Sincerity is hard to fake

You’ve got to be sincere. Or, when it comes to making an apology, you have to at least appear sincere. And therein likes the problem for Kevin Rudd. Rarely can anyone have looked less genuine about admitting a mistake than our Prime Minister in the last couple of days. He was just too glib to be convincing and the net result of sort of, but not quite, not really, taking the blame will be to lower his standing even further.

The amazing thing is that a man whose Labor Party has been ahead by potentially landslide proportions for more than two years thought he should pretend that voters were punishing him for governing badly overall! Any recent fall off in support for Labor is not the result of some general dissatisfaction but a reflection of some public anger at an appalling administrative bungle in implementing an insulation scheme.

If the Rudd apologia was confined to that, and accompanied by a fair dinkum sacking rather than a token chastisement for a Minister who remains on full pay, it might be believable. Going on about deserving a whacking for other things is simply asking for a whacking.

No sign yet from Morgan. The size of the whacking in the opinion polls Rudd speaks about was not evident the weekend before the one just gone when the Morgan pollsters were knocking on doors and doing their interviewing. On February 20/21 Morgan found the ALP with a two part preferred vote of 56.5%, down 1% since the last Face-to-Face poll conducted on February 6/7 & 13/14 but maintaining a strong two-party preferred lead over the L-NP (43.5%, up 1%).

Where there has been a modest  movement against Labor is in the Crikey election indicator which this morning has the ALP at a 75% chance of being re-elected to 25% for the Coalition.

Difference of opinion. It is a rare thing for my friends the business economists to have differing views on whether interest rates will change at a Reserve Bank meeting. They tend to predict as a herd where it is safer to be wrong or right like every one else than run the risk of being the only one wrong. So what to make of this morning’s Bloomberg survey where 14 reckon the official rate will go up a quarter of a percent tomorrow while five are opting for no change?

There’s also some caution on the markets where opinions are backed by dollars. Futures traders, reports Bloomberg, estimate a 54 percent chance of an increase when the decision is announced at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow in Sydney. The Crikey Interest Rate Indicator rates the chances of a rise slightly higher.

The global warming political problem. Concerted international action on global warming is looking even further away now that the Japanese Government is apparently backing down from some earlier promises to take strong action. The Japan Times reports that the latest draft law compiled by the government shows some measures could be watered down significantly. An environmental group official with knowledge of the draft criticized it as “giving the nod to doing nothing.” The Environment Ministry’s initial draft had aimed at setting an upper limit to the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions from business corporations in line with the ruling party’s election pledges. The latest version envisions creating a system of setting an upper limit per production, which means that overall emissions would rise if production increases.

A race again in Britain? A salutary reminder to all we political pundits in the course of the opinion polls in the United Kingdom. What goes up quite clearly can go down as the Conservative Party is finding from these YouGov figures.

Problem for the penguins. Those cute little customers featured in the film The March of the Penguins are in trouble after an enormous iceberg in Antarctica plowed into a peninsula made of ice and snapped it off, creating a second gigantic iceberg.

A joint Australian – French study reported the “calving” of the large iceberg from the Mertz Glacier in the Australian Antarctic Territory. The iceberg, 78 kilometres long with a surface area of 2,500 square kilometres, broke off the Mertz Glacier after being rammed by another iceberg, 97 kilometres long. The two icebergs are now gradually heading counterclockwise around Antarctica, south of Australia and moving toward an area of open water that’s the feeding grounds for the Emperor penguins who became international stars in the March of the Penguins documentary.