Will Abbott’s Green Army work?

Abbott:

Peter Lloyd writes: Re. “Abbott’s army: we’re powerless unless we act on climate change” (Friday, item 2).  Despite years of disappointment, I prefer to give proponents of policies a chance to demonstrate their goodwill.  But Abbott’s “green” workforce will be without a shadow of a doubt a sham.

Abbott’s closest backers are to be found in Tasmania, where the “deep south” social/religious conservatives have always controlled the party at the expense of the enterprising/business oriented section of the Liberals.  Through the Gretch email and the November coup Eric Abetz played a key role in bringing down Malcolm Turnbull, backed by party powerbrokers from old money families such as Bushby and Colbeck.  Guy Barnett couldn’t run a school tuckshop, but is obsessed with ending abortion and diverting public funds to the churches.  The Tasmanian Liberals have close ties to the Exclusive Brethren, a reprehensible, family-splitting cult.

Another salient characteristic of this group is a reflexive, deep-seated hatred of all environmentalists.  No amount of climate science will convince them global warming is real, because they cannot escape the framing that was established in the battles against the Franklin Dam and the Tamar Valley pulp mill, among others.

So any environmental workforce directed by these people will inevitably be providing window dressing at best, but more likely will be actively participating in environmentally-damaging schemes such as supporting plantations on former naturally-forested land, or helping out at Forestry Tasmania’s embarrassing and financially-disastrous forest “theme parks”.

John Hunwick writes: David Freudenberger and John Hepburn  are right — Abbott’s Green Army is a small, even vital, step forward but on its own is just an example of making the deck chairs on the Titanic a bit more comfortable to sit in. A plan to close down coal burning, the creation of a DC nation-wide grid to carry renewable energy across the country are the sorts of announcements that are desperately needed right now.

As for listening to irrigators who want to turn back the clock — it won’t happen. What is needed is new farm plans that start with the best information on global warming and its likely impacts in their region, and a change to organic food production.

Perhaps Crikey can encourage readers in 50 words or less to identify the most needed responses to go with the Green Army.

Lewis Luxton writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (Friday, item 5). Your correspondent has their wires a little crossed.

It is only the Undergraduate degree at both Oxford and Cambridge that eventually, without further study and upon payment of a modest fee, progresses to a Masters.  Tony Abbott, as a Rhodes Scholar, would not have completed an undergraduate degree.  I don’t know what he studied but he would have ended up with something else.  Maybe a PhD.

I was one of the last Australians to go to Cambridge as an undergraduate,, more or less straight from school, although I spent nine months working at odd jobs as the Oxbridge academic year starts in October. I read Law and at the end of three years, having passed,  I was awarded a BA.  Everyone at Oxbridge gets an initial BA no matter what their course, at the end of three years.  If one intends to go on and qualify, as a doctor engineer or whatever, one studies elsewhere for  a further two or three years.

Then, if one behaves for three years after the initial BA, is not up on criminal charges or bankrupted, is of good character, one can advance to an MA degree.  If you attend in person you pay five pounds, if in absentia, six pounds — or so it was half a century ago.  It’s now a nonsense, a survival of some medieval arrangement and everyone in England understands.

As all degrees at Oxbridge are Honours degrees I suppose the wait before one can claim ones MA is simply to confirm it is deserved.  (Although my father seems to have been the exception, he asked if he could drop back to an Ordinary degree as the work for an Honours degree was interfering with his rowing, yet 30 years later when I went up to Cambridge he attended at the Senate House in person and was given an MA.  Perhaps they needed his five pounds.)

So the letters after my name are MA Cantab.  One the rare occasions when I use them (usually to alarm some bastard of a bureaucrat or council official) I write MA (Law) Cantab. which generally levels the playing field a bit.

I could have gone on at Cambridge to do an LlB or a Doctorate as well as my BA and eventual MA, but to be qualified to practice Law I would have had to complete another two years at one of the Inns of Court in London or pass a few more subjects at an Oz university.

If you are now thoroughly confused remember that Oxford and Cambridge were founded in the C11th and C12th and things were different then.  As the centuries rolled by the Fellows of the Colleges, who were the Universities, saw no reason to make much sense of a system which they understood and which confused outsiders.

Matt Brown:

Jim Hanna writes: Re. “MP Matt Brown denies dancing in jocks — who’s telling the truth?” (Friday, item 1). Andrew Crook appears to have been misled, judging from this quote in his story:

“A couple of days before the incident, Matt Brown suggested he wasn’t going to keep all the staff from David Campbell’s office”, one source told Crikey this morning.

I don’t know what happens in other states but in NSW, Ministerial staff tend to stay with their Minister when he/she changes portfolio. There may be one or two on loan from a department with specific portfolio expertise who switch over to the new Minister, but there’s no way Matt Brown would have suggested these people needed to go. The “tip” doesn’t stand up.

Jim Hart writes: A politician denies dancing in his jocks. But it seems dancing took place, so can we infer then that he was not wearing his underpants at the time?

Haiti:

Keith Thomas writes: Re. “Crikey wrap: Haitian earthquake could mean up to 100,000 dead” (14 January, item 3). The aftermath of the Haitian earthquake has highlighted a question I have always had in my mind about reporting from disaster zones where food and clean water is in short supply: “How do reporters feed themselves adequately in the midst of a food and water shortage?”

And, presuming they do not starve themselves, how do they keep their sources of food and water secure in regions where the local people are all in greater need of sustenance than they are? How is it they are not mobbed with demands that they share their supplies? The same questions apply to Darfur, Ethiopia last century etc.

I am not asking these questions to manufacture a case for hypocrisy against journalists – I accept that reporting from disaster zones can provide a net benefit the  local populations by feeding vital information to aid givers.

Housing prices:

Luke Miller writes: Re. “Housing boom: where the shortage myth is relevant” (Friday, item 17). I want to believe, Adam Schwab, that housing prices will come down. However your article does not entirely ring true with me.

Your statement that no property buyer “would purchase an investment that returns less than it currently costs” ignores the tax benefits of a low return and also that a large percentage of houses are bought to be occupied by the owner, not for their rental returns at all. You also state that “no asset (even land) increases in price indefinitely”.

If Australia’s population continues to grow for the next 40 years and beyond (the ABS projects 36 million people by 2056 and more by 2106) and if the cost of land is related to population size, then for all intents and purposes to you and me, property prices will continue to rise forever. Depressing, I know.

All we can hope for is that the market has overshot and will correct in the short to mid-term, and so more cautious people can buy then (the so-called soft landing?).

Although I am the last person from whom I would take financial advice, it seems a fairly valid savings strategy to remain a renter for life but it involves saving money as if you were paying off a mortgage, since one of the main benefits of buying a house is the enforced savings it creates.

I liked your article. Housing prices in Melbourne make baby Dawkins cry.

Lord Monckton:

Peter Henderson writes: Re. “Quiggin: to debate Lord Monckton, that is the question” (Friday, item 3). I am enjoying your pursuit of Monckton et al. Seems with Monckton a certain eccentricity (to put it mildly) runs in the family.

His father (I presume) Viscount Monckton of Brenchley when applying to remain in the House of Lords after the changes made by Tony Blair declared in his manifesto that, “I support the Queen and all the Royal Family … All cats to be muzzled outside to stop the agonizing torture of mice and small birds … LEVEL UP not level down. God willing” (Cited in Francis Wheen’s Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies, p. 71).

The Art Gallery of South Australia:

Arthur Kritique writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (Friday, item 5). As the “Tips and rumours” bit of Friday’s Crikey shows cracks within the walls of the Art Gallery of SA. Ha, Ha!

Is that meant to be a joke? Are you a philistine? Do you not recognise art when you see it?

This is top quality installation art, and if the Gallery is short of funds, it could quite easily start charging a few pennies for people to view this permanent exhibition.

Pyrmont rubbish:

Ava Hubble writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (Friday, item 5). As well as overflowing harbourside rubbish bins, Pyrmont is littered with abandoned supermarket trollies. There are trolley collections, but it seems that for every trolley retrieved, another is abandoned.  Surely it’s not beyond the competence of supermarket security personnel to prevent customers trundling laden trollies out of their stores.  The suspicion is that staff are encouraged to turn a blind eye to this practice to encourage consumption.

Pyrmont is only one of the thousands of suburbs around Australia which are blighted by abandoned trollies, many of which are used as garbage bins.  So when are the authorities going to get tough on Coles, Woolworths and the smaller supermarket chains which are proving such poor corporate citizens, despite all their boasts of concern for the environment.  When are fines going to be issued?  Surely corporate inefficiency that leads to a trolley being abandoned in public streets and parks
should attract at least as large a fine as an illegally parked car?

And what about a bit of entrepreneurial nous?  Why don’t the supermarkets commission one of the universities of technology to come up with a design for an attractive, sturdy, user-friendly, collapsible, family-sized trolley that could be sold or hired to customers on payment of a deposit.   It might even have a multi-purpose computerised screen which would, among other smart things, enable customers to beam up their shopping lists.

The Tote:

Terry Towelling writes: Re. “Rundle: memo state Labor governments, occasioned by the closing of the Tote” (Friday, item 11).  Yes, yes, it helped spawn many a great band and was one of many Melbourne pub rock institutions, but before we get too misty-eyed about the closure of the Tote, some of us old musos will recall it was Melbourne’s most infamous “pay to play” venue.

Any aspiring band simply paid the venue a pretty hefty fee for the use of a beer-soaked PA system, complete with rancid microphones and ratty leads that stuck to a stage constructed almost entirely of gaffer tape.

You then put your own people on the door, charged what you could, and hoped all your friends and family would come (and pay).

ASIO:

Jeff Sparrow writes: Re. “Sparrow misses the point about ASIO, screening asylum seekers” (14 January, item 9). Thanks to Neil James for confirming (indeed, embodying) the absurdity of debates around national security in Australia. Last Thursday, he triumphantly proclaimed that I was “unable to cite one instance where ASIO assessments of refugees have been improper or incorrect.” Gosh, why might that be? Would it have anything to do with said assessments being, like, totally classified? In other words, in a piece of effrontery so brazen as to be almost admirable, James uses the secrecy of ASIO assessments  … to justify the secrecy of ASIO assessments!

As the Diggers used to chorus: we’re here because we’re here because we’re here!

Later in the same article — after bizarrely implying that perhaps the agency did good when, after WWII, it cozied up to Nazi war criminals and Ustashi terrorists —  James dismisses as “irrelevant gossip from bygone eras” the extensive documentation of ASIO’s past misdeeds. Well, as my original piece argued, it was an ASIO assessment led that led to the solitary confinement of the entirely innocent Scott Parkin – and that was back in the bygone era known as 2005.

Those like James who adhere to the “we never make mistakes” school of secret policing might also ponder another little incident in the dim mists of 2003, when, according, two ASIO employees kidnapped (!) and then falsely imprisoned (!) a man called Izhar Ul-Haque. In that instance, the agents’ sense of themselves as entirely above the law was subsequently confirmed since neither faced any penalty whatsoever for a crime that would see you or me or Neil James spending a long time in gaol. Scarcely reassuring, is it?

James’ breezily assures that ASIO treats material obtained from dictatorships with “much more scepticism than information provided legitimately”. Does it? How do we know? We don’t have the faintest idea what goes into these things (though one could speculate that James’ own willingness to gloss over the atrocities of the Sri Lankan government with the well-worn lesser evil argument is perhaps itself indicative).

More generally, if, after everything that’s transpired since 2001 – the sexed-up dossiers, the Habib and Hicks cases, the manifold and brazen cover-ups and failures – if, after all of that, James still thinks the public should casually accept whatever the secret and largely unaccountable spy agencies feed us, well, I’ve got this fabulous war in Iraq to sell him.

Oh … but he already bought that, didn’t he!

Killer carrots and taste animals:

Jackie French writes: Re. Geoff Russell (Friday, comments). I’m a moral omnivore; I eat backyard chooks, and feral goats that are turning the land here into a desert. All are killed with neither pain nor stress, and there is too much meat for the goannas, crows, blacktailed wallabies, possums, chooks, bush rats and other local omnivores to deal with. (I also eat anything that has been cooked for me with love and generosity.)

Yes, abattoirs are places of insanity that most humans prefer never to face, but  we have many more dietary choices than ‘ abattoir meat eater’ or ‘vegan’. A paddock of carrots kills wildlife, by removing their food source and their water. A  tonne of wheat may cost 6 tonnes of top soil. Beware of anyone who tries to give a simple ecological impact statement.

Simplicity usually equals inaccuracy.

Edward Thompson writes: As a concerned PETA advocate [People for Eating Tasty Animals] I’d just like to let Geoff Russell know, that for every animal he doesn’t eat, I’m going to eat three.

Wills visit:

Kim Lockwood writes: Re. “Media briefs: Getting down and dirty at media cafeterias … G’Day journo junkets” (Friday, item 15). Terry Towelling takes issue with the Courier-Mail — there’s a hyphen in the paper’s name, Terry — for the headline “Tight security for Wills visit”, arguing that either more than one Will will visit or the punctuation sub is on leave.

Neither, Terry. The man’s nickname is Wills. It is a Wills visit. A visit by Wills, not a visit by Will.

First Dog on the Moon and the Chicken Twistie:

Stephen Cannings writes: Re. “First Dog on the Moon” (Friday, item 4). Could the Chicken Twistie be the new direction finding duck?… More tales please of this displaced snack foods desire for belonging.