Haste does not help. The promise to send new boat people arrivals to another country for processing was clearly made in haste and before there were any arrangements in place to allow it to be carried out. That is very poor politics as it makes the government look like it is in panic mode. Julia Gillard is getting very close to looking like a Prime Ministerial joke.

Up go the fag taxes. There is one certainty if cigarette companies ever get around to carrying out their threat to substantially reduce the price of their product if and when plain packaging comes into force: the government will respond by increasing the excise to maintain the balance.

Back to El Nino. Farewell La Nina. Welcome back El Nino? The Bureau of Meteorology’s Predictive Ocean Atmosphere Model for Australia (POAMA) foresees a transition to an El Niño this summer.

This forecast that pacific water temperatures are going to rise more than a degree above normal are just an experimental forecast but perhaps we should enjoy the rain while we have it.

NASA’s Hansen had predicted back in October that “It is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global temperature.” An El Niño would make that an extreme likelihood.

Give ’em a kick up the … and let ’em go. Certainty, swiftness and severity. They were the principles of Sir Robert Peel when he set up Britain’s first police force and Professor Lawrence Sherman of Cambridge and Maryland Universities is suggesting a return to them. In an introductory essay to a special crime and punishment edition of the journal Criminology and Public Policy.

The Professor supports the idea of less prison and more policing as the best way of making society safer. Not for him the normal approach of politicians that the answer is to lock more people up for longer. He favours allowing police greater discretion to deter minor crime while using a crime harm index to identify those likely to become dangerous criminals and thus the ones where safety is enhanced by having them locked away.

His short lecture outlining the approach is well worth a listen although I doubt Australian politicians are likely to be diverted from their currently ineffective law-and-order thinking.

Backing a president. With potential Republican Party presidential candidates falling by the wayside the message looks clear to me: Barack Obama is looking more and more likely to get a second term.

I expect that within a few months the current market assessment that the Democrats are only a 60% chance of maintaining the presidential office will look generous indeed. I’m taking the available price now.

As to who the Republican candidate will be is far from clear.