected. He won't. The electorate has shifted.
A counter perspective: Rudd believes that inaction on global warming will have disastrous consequences, and international co-operation is essential. The world needs to set price signals on energy that reflect the real cost of fossil-fuels and an international structure send those price signals. Australia will thus move ahead with a carbon emissions trading scheme and the legislation will be re-introduced as one of the government's first acts of the new parliamentary year.
Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "Kevin Rudd is happy to criticise me from afar… I written to him pointing out that even if all the nations of the world cut their carbon emissions by 30 per cent, at a cost of trillions of dollars, mostly to the West, it would stop global temperatures from rising by 0.02 Celsius. You couldn't even measure it with a thermometer.
"And to achieve this you will fatally damage your economy, and your workforce, you will make bankers rich, and you will frighten children in their classrooms."

I just want to point out that this is a Lord from England, expressing his pathetic, ill-conceived opinion in order to try and influence the electorate of Australia. This is not a scientific point, this is Lord Monckton trying to influence the outcome of the next election through denigrating the emissions trading scheme. As an Australian, I find this offensive. We don't send our ex-pollies over to England to tell them which way to vote.

But let's put that aside for a moment and address what he's saying. He is asserting without any evidence that an ETS would "fatally damage your economy, and your workforce, you will make bankers rich, and you will frighten children in their classrooms."

If you don't put a dollar-value on carbon emission, you will never come up with a proper mechanism of dealing with emissions. So the first fear is idiotic. It is doubtful an ETS will harm the workforce because putting a dollar value on carbon emissions will open up the economy to new businesses built around addressing the issue of emissions. Bankers getting rich is not a problem that is new. They seem to get rich regardless of an ETS or not, banking regulations or not. They're *bankers*, Lord Monckton, they exist to get rich, regardless of carbon emissions.

As for frightening the children, I have no issue with that. They might be jolted awake into being responsible human beings on the basis of that fear. It wouldn't be an irrational fear, like the fear of monsters or ghosts; it would be an entirely rational fear to have. it's the kind of fear Lord Monckton himself might do well to possess.

Having gone through the 10 points, I'm sort of surprised the editor didn't pull this article from the SMH. It's idiotic in the extreme.