The Charcoal Writing Is On The Wall

Cate Blanchett stumped for the cause of a carbon price and got a ripping from the Murdoch press. What followed was an admission by Dick Smith that he agreed with Blanchett but was too 'gutless' to front up for his beliefs for he feared exactly the sort of treatment Blanchett was receiving from the Murdoch press. Dick Smith even pointed to Murdoch's own words about climate change and implored the employer of these institutional climate change deniers. to come back and set them straight. Barnaby Joyce charged that Blanchett was unfit to comment as she was rich. Adam Bandt pointed out that so was Gina Rinehart and that it didn't stop her from campaigning for her own personal gain. Blanchett at least is campaigning for the common good - an important distinction.

Since then it's been a bit of a free for all.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, did not overplay Blanchett's involvement, saying she was as entitled as anybody else to have her voice heard on the issue.
Mr Abbott dismissed her as a celebrity who was out of touch. ''You do not give special weight to celebrities,'' he said. ''You do not give special weight to people who live half the year in Hollywood where there is no carbon tax.''

That last bit is a bit (pardon the pun) rich. It points to a deeply undemocratic vein in Tony Abbott's political outlook but I won't go into that too much. Barnaby Joyce's denunciations too reveal a largely patriarchal anxiety wherein he is acutely aware that the beauty bias runs against him. If he had to stump up next to Cate Blanchett, he can't win because she is far better looking, better known and liked.

Still, it's this patriarchal libertarian leave-me-alone-to-do-as-I-will entitlement of bloke-ishness that seems to glavanise around the political end of the carbon price debate; and it's the school-marmish restraint of women like Julia Gillard and Cate Blanchett who are arguiing strongly for restraint of carbon emissions and a means of setting price point to discourage excessive emissions. No wonder the barbecue-loving blokes are going flipper and tongs at Cate Blanchett, ad hominem.

Well this is not about Cate Blanchett's right to side with the Carbon Price. It's about where the debate will ultimately go, and should go.

The Carbon Price debate is going to crash over the line with a lot of screaming rhetoric, but in the end the big end of town knows it needs to be done, and that if the discussions go past 1 July, it will be the Greens who will control the debate in the Upper House. This would suggest that it is incumbent upon the Coalition to represent the big end of town and secure the best deal they can out of the wounded Labor party before they both get taken hostage by the Greens - but no, it's Tony Abbott at the helm.

It's not just me saying it.

Abbott's whole “big new tax” campaign shuns acknowledgment of the real point, as does his alleged alternative strategy of paying farmers to bury carbon. It has worked in scaring voters and perhaps raised the hopes of a few gullible cockies, but it's also created investment uncertainty and is contributing to wobbly consumer confidence.
Keep shouting that the Government is taking Australia down the drain, that our macro economic policy is a total failure, and some people will be silly enough to believe it. The mindless simplification of budget policy into “surplus good, deficit bad” has been effectively debunked by Ross Gittins but don't expect most of the media to understand it.

But the ructions of the past week within the Liberal Party might indicate the very people who gave Abbott the job somewhat by default (remember that Joe Hockey didn't stand) are beginning to realise there are limits to Total Opposition. More pragmatically, they know Labor is so on the nose, the Liberal Party can afford to be seen to have some principles again.

Labor presently thinks Tony Abbott is the best thing going for it. If they can implement their Malaysian boat people solution, their (rather simplistic) hope is that a very mild carbon tax then proves to be a non-issue upon implementation, leaving Abbott as the attack dog without a bone to worry.

Tony Abbott and his climate-change denying cohorts are an embarrassment.

I'm Uncomfortable With That

Applauding David Hicks

The thing I found most disturbing this week was the the report that David Hicks received a standing applause from his audience at the Sydney Writers Festival.If there ever was a report that lowered my estimation of the people who go to the Sydney Writers Festival, this might have been it.

David Hicks is a divisive figure, and I can understand full well that his incarceration was so monstrously unreasonable by any legal definition, and yet I don't understand how that translates into an standing applause. I've had people explain to me that it is the deep anti-American feelings being expressed by people of conscience - but I struggle to understand why that conscience isn't equally for those who passed in the 9/11 attacks. And if they did feel it, then maybe the enthusiasm for the cause that once was David Hicks might be tempered a little.

I found I was not alone in my misgivings.

For those who have an interest in the facts rather than a self-serving rewrite of history, a quick reprise of Hicks's past is in order.

His latter day effort to portray himself as some sort of harmless, hapless dilettante is belied by letters written in his own hand. In these missives he talks of undergoing weapons training that included "anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets, rapid-fire heavy and light machineguns, pistols, AK47s, mines and explosives". His words, not mine.
Hicks's hamfisted dishonesty is on full display when his autobiography presents a bowdlerised version of a foray to the front line between India and Pakistan. Hicks travelled to Kashmir courtesy of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. In his book, he declares: "We did not fire upon Indian soldiers or any other people. We only participated in the symbolic exchange of fire."

But in a letter written in August 2000, Hicks described his Kashmiri experience in more robust terms. "I got to fire hundreds of bullets," he crowed. "Most Muslim countries impose hanging for civilians arming themselves for conflict. There are not many countries in the world where a tourist, according to his visa, can go to stay with the army and shoot across the border at its enemy, legally."

During his festival appearance at the weekend, Hicks claimed the first time he ever heard the name al-Qaeda was "from the lips of an interrogator in Guantanamo Bay". But once again, he is busted by those pesky notes he penned to his family.

In a May 2001 missive he wrote: ''By the way I have met Osama bin Laden 20 times now, lovely brother, everything for the cause of Islam. The only reason the West calls him the most wanted Muslim is because he's got the money to take action.''

And of course, Hicks's epistolary boastfulness comports with the view held by the Australian intelligence community. During Senate estimates hearings in May 2002, the former ASIO director Dennis Richardson said that "certainly Mr Hicks has received extensive al-Qaeda training".

A day after, Lapkin's piece was countered by Mary Kostakidis.

In the Herald yesterday, Ted Lapkin from the Institute of Public Affairs, persisted with the Howard government's demonisation of Hicks with no regard for history, facts or the rule of law.

He mentioned Hicks's letters, which were written more than 10 years ago. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group with whom he travelled to Kashmir, was years away from being declared a terrorist organisation. It was supported by the Pakistani military, which provided standard military training, using facilities once used to train the mujahideen (whom the West supported). It also was responsible for dealing with the needs of refugees from the conflict with India, running orphanages and schools.

The plight of the Kashmiri people in that conflict was such that a NATO representative called for the West to help in whatever way we could. You and I may not respond to that call but Hicks naively did, embarking on a course of events with which he was completely unequipped to deal.

Lapkin and others also quote selectively from Hicks's letters. In them Hicks refers to the Taliban as bloodthirsty idiots. There is no reference to terrorist training or any training aimed at hurting civilians. There is not one mention of al-Qaeda. Hicks was present in a crowd listening to Osama bin Laden speak, but he does not understand Arabic and took his information from the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. Its editorial line was that bin Laden had become a scapegoat - he was seen as a hero.

He continues to be seen as a hero by many millions around the world, but not by Hicks.

I was a news junky so I remember things very well. Mr. Lapkin has the facts right and it is Mary Kostakidis who is deliberately twisting them. He is not selectively quoting things out of context; they are exactly as were reported at the time from the media including SBS for which Mary Kostakidis used to read the news. It is Ms Kostakidis who is retroactively trying to rewrite the reportage and how it was presented, and more importantly what it meant; which is to say, if anybody is indulging in some Orwellian history-doctoring, it is Ms. Kostakidis with her insidious little opinion piece.

This much we know: David Hicks saw the 9/11 attacks on TV as they happened, and instead of going to work like every other person the next day, he chose to go to Afghanistan. And we can give his motives a thousand excuses and characterise it in any which way, but I remember 9/11 and the next day following. Anybody who thought they had to go to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban, had what was coming to them.

Yes, Camp X-Ray at G'itmo was a terrifying legal construct and yes, we all felt it was horrible how the Howard Government left David Hicks out there to rot; but in the end when we look at the very root cause of how he got there in the first place, you have to accept he put himself - foolishly, as he now admits (but what other way can you characterise it?) - right into the maelstrom to be picked up and tossed anywhere. Almost all the sensible people of the world went about doing their every day business. The point about David Hicks is that even if he weren't guilty of the terrorist charges that he pleaded guilty to, he is still a scum bucket for going there in the first place.

I do think David Hicks had an unfairly long and hard time in Guantanamo Bay, but had he watched 'A Few Good Men' and watched 'Born on the Fourth of July' before going off to fight against the US Marines, he might have had a better idea of who he was squaring up against. And if indeed he watched the Twin Towers come down, and had any amount of imagination he couldn't have expected the US Marines to be merciful upon their enemies. Nothing in his ordeal could be described as surprising. He signed up for it, it was all in the brochure, so to speak.

I know it seems unfair to kick him around even today, but honestly, he's the one who wrote the book, and is giving talks at the Sydney Writers Festival and lying about how he got there. But that is all one thing to the side. What I can't abide is the crowd who accept his claptrap and stand up and applaud. I know there's a healthy vein of anti-American sentiment in the Australian cultural set, but this is idiotic.

Is China Working Properly?

China As Depression Candidate

Pleiades sent in this interesting read today... If you thought China was going to be the economic engine that pulls the world out of the post-GFC slump, then you might not want to read this contrarian article here.

In a recent interview with Kathryn Welling at welling@weeden, he argues that the Chinese economy at present bears an uncanny resemblance to the US economy in 1929, just before the onset of the Great Depression.

He points to eight key similarities – the massive disparity of wealth, income and education; the rapid industrialisation and displacement of labour; opaque and misleading economic and financial data; a massive build-up of leverage across the “rising” class; bubbles in both residential real estate and fixed asset/infrastructure development; an accelerating and uncontrolled growth in disintermediated credit; the expected transfer of economic growth to domestic demand; and, finally, an accelerating price/wage spiral.

At present, he says, China has lost control of its economy. “Essentially, in its own zeal to placate its masses with rapid growth, China has created a tide of inflation that threatens it with widespread social unrest. But if it crushes speculation and clamps down on credit, it risks a deflationary collapse that would also threaten social harmony. The upshot is that China no longer controls its own destiny. The free markets do.“

That last bit is actually quite ominous because if there's anything to be said about Free Markets, is that they tend not to be on the lookout for mid to long term ramifications; they're in it for increasingly shorter hauls.

if China should fail, and at some point it will, then there will be repercussions the likes of which will impact Australia severely, for if Australia got through the GFC lightly thanks to a variety of factors, the main one was how connected it was to China. Should China falter, then all those un-cashed chips will be there to be cashed in, so to speak.

Kick The Frog

A New Game In Town

The flurry of media reports surrounding both Dominique Strauss-Kahn's situation and Arnold Schwarzenegger's separation have been bordering on the absurd. Here's Paul Sheehan's idotic take for instance where he likens the two men and then goes to say that trial by media is just because these men are powerful men. Having read  it, what I want to know is how he keeps his job when he writes such idiotic rubbish, but the world is as it is and we must take it as we find it. I find myself in a world where Paul Sheehan gets paid handsomely to write idiocies in our broadsheet.

Yet he is not alone in conflating and judging both men as equivalents.

But in any event, the arrest of Strauss-Kahn in New York City for allegedly trying to rape a hotel maid has ignited a fierce debate over sex, law, power and privilege. And it is only just beginning. The night of Strauss-Kahn's arraignment, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted that the reason his wife Maria Shriver walked out earlier this year was the discovery that he had fathered a child more than a decade ago with a former member of the household staff. The two cases are far apart: only one man was hauled off to jail. But both suggest an abuse of power and a betrayal of trust. And both involve men whose long-standing reputations for behaving badly toward women did not derail their rise to power. Which raises the question: How can it be, in this ostensibly enlightened age, when men and women live and work as peers and are schooled regularly in what conduct is acceptable and what is actionable, that anyone with so little judgment, so little honor, could rise to such heights?

Umm, I know it's Time magazine, once the bastion of WASP America, but this kind of moralism is a bit much. The marital infidelities of a movie star are not surprising. The fact that he subsequently became Governor of California notwithstanding, it actually is a long bow to stretch to stick Arnie's peccadilloes with Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexual assault. For a start, Arnie's affair was between consensual adults, not an assault. Arnie is not accused of a crime, he's been outed as an adulterer with a love child. Comparing the two men is a complete category error and conflating the two only muddies the waters.

The article then goes on to compare Dominique Strauss Kahn to Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen, but again, you have to wonder if these comparisons are chalk and cheese no matter how chalky one of the cheeses might be; and if so then any argument built on such comparisons are really not valid in any way shape or form.

If it isn't a free swipe at Arnie, then it seems the free hacks are aimed at French culture over at Time, which is having a field day with this stuff.

Even the well connected had qualms about confronting Strauss-Kahn. A regional Socialist Party official stepped up on Monday to say that her daughter had come under sexual attack during a 2002 interview with Strauss-Kahn. The official, Anne Mansouret, repeated the allegations made by her daughter Tristane Banon during a 2007 TV program about how a well-known politician [Strauss-Kahn's name was bleeped out] tried to overpower her with a sexual embrace. What took so long for Mansouret to back up her daughter and name Strauss-Kahn? She told French TV that she had dissuaded her daughter from filing charges because Strauss-Kahn was en route to greatness — and derailing the ascent of a fellow Socialist Party official would be bad form. She also said that because Strauss-Kahn's second wife was Banon's godmother, blowing the whistle on the alleged attacker would create rifts within Mansouret's circle of family, friends and intimates.

Worse still, the French are racists, apparently:

The case in New York City reflects another dimension of the problem in France. "If I try transposing the situation in New York on Sunday to France, I just can't do it," says Diallo. "Not only because the woman is black and apparently an immigrant. But also because she's a housekeeper. Perhaps even more than her race, her station in society would probably prevent authorities [in France] from taking her accusations against a rich and powerful man seriously. Racism is on the rise here again, but class discrimination has never gone away."

I find that hard to believe - And I've been likened to a dog by a French girl in my time. (As in "dating you would be like dating a different species, like a dog or something".) I still don't buy this bullshit they're selling about the French being worse racists than Americans. Then there's this piece of idiotica:

As Strauss-Kahn's case moves forward in New York, the particular form of French "exceptionalism" that holds that men will be men and women will be women and no amount of political correctness can — or should — temper their natural desires will be on trial too. Like it or not, Strauss-Kahn and his supporters now have to play by our rules. These don't stem from prudishness or Puritanism. They're based on respect, on updated understandings of male-female power relations and on a desire to change the nasty little systems of complicity that have long kept them flowing in one direction.

That piece implies the arrest shut up France who have different sexual mores to America, but they can't hide behind those mores because Strauss-Kahn is being accused of a sexual crime. The triumphalism is a bit rich too. Nobody in their right mind supports sexual assault in a civil society unless one is a devout follower of the Marquis de Sade - and such a human being is more likely to be in a French jail than being a commentator in the French press supporting Strauss-Kahn. Get a grip, lady. This is not some turning point in some war against French sexual mores. The mind boggles.

Really, no matter how heinous they paint his crime, I just can't bring myself to judge French culture pertaining to sexuality, gender and race on the basis of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I sure as hell wouldn't judge American culture on say, J. Edgar Hoover. No sane person would leap to such generalisations, but here it is in black and white in Time magazine no less. And it's written by people - wankers, even - who probably still enjoy a visit to Paris and make out it's really romantic to walk down the Champs-Élysees or something.

On a more genial note, the funniest entry perhaps was Schumpeter in The Economist, complaining about the French intellectuals and their weird abstruse Post-Modern rhetoric rallying to the defense of Strauss-Kahn:

BHL is a mere amateur compared with Luis de Miranda, a novelist. According to Anthony Daniels, Mr de Miranda penned a piece for Libération under the title "a philosophical hero". Taking DSK's guilt for granted (which we should certainly not do), the author says that “we bet that in his depths Dominique Strauss-Kahn is joyful. Perhaps he doesn’t admit it to himself yet. But behaving thus at this point in his biography could only have been voluntary. I add that it is heroic.”

Why heroic? Because DSK engaged in a supreme act of self-sacrifice, apparently: “If the cleaning woman has been attacked, the woman worker had violence done to her, then we are touching on the sublime, in the Kantian sense...A political suicide rather than the death of an automaton or the possibility of a reign unleashed.”

I particularly liked the use of the phrase "in the Kantian sense".

Don't we all?

What Will They Do Without Him?

Bill Hunter Is Sick

Apparently he has cancer.

Family and friends have gathered around Australian acting legend Bill Hunter, who is gravely ill in a Melbourne hospice.
Hunter's manager Mark Morrissey confirmed this morning that his 71-year-old client's health had deteriorated since he was admitted to the Kew hospice two days ago.
"Sadly, he has cancer, and it's inoperable," he said.

I know the standard joke for years has been that he's the bloke in EVERY Australian film, from 'Gallipoli' to 'Muriel's Wedding'. What will the Australian film industry do when he's gone? Can they make any credibly 'Australian' film without this man? Screen Australia will be unable to approve any projects!

I jest. But it is profoundly sad news that he's so gravely ill.

Censorship Blues - 13/May/2011

How About Arguments Based On Intellectual Merit?

Where does one start with the idiotic submission by Bravehearts to the Senate?

ONE of Australia's most prominent child protection advocate, Bravehearts, has weighed into the art censorship debate, calling for the Classification Board to be overhauled and for matters of ''artistic merit'' and expert evidence to be scrapped when deciding if art is pornography.

Bravehearts's submission to a Senate inquiry into the film and literature classification scheme was one of several submissions highly critical of the board for allegedly sanctioning the exhibition of photographs of children that would otherwise be illegal, and for failing to halt the proliferation of images that demean women and pressure young girls to act in sexual ways.

Other community and Christian groups wanted the board's power increased so it could censor outdoor advertising, which is at present self-regulated by an industry body, the Advertising Standards Bureau.

The executive director of Bravehearts, Hetty Johnston, an outspoken critic of the work of the photographer Bill Henson, called for NSW employment laws that ban taking photographs of naked and semi-naked children to be replicated across Australia and said such photos should be refused classification by the board.

''How is it that it was illegal to take the photos but not illegal to exhibit them?'' she said, referring to photographs Henson took of a naked 12-year-old girl that were exhibited at a Sydney art gallery in 2008, sparking a ferocious debate about pornography and art.

That sound you hear in the distance is me grinding my teeth. I don't exactly do art with nude teens in them, so it's not a problem that sits in front of me, but I have written songs about an Orangutan sex slave prostitute and Josef Fritzl so I can see this sort of thing being a problem for my work as well. It may very well take Frank Zappa recordings off record shelves.

The problem is threefold.

The first problem is that the censorship board can't be the board that decides if there is artistic merit or not. neither can it proceed with the notion that there is no such thing as artistic merit. Asking for it to discard notions of artistic merit and place judgments based strictly on whether there is a minor depicted in the nude or not, is grossly censorious and has terrible ramifications for ALL freedom of expression. It places too much under the blanket of a taboo, just in case there's a pervert out there who gets aroused by art. Nobody would be able to discuss anything in fiction or art, because sure as hell it won't stop at fears of paedophilia.

The second problem is that of defining pornography when removing the framework of art. In any age of history in age of differing societal standards is that it's strictly in the eye of the beholder. It's up to the beholder to decide how they respond to an image or an object. By Johnson's logic, it's only acceptable art if one doesn't get sexually aroused. I don't think that is going to work as a definition of art. And this has a corollary:

Let's consider for a moment the humble rock melon. Most people on the planet don't conceive of a rock melon as a sexualised object. Some people who use them as sexual aids for purposes of masturbation might consider otherwise. By Hetty Johnson's logic, it would become illegal to display melons in shops because somebody might get aroused.

Similarly, if there are in this world bestial perverts and they were likely to be aroused by sheep, then why should there by all those naked sheep allowed to roam our countryside available to the person? How does Hetty Johnson suggest we enforce this issue? Putting diapers on all sheep in Australia? It's clearly an idiotic position to take on what things are in the public view.

The third problem is that should it be possible to enforce censorship without notions of artistic merit, then where would such a revision stop? The naked cherubs in Renaissance paintings? The statue of David by Michelangelo and Donatello? David was a teen when he slew Goliath by biblical accounts, so by Johnson's logic any statue of David should not be in public view, lest some pervert get aroused. Well, there happens to be a replica in a shopping centre on the Goldcoast, and it's been there for years. She is really arguing that we shouldn't consider the artistic merits of a Michelangelo, or Donatello, just focus on the exposed genitals.

Artistic merit of works is like the presumption of innocence in criminal trials. Without it, you're going to have totalitarian repression of expression. If Hetty Johnson doesn't understand this, it's probably because she is happier with embracing fascism than actually trying to help kids from paedophilia. Picking on the arts is stupid.There's no correlation between what artists do and child porn. Likening the two to one another is insidious. The fact that she can only see controversy and no artistic merit in Bill Henson's work is not a failing in Bill Henson or his work or for that matter the Classification Board, it's actually her problem and it rests squarely with her. She should seek help from a psychiatrist instead of wasting the Senate's time.

Sleeping Audience, Angry Critics

A Typical Australian Film

I won't judge the film sight-unseen, but 'Sleeping Beauty' beauty sounds like it's quite a difficult film to watch.

Here's an early report from Cannes.

Watched by a capacity audience on the opening night, the work of first-time director and novelist Julia Leigh left some viewers speechless with its graphic look at the sordid sex life of young high-class escort, Sara, played by Australian Emily Browning.

Between her university studies, various casual jobs and bizarre friendship with a suicidal drug addict, Sara, the working name of the ice-cold Lucy, is put to sleep for "erotic" sessions with wealthy old men.

The audience hurried out of Wednesday's screening, many lost for words.

"It's Eyes Wide Shut without the engagement," one woman said as she left.

The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney was among the first to post a review of the film, labelling it "psychosexual twaddle".

"[It] will no doubt have its admirers, [but] it seems a long shot to attract a significant following or herald the arrival of a director to watch," he writes.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone said the film was dull and anything but erotic. "The best thing about the film is how disturbing it is. The film's biggest problem is how boring it is," she writes on The Wrap website.

"Yes, even with a pretty, naked girl, full-frontal male nudity, prostitution, drugs and casual sex, Sleeping Beauty turns out to be very slow and a little dull."

I don't know what it's about. I don't really want to know now that I've read the article. It's just a little too predictable that Julia Leigh, novelist and first time director, turned in a film that really doesn't work for the audience. We've been getting PR spills for weeks now on this film, as if it was going to be the next great thing; that it's going to Cannes, that it's going to put a new exciting director on the map of Australian cinema; but really, the cat is out of the bag.

It's not winning audiences, it's alienating them.

Screen Australia is going to wash their hands and run like hell as it always does. People will be asking how come this film got made on public monies? They'd be right to ask; and the answer is because it's exactly the kind of film Screen Australia are looking for. Yep, you go, guys, you winners, you. LOL. Fuck me dead.

I feel like David St Hubbins in 'This is Spinal Tap' yelling during a performance of 'Jazz Odyssey' - to the crowd who presumably came to see a puppet show - "On bass, Derek Smalls. He wrote this."

Post-Budget Babble

150k Is The New Battler?

I didn't find the budget to be too scary. I guess they ant single mums to go get jobs and mental health got a big boost - most likely because of things like the Anthony Waterlow case where you just couldn't go pin it on the psychiatrist who signed off on him or the mental health worker who couldn't ensure he stayed on his meds. What's been more interesting is the dialogue surrounding the $150,000 p.a. income beyond which a lot of benefits disappear.

These included extending the freeze in the indexation of income limits on family payments, including Family Tax Benefits A and B, the baby bonus and paid parental leave until 2014, which will save more than $1 billion over the next four years.

The government will also phase out the dependent spouse tax offset, a $2200 concession received by taxpayers earning less than $150,000 a year with a dependent spouse and no children.
The Treasurer said $22 billion in spending would help deliver a surplus in 2012/13, taking pressure off the rising cost of living.

But Mr Swan told reporters in Canberra today he did not believe the $150,000 figure now represented a benchmark for "rich".

"We are targeting our payments to families on modest incomes," Mr Swan said.

"You raised the figure before - about $150,000 a year. I don't believe those people are rich, but there are plenty of families on incomes of $60,000 or $70,000 a year.

Which is all very fine. If you head down to the comments you can see some doozies.

What's causing some of the angst is that people of that income bracket want to send their kids to private schools. It's understandable but some of these schools are charging 15-20k. If they had 2 kids, that's 30-40k of post-tax dollars. For this argument, let's say it's 30k for the 2 kids.

If they have a mortgage on a million dollar bit of real estate, then that's a good deal of money out the door. Assuming they had about $200k down payment, a quick calculation of paying off $800k in 20 years says that's about $6k a month = $72k p.a. on repayments at 6.5%p.a. So that's about 102k out of $15ok on post-tax dollars. Add in the lease on the de rigeur German imported car and you're talking about another $15k. That makes it about $120k of the post-tax dollars on lifestyle choices. I don't know how these people make ends meet, but I sure do see a lot of them driving around in their de rigeur  German imported cars, battling the Sydney traffic. :)

At some point you'd think that these people would admit that they've got some of their priorities wrong, if they can't make 150k p.a. work for them. There's nobody pointing a gun at their heads to make them send their kids to expensive private schools or make them take out mortgages on million dollar homes or drive that German car. Whatever challenges face them in balancing their books, it's really not the government's fault that they've got problems making ends meet on 150k. I mean, really.

Interest Rate Watch

Something Curious About Interest Rates

I caught sight of this article in the SMH a few days ago and wanted to link to it, so here it is.

It's easy to talk about "tighter monetary policy" restraining inflation, but few pause to think how it actually works.
There's the usual euphemism about higher interest rates taking money out of consumers' pockets and thereby reducing the demand their spending creates, which results in prices not rising as much as they otherwise might.

The reality is harsher.
It doesn't just mean the minority of Australians with mortgages have less to spend. Higher interest rates reduce demand by sending marginal businesses broke and making others marginal.

"Freeing up resources" when we start running close to capacity means creating unemployment in those industries that aren't riding high commodities prices or servicing those that are.

"Freeing up resources" means people going bankrupt, losing their homes and therefore forced to look further afield for work.
An immediate example that comes to mind would be higher rates sending a struggling new car dealer broke, "freeing up the resource" of the yard's mechanics who could then be expected to become available for work in the mines. It's more than a little absurd that Treasurer Wayne Swan tomorrow night will work directly against that aim with a dopey $5000 subsidy for successful small businesses to buy a new car. The offer is of no use to any business "doing it tough" as they must first have the spare capital to blow on a new vehicle which will depreciate by nearly as much as the subsidy as soon as it leaves the showroom. Tell me again how this was meant to be a tough budget.

There's a kernel of something in there about how the RBA might want to raise interest rates but in reality can't bring itself to do so. One gets the feeling that the RBA is putting off the decision for as long as possible before the mining boom kicks in and we have the two speed economy in full dysfunctional totality.

I've suspected for a while that the RBA can't go higher on rates because it would blow up the property bubble. Even if the mining sector does go gangbusters, there might not be much more headroom to go for the rest of the economy. The rate we are at now, might just be the limit of what our non-mining part of the economy can take.

It can't really split up the interest rate to apply differently to the economy, and yet what is going to happen is that the mining sector is going to go gangbusters while everybody else will get left in the doldrums. Spltting the difference and putting up an average isn't going to cut it, but neither is following the mining boom and taking the interest rates up, because surely that will bring down the house of cards that is the property bubble.

When you think about how low interest rates are in places such as the USA, Japan and the Euro-zone, then Australia's interest rate sticks out like a sore thumb. Worse still, those same economies are printing money, then no wonder money is flooding in to Australia, pushing up the AUD. All the same, if the property bubble should pop, then there would be a deflationary spiral, so there's a weird dilemma going on in there. Raise it and be damned or not raise it and be damned. The RBA is clearly trying to stave off the possibility of the inflation to come, but if it raises it too high and the bubble pops, it will have to chase the other nations' interest rates, all the way down to combat the deflationary spiral. Interest rates may not go up at all until the last quarter of this year. Just saying.

Fiat Money Blues

The Latest From Peter Hartcher

Here's something interesting.

The economies that account for 96 per cent of the world economy are today running loose money policies. Most are happily handing out free money. Some are supplying money at rates so low that it's actually cheaper than free.

It's done for good cause. When money is cheap, people are more inclined to invest or spend. So it aids economic recovery. The former chief of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was named as Time magazine's person of the year in 1999 for his ready resort to loose money.

But if there is too much for too long, it ends badly. Exactly a decade later, Time named Greenspan as No. 3 on its list of "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis". And I think they let him off lightly.

The evidence of the past three decades should be enough, but you can go back further. In fact, every major financial crisis in the four centuries of capitalism has had its origins in loose money.

How does it work? It's simple commonsense. The basis for value is scarcity. If scarcity is destroyed, so is value. And when money loses its value, it is abused.

The problem is deleveraging out of extreme debt positions that stem from easy money, when the bubbles pop. So far what we have learned from Japan post 1989 and the US in the 2000s is that nobody who is stretched out wants to take their medicine when the debts are called in. Consequently, the assets that should be written down don't get written down. In a sense, all the asset bubbles that form are deemed to be too large to fail.

It's not as if Australia has more moral fibre in the moral hazard stakes. It's just that it is in a lucky position where the debt collector hasn't come knocking, thanks to Peter Costello's balancing the books.

What history is showing is that the only two ways of paying your way out of debt is to tighten belts or inflate away the money. In a democracy, no administration or government seems able to survive the tightening of belts unless they rise to power with that specific mandate - and even then it remains to be seen if the Tories in the UK can keep it up and retain government. So that leaves the Weimar Republic option of inflating away the debt, which hurts everybody's savings (and explains why everybody rants about gold and decries fiat money).

There is another way of course  and this is simply not to pay what you owe. The fancy version of this is Chapter 11 in the USA, but in Australia we're seeing companies like the Swish Group get away without paying creditors and re-forming themselves as essentially the same outfit that racked up the debts. Not paying your creditors is an option - which Iceland is embracing.

If we had still had the Gold Standard and the value of money was locked into Gold, then we would not have had the option to print the money, which means the fallout from the 2008 GFC would have crippled whole economies instead and the majority of us would be wandering the streets jobless wondering what the hell happened.

You can see why we keep repeating the soft option of inflating away our debts and hurting the entire population over all rather than sheet home the blame to the rich. I just don't see Lloyd Blankfein or Donald Trump hurting too much.

Sydenham Price Surge

There's A Reason Those Houses Got Demolished

The weird thing to read today is that houses in Sydenham are rising in price.

Several kilometres down Unwins Bridge Road from St Peters is this small suburb that was made smaller in the 1990s when the federal government bought up and demolished a swathe of houses under the flight path.

In their place is a park, Sydenham Green, one of several in the suburb. Like St Peters, Sydenham is on the train line, several bus routes and is close to the shopping strips of Marrickville and Newtown.

And while much of it also suffers from aircraft noise, Rowley says this only seems to be putting off prospective buyers who have never lived in the inner city.

In his experience, that's about one in five people at an open house.

I work next to the park where the houses were demolished with the advent of the Third Runway. The planes come in overhead to land and I can see the innards of the undercarriages as the wheels hang off the bottoms of the planes. It stops conversations dead. The rumble is an ungodly 110dB SPL just outside the building when a 747 comes in. You get used to it, but you wouldn't want to live there. Desiring to live there is a questionable factor if but for the price, so it is the devil's choice. Even if the median prices were 644k, it's nuts. There's a reason those other houses got demolished.

You only need to stand in the park for half an hour to understand.

Cultural Policy In Development

Let The Wookie Win

There is that scene in the original Star Wars where R2D2 beats Chewbacca in some kind of holographic monster chess. The Wookie complains about the loss. Han Solo points out to C3PO that Wookies are known to rip the arms out of their enemies, which prompts C3PO to instructs R2D2, "R2, let the Wookie win."

Such is life in the sphere of media policy in Australia. Here's something from Pleiades that shows just how it works.

Given the importance of the Convergence Review to the eventual shape of the content industries in Australia, it’s pleasing to see that a debate about the policy and regulatory frameworks surrounding them has finally emerged. Yesterday saw the release of a high-quality research paper on convergence by the University of New South Wales’ Catharine Lumby and Kate Crawford, who are senior academics at the Journalism and Media Research Centre there.

Entitled The Adaptive Moment: A Fresh Approach to Convergent Media in Australia, the paper does a much better job than the Convergence Review Committee of setting out the patchwork quilt of competing state and Commonwealth regulations that supposedly govern Australian communications, media, broadcasting and the internet.

It’s not a pretty picture. As they point out, because the internet is “a multifaceted, distributed network with no centralised gatekeeper”, the “vast range of communication options it contains were once governed by distinct policy areas”. As a result, “policy responses to convergence end up being ramshackle and jerry-built”.

The bottom line is that they're likely to roll into one a regulatory body that oversees the whole range of media as a 'one stop shop' with community standards. The best thing about this idea is that it probably gets rid of more jobs of regulators. But can you imagine how powerful this body would become? That is possibly a recipe for various kinds of expression to be oppressed and suppressed by a central body with an axe to grind. Should we see a prolonged period of conservative rule, it won't be long before people would be lining up with pitchforks looking to flay Bill Henson again.

The other nugget in the article is this bit:

It’s also worth thinking about how convergence will shape Australia’s future arts and cultural policies. Historically, there has been almost no understanding among arts policy makers that the internet or broadcast media are even relevant to cultural policy — as the Australia Council’s laughably late and ill-considered attempts to create an arts strategy “for a digital era” attest.

Lumby’s and Crawford’s paper shows what might be achieved if cultural policy was reconsidered in light of the rapid change sweeping the communications and media sector. But the very fact that the Convergence Review  and the National Cultural Policy are being pursued in parallel, with apparently little to do with each other, shows how tough it is to get governments to think outside of their existing silos.

All of this makes the notion of cultural policy even laughable.

The perennial problem for Australia is that the government is always the first and last sponsor of cultural projects. Our publishers and exhibitors and galleries are either too small to amass the kind of capital to initiate their own projects, or these projects tend to be extensions of corporate PR more than genuine attempts to enrich our cultural experience. It's pretty obvious that cultural activities are really not valued by the wider community so it is hard for the government to see a utility in it beyond chest-thumping when somebody wins an Oscar or a Booker Prize.

This isn't to say artists should be entitled to hand outs from the public purse, rather, that it is clear that Australia is only interested in its cultural industries as something to point at and say, "see? we've got one. Now let's talk about the cricket."

Other countries don't quite have this kind of government-led policy formation. In America and Europe and Japan, cultural policy is often signing off after the fact as things keep happening. Culture is something that happens regardless of what bureaucrats say or do, or what guidelines for controlling the expression are laid down. Artists will do as their talent dictates. Cultural Producers will produce as their circumstance dictate. It's not really a problem that the greater community has little appreciation of this fact. We've been happy to be a nation of bogans in the past, it's not worth pretending that having a cultural policy is going to help us grow up from being a nation of bogans  in the future. In that sense, discussions about cultural policy is just all window dressing.

More From Steve Keen

Housing Bubble Is Shot?

Pleiades gave me the heads up on the latest from Steve Keen. Keen thinks we're seeing the early stages of the decline in house prices. If so sell your banking shares now!

Population dynamics – even immigration dynamics – have nothing to do with house prices. What determines house prices is not the number of babies being born, or immigrants – illegal or otherwise – arriving, but the number of people who have taken out a mortgage, and the dollar value of those mortgages.

For changes in house prices, what matters is the acceleration of mortgage debt, and that’s why the 'first home vendors boost' was instrumental to the turnaround in house prices in 2009: it turned a nascent deceleration in mortgage debt into an acceleration once more. That acceleration has now run out and deceleration has resumed – and house prices have started to tumble as a result.

The fact that the Credit Impulse leads changes in house prices also gives some indication of where future prices are likely to go. The mortgage Credit Impulse shown above is for the acceleration in mortgage debt over a year: the change in mortgage debt compared to the previous year. This brings in an inevitable lag in the series – matched by the lag in the change in house price data, which also shows the change in house prices over the previous year – so that the turning points in each series line up in the graph. Lows in the mortgage credit impulse are associated with lows in house price change, and vice versa. With the mortgage credit impulse still headed south, and leading falls in house prices by three to six months, that implies that there are at least two more quarters of negative house price movements coming up.

All a bit of fun stuff. If you already own your home, then it's probably not the biggest deal. If you've borrowed against equity in the house, this stuff is THE nightmare. I guess there will be an announcement by the government soon that they'll try and prop up house prices with some new helicopter drop of money. If that happens then I think it says a lot about our polity and that in the long run it will be the housing industry and its associated lobby that will be the undoing of Australia - just as the Military Industry Complex in America has racked up the debt, and the construction industry in Japan has soaked up government money putting that government deep into debt. The money spent by the government will simply stave off the inevitable. The problem is that when the reckoning comes down the track, the conundrum will be much bigger then.

Osama Bin Laden Killed At Last

OMG They Killed Osama!

Like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, President Obama made an address to the world announcing the death of Osama bin Laden. They sent in a small Navy SEALS team to do it - which makes it more like an early 1990s Steven Seagal movie, but I guess that's about the speed of the discourse surrounding Osama bin Laden, even after all these years. I can just hear the synth bass pumping in the soundtrack.

The body of Osama bin Laden was allegedly buried at sea.

The US decided to bury him at sea because it would have been difficult finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted terrorist, the official said.

After bin Laden was killed in a raid by US forces in Pakistan early on Monday, senior administration officials said the body would be handled according to Islamic practice and tradition.

That practice calls for the body to be buried within 24 hours, the official said. The official did not immediately say where the body was buried at sea.

Not that it matters to most of us but it makes it impossible to turn it into a shrine. There were fake images of his corpse flying around for a while there but there have been no official releases.

So just like that, the cartoon villain vanishes into thin air. It's almost impossible to ascertain for ourselves if anything about the man was ever true. For my money, he was the most contemporary 'Emmanuel Goldstein' in an Orwellian 21st century we lived in. Sort of an icon governments of the free hour and put up and get their '2 Minutes Hate' happening. And for 10 years the image and myth of Osama bin Laden did his job. It seems today that they had known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden for some while they probably haggled with Pakistan as to how to deal with it. Maybe it was like a card waiting to be dealt; in which case it is most certain there is a meaning to it happening today. My first guess is that this signals the cue for America and her allies to get out of Afghanistan.

There's a big fiscal problem brewing in America and military spending cuts are inevitable. It seems closing the book on the Osama bin Laden myth complex would allow America to get out of Afghanistan and proceed legitimately with the spending cuts that would include cuts to the military budget.

'2 Minutes Hate' Lasts For 10 Years

It seems like such a long time ago that the Twin Towers fell and ushered in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. it seems a world away and half a lifetime ago. The whole nightmare of going to war on terrorism is still hanging over our lives, impinging on our liberties, hampering our movement, blighting our sense of well being. And you could pretty much blame Osama bin Laden for it all, even though various theories swirled as to whole really was working for and why the hell they couldn't "find him and kill him".

Now that Osama bin Laden is officially dead, presumably official business should proceed in the direction of moving back towards the way things they were before the mess - but maybe they won't, because heck, maybe they don't want to.

Just as it was with the wars, I guess we'll get to find out. The next stop is the alien threat terror. It's such a drag.

UPDATE:

Just a quick snapshot of Prime Ministerial hand gestures in the wake of the news.

John Howard and Julia Gillard agree waving the right hand wipes away the smear of Al Qaeda!

Is anybody amused that Osama was hiding in Abbottadad? Presumably Tony Abbott isn't.

Sexcalibur Compendium

Customising Is A Way of Consumerist Life

As some of you over on Facebook may know I've been assembling an electric guitar from parts for the last few months. The reason I was quiet in the last few weeks is because the body finally arrived and I was putting it all together rather than spending my nights tapping away at the keyboard. Since then, some people have asked what guided my decisions in picking the parts so I've decided to write it all down. This is sort of an entry to explain my decisions. Others will have different ideas so don't look at this as any kind of best practice - it's more like an extension of where my thoughts were headed.

This guitar project has its origins in my frustration at not being able to find a 'shred axe' - a guitar for playing heavy metal tones that covered all the things I wanted. There are many out there that look like shred axes wielded by the mighty shredders we know, but they don't cover important points. They might have bodies made of bad woods, crappy pickups, horrible replicas of Floyd Rose bridges and so on. Thus the exercise became sourcing all the right components to put into the one guitar to make it kick and scream in a particular way.

Overview

The concept of this guitar has a name and it is, 'super-strat'. This term came about in the 1990s when the original single coil strat design was updated with humbuckers in the bridge. All the shred axes we see today are downstream developments of this idea of marrying a Fender Strat to a Gibson pickup, looking for the best of both worlds.

Historically speaking, the model of this thinking actually goes back to the famous 'Frankenstrat' as constructed from parts by none other than Eddie Van Halen himself. Unashamedly, I have to admit that what I wanted to do was build something that had a Floyd Rose, a Maple neck and a humbucker that had the right out put, which is to say, just another 'super-strat'. but you'd be amazed at how hard it is find one with everything done right these days.

Since the death of Shred as a market force, the guitar manufacturers have beaten a retreat from the once saturated 'super-strat' market to the point where it is actually a lot harder to get the real thing in one piece. Instead there are various low end models for kids that look the part while cutting costs and therefore charm and performance. Presumably the adults get $8,999 Re-Issue Marc Bolan Commemorative 'Pre-Aged' Gibson Les Pauls. Like, yeah.

As for 'super-strats' and shred axes, you can always get a mediocre substitute, but it's worth doing this for real.

The Neck

I got the wooden parts from Warmoth. The neck was bought off their showcase while I specially ordered the body. I picked Warmoth over buying the 'Frankenstrat kit' you can now buy on line because I wasn't really interested in slavishly duplicating the original Frankenstrat. The other reason is that I really wasn't sure of the wood that comes with the kit while Warmoth were all about the best woods they can get their hands on, but more of that in a moment.

The neck is maple, with a maple fretboard because when it gets down to it, that's what I like. I know ebony is nice, Bubinga is interesting as are exotic things like Pau Ferro, wenge, Bloodwood and Purpleheart, but I actually don't know what some of those exotic things sound like, and whether I would like them at all. Maple on Maple? I know I like that.

I was fortunate in that the 'KWS' banana headstock also had the 'Nightswan' inlays which are quirky to look at. Other than that, it was just the clean satin nitro finish and a shelf for the Floyd Rose lock down nut that sold me. Warmoth is particularly cool because if you're adventurous, you could come up with all kinds of wood combinations to satisfy the most inquisitive impulses.

The frets are '6130' so it is like a vintage Gibson. This is possibly the most perverse combination in as much as the neck dimensions are like a Fender stratocaster, but the frets are Gibson-like. This also comes from an old interview in Guitar Player magazine I read years ago where Eddie Van Halen described his early attempts at building a Frankenstrat and how he ruined a strat neck striving to put in Gibson frets. It's nice that you can just order it that way these days.

The Body

Being cautious (or conservative, depending on point of view, I guess) I settled on a combination of a carved Flame Maple top on Mahogany. Again, Warmoth offers a lot of options so you could go crazy looking through their site, but when it comes right down to it, the idea was to marry a Strat to a Gibson. If the maple on maple 25-1/2 scale neck is all Fender, then the body materials had to be something a bit like a Gibson Les Paul Custom.

Just as a side note, the original Frankenstrat was Swamp Ash and many of the kits on offer seem to be made of Alder, so I figured the biggest expenditure should go on getting a combination of woods that justified the whole exercise. To that end, the soloist body also has a carved top, which is in some ways excessive over-design; But you only do this once in a blue moon, why not?

As with the neck, I can think of all sorts of crazy combos from the options available, and it's tempting to just keep building these guitars  with different combinations of woods. You can spend hours playing with the Warmoth site. It's like IKEA for guitar players.

Pickups

The most fun you'll have customising an electric guitar is picking pickups. The plan of attack I had for this one was to go for a set that had about 8.5k ohm resistance and a resonant frequency well below 10kHz. You want a lower resistance because you want the pickups to be responsive. The higher resistance comes from stronger magnets that keep the electrons in place. The lower the resistance, the less power the magnets are exerting on the electrons, the more responsive they become. The bad news is that they have less output, so it's a case of finding the right compromise.

There is a sound you can get from high output pickups but dynamic is not a feature of that sound. Conversely, you can get more dynamic with weaker magnets but you might not get a lot of output to do much with. Both the Humbuckers I picked feature Alnico II magnets as opposed to Alnico V, and the designs are fairly close to the Gibson PAFs.

A more modern metal sound would be to go for the higher output pickups with Alnico V magnets. In my case I was looking for a piece of 1978 (hey, the Yankees won the World Series that year). The bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan Custom '78. The neck Humbucker is an Alnico II Pro, also from Seymour Duncan and the middle pickup is the Seymour Duncan Cool Rails.

There are some other amazing pickup options out there so this is by no means any kind of ideal. The most important thing I was looking for was that they were roughly the same in resistance so that when I had the switch in between the pickups, I'd get a balanced combined tone. Looking back on the soldering I did, I sort of regret not installing a 5-way super switch to do the fancy coil splitting, but then I didn't know about it until I sat down to wire it up. I naively assumed a normal 5 way switch would get me there.

The Tremolo System


It goes without saying that an axe like this needs a Floyd Rose. What's probably not as well known is that you can easily change the block on the Floyd Rose. Yes, it adds sustain. My advice is "Nike" as in, "Just Do It".  I upgraded mine with a big L-shaped block from Floyd Upgrades. The hope was to have as much Bell Brass sustain to last into the next millennium... except... the problem with the L is that it blocks the forward movement with the L protrusion so I can't pull back. I'll have to get the non-'L' 42mm block now.

Replacing the block is not too hard. Setting up the Floyd Rose system is a little harder. It helps to get one of these trem stoppers. Once it's in place, then it's easier to set the action, the neck relief and then the intonation. Afterwards you can adjust the spring tension. It's a hassle winding the strings on and off, but it's about 2 hours work.

Potentiometers, Capacitors, Switches, Knobs

The most tedious part is ordering these necessary components. You need 3 pots for a Strat configuration; 3 knobs; a 5-way switch; and ouput plug; wire and copper shielding. Copper shielding is something I recommend, now that I've built mine. I encased the entire rear rout with the shielding and it is quiet as a mouse. No RF in the guitar.

The potentiometers in this guitar are 500ohms, as per Gibson specs as opposed to 250 ohms as per Fender specs. The simple reason is that I've loaded up with 3 Humbuckers instead of 3 single coils. It's worth remembering that Humbuckers need 500 ohm pots.

The other note is that on recommendation of the guys at Sydney Guitar Setups, I used this capacitor here. I have no real explanation for this one except that the 0.047 uf I ordered from Warmoth looked strangely 'weak'. I'm no expert but I figured the guys at Sydney Guitar Setup might know something I didn't so I asked them their recommendation and it was the Sprague Big Orange Drop Capacitor.

I don't have a capacitor for my bridge pickup tone control. It's weird, I know, but I wanted to duplicate the 'direct' thing by not putting any capacitor with the Custom 78, as per the original Frankenstrat that had no tone controls. Yes, it's a little hardcore but I can really live without any tone control on the bridge pickup on this guitar. I can't remember ever winding back the tone on the bridge pickups on my Stratocaster or Deusenberg.

The Tools You Need

It's worth listing the tools I needed:

• drill


• soldering iron & solder


• wire-stripper


• pliers


• screwdrivers


• guitar tuner


• sandpaper in '220' and '100' - and sandpaper block


• scissors

It's not much if you already own it. I didn't own a drill or a set of drill bits so I had to shell out for that. You don't need a super-powerful drill. In fact it helps to go slow when you screw in to precious bits of wood.

Peak Oil Is Knocking

Today's Peak Oil Article

Here it is.

Peak oil is forcing its way to the top of the agenda with stark warnings from the International Energy Agency and others repeated on ABC radio and television this week, after an investigation by the Catalyst program.
Following up a similar program she made in 2005, journalist Jonica Newby gained a rare interview with the IEA chief economist, Fatih Birol, who said crude oil production peaked in 2006 and, in veiled terms, added governments should have started working seriously on the problem a decade ago and warned of the threat of more oil wars.

Whereas five years ago the agency expected total production - including oil from deep-sea drilling and unconventional sources such as tar sands - could rise to 120 million barrels a day by 2030, the agency now expects production will reach only 96 million barrels. And Birol reckons there are no guarantees it can be brought out of the ground in a timely fashion.

''Existing fields are declining so sharply that in order to stay where we are in terms of production levels, in the next 25 years we have to find and develop four new Saudi Arabias. That is a huge challenge.''

If you're unsure of the general outline of the argument for Peak Oil, here's the helpful Wikipedia entry with the usual caveats about Wikipedia. Even the mighty Russian fields peaked in 2007 according to Wikipedia. If you want to read in more depth, here's a cool link.

Anyway, back to the article:

Desperately needed, of course, is a policy to tackle both peak oil and climate change at the same time.
Last year the think tank Beyond Zero Emissions, with Melbourne University's Energy Research Institute, published its Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, which shook things up by calling for investment of $37 billion a year to switch the whole country over to 100 per cent renewable energy within a decade. The plan included enough installed energy capacity to power all our transport needs.

Beyond Zero has assembled a team of scientists, engineers and planners working pro bono on a fully costed, national transport plan that will take in three streams: city passenger and public transport, freight, and intercity transport and high-speed rail.

Workshops are under way, drafts are circulating and the report is due out by the end of the year.
The executive director, Matthew Wright, says the opportunity for Australia is there to invest in new, climate-friendly transport infrastructure and avoid spending on high-priced oil imports, which Beyond Zero estimates could exceed $50 billion a year by 2015. ''That's what I call a great big tax,'' says Wright.

That should be the take home message for now. our politicians are barely on the edge of the crux of the problem, and they're whipping up the wrong frenzy. Somewhere in the midterm, our dependence on oil could cripple our economy when it becomes impossible to move things around this country without oil. It's on the cards, it's part of the complex problem that gives rise to the need to prepare infrastructure for alternative energy sources. If one thing could contribute to the popping of the Australian Property Bubble, it would be the rising cost of oil.If people value the investment value of their houses, they might consider moving to alternative energies faster, not slower; and in turn stop whinging about the Carbon pricing because that is the mechanism by which the technology will be funded.