Quick Shots - 30/Nov/2014

What's The Mood Like In Victoria?

I was down in Melbourne for a day and it so happened that it was the State election. The funny thing about Melbourne is that customer service people really want to talk to you and find out what you think (This is unheard of in Sydney). This resulted in repeated conversations where I was asked whether I had voted already ("No, I'm from Sydney. I'm just here for the day") and their volunteering the information that they had voted already, and had enthusiastically voted for the ALP because they hated Tony Abbott so much.

"You know you're voting in the State election and not Federal right?" I pointed out, possibly in a cynical Sydney sort of way. In each instance I was told they didn't care, they had to send a message.

So, just in case Tony Abbott hasn't got the message, here it is loud and clear: the shop assistants of Melbourne loathe you and are willing to vote against the Coalition especially because it would be against your interests to do so. The ALP could have run Daffy Duck - Dr. Napthine wasn't going to win thanks to his Federal colleagues and the Prime Minister.

I bet that looks mighty fine in the Liberal Party room tomorrow.

The Claire Underwood 'Do' Is Like Aspiring To Charles Manson

Julie Bishop is aspiring to all kinds of crazy lately. Just how psycho is Julie Bishop? She just reopened the nuclear debate in Australia. This is rather ironic given that the world is browning off the notion of nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. Angela Merkel no less declared if the Japanese can't make this work, nobody can make it work, and started decommissioning Germany's own nuclear reactors.

Uranium spot prices are collapsing, making some of our oldest uranium mines face closure. This naturally leads one to suspect that perhaps Julie Bishop is the uranium mine lobby's poster girl. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the lawyer who defended James Hardie in the asbestos case was in the pockets of such an unpopular lobby.

The weirdest thing about Ms. Bishop's reopening of the nuclear debate is that she wants us to consider having nuclear power stations because of the need to combat emissions with this marvellous zero-emissions technology. How could we have been so amiss in not considering nukes! Silly us! So maybe the foreign minster at least is not a climate change denialista. Otherwise the premise to her argument would make no bloody sense. One wonders if this is part of Tony Abbott's change of stance in the wake of the Brisbane G-20 ambush where just about everybody except Vladimir Putin shirtfronted Tony Abbott to face up to the reality of climate change.

It's a funny world, really. Until we build a nuclear power station and it melts down.