As I'm off to Tasmania for a holiday next week with Suzanne. It's a break from work for Suzanne and a photographic roadtrip for me.

So I'm interested in what is happening in that island state, environmentally speaking. One issue is the Tamar River silt problem, which refers to the massive amounts of sediment flowing into upper Tamar Basin near Launceston. Close to 30,000 cubic metres of silt is deposited each year. Boats now sitting in the mud at what was once a very picturesque part of the city's riverscape.

One consequence is that the increased amount of mud in the Basin effectively limits the space for the rising river waters---a one in 50-year flood event would lead to significant property damage and an emergency evacuation response in the low-lying suburbs of Launceston. The solution has been dredging and building flood levee banks around the city.

I've started my road trip to Tasmania. Blogging will definitely be lighter, even I am able to get pre-paid mobile broadband from the Telstra shop in Devonport after we leave the ferry from Melbourne. Many in Tasmania love chopping down trees, not planting them.

Meanwhile, the Britain's Met Office says the world is on a path towards a potential increase in global temperatures of 4 degrees as early as 2060. And Kenneth Davidson in The Age argues that the Coalition 's fear campaign against an ETS will bite and that Rudd should dump it and introduce a carbon tax instead.

The Bill introduced by Michael Atkinson, the SA Attorney-General, to change the Electoral Act and the rules governing democracy in South Australia offers an insight into Rann Government's understanding of individual freedom and it highlights the democratic deficit in South Australia.

This is not an open government, it has a track record of curtailing freedoms and rights, and Atkinson stands for hard-right or authoritarian law and order policies and is known for his refusal to accept R18+ rating for computer games and the introduction of an adults-only games category.

This is a government that opposes South Australia needing an Independent Commission Against Corruption--there's no corruption in SA you see. There's no need for the furiously spinning politicians to clean up their own act, despite the lack of open accountability around political donations. This is a government dominated by the Labor Right.

It's what you would expect from the Coalition on climate change after they dumped Malcolm Turnbull as their leader. The risk was that the opposition will be seen as having no policy clothes.Their problem was that they had to do something about addressing climate change, even though they are climate change sceptics and deniers.

They came up with a climate change plan to get the Coalition through to the next election, not a serious plan to refit the Australian economy so that it emits less carbon. It's a fig leaf designed to give them some green wash and a shield designed to protect Australia's coal, aluminum and cement industries from change.

Ben Cubby in the SMH says:

By failing to address the sources of rising greenhouse gas emissions, even the federal government's minimum target of 5 per cent cuts by 2020 would be likely to spiral out of reach, potentially exposing Australia to punitive action from other nations that are able to meet their targets. A 15 or 25 per cent cut by 2020 could no longer be contemplated, passing on much steeper costs into the following decade.In essence, farmers would be asked to plough carbon back into the ground faster than the coal industry can dig it up, and Abbott's volunteer ''green army'' would be asked to plant trees faster than the timber industry can cut them down.

The old economic "wisdom" is returning as the global financial crisis of free market capitalism fades into history and participants at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos meet to discuss how to rethink, redesign and rebuild the global economy to ensure principled growth and sustainability. For them the global recovery is fragile--- reliant on the stimulus provided by ultra cheap money and budget deficits--- and now is the moment to rebuild prosperity.

The old economic "wisdom" about rebuilding for prosperity as expressed in our media in Australia is well known. It states that we know from an economic point of view how to deal with excessive debts and deficits. You just take the bitter pill of austerity. That means public spending cuts and possibly some tax increases. The political question is can governments deliver that kind of pain-- some ‘shock therapy’? Do they have the political courage?

This is a shift in our understanding of crisis-- moving the crisis of the economy from one of free market capitalism and the financial sector to being one of the state, public spending and public debt. Behind it sits the discourse about welfare dependency, "rolling back" the state and people as atomised consumers, not citizens.

I tuned into the ABC's Radio National Breakfast this morning before I went to the gym, and I heard the Coalition selling its retail politics. It was Barnaby Joyce doing his standard rave thingy on climate change. The ETS is a gigantic big tax, it's a revenue raising mechanism to pay off the huge government debt, and we'll all be crushed by the big tax and gigantic debt. Outrage outrage. Anger anger. Bad bad bad. He's running a campaign.

At least Joyce didn't go anywhere near the comic figure of Lord Monckton, currently going around Australia tilting at windmills:

Barnaby Joyce slowed right down when he was asked about his cost free climate change policies. He kinda sounded deflated. Aw shucks, I have to say something sensible here. Yeah we'll have something soon he said. No details though until just before the election. It wont be a consumption tax like Labor's and off he went on the talking points of the big tax rave crushing us all again. He's in election mode firing up the conservative base with the talking points of his politics of fear.

British political news has been caught up for the last several weeks by a formal inquiry into the illegality and deceptions behind Tony Blair's decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein of weapons he did not possess. Blair as war leader used secrecy and slick subterfuge to attain his ends. That war is the defining choice of Blair's premiership.

The Dutch have found that that the war, which was supported by the Dutch government following intelligence from Britain and the US, had not been justified in law. Blair regrets nothing and his performance exhibited his question-dodging skill.

The 7.30 Report on the ABC has been running a series on the population population debate last week. This series steps beyond the political rhetoric of a greater Australia to:

take a look at how an increased population is likely to reshape Australia, where it will be accommodated, how government will cope with the pressures on all those fundamentals like jobs, transport, housing, food, energy and water, health and education, and how we're going to maintain social cohesion through the next wave of immigration.

Secondly, a region's population and economic growth is limited by water-- a strong possibility for the south-east corner of Queensland and Canberra. So how do you ensure our cities are running sustainably? Water recycling from the shower, the bath and the laundry for households; storm water retention and recycling for cities; recycling treated sewerage for businesses and landscapes.

If Obama gives good speeches then it is the follow-through that is generally problematic. In his 2010 State of Union speech he said that everything begins with the economy and then said that the most urgent task was to shore up the same insolvent banks that helped cause this crisis. So it is Wall Street not employment on Main Street that needs shoring up, even if the US is a consumer-based economy.

How then does Obama jump start the engine of job creation, given an unsound financial system calling the shots, a 10 percent unemployment rate and little sign of a vigorous economic recovery?

Obama's 'jobs and economy' section of the speech acknowledges that the aftermath of a severe financial crisis has led to mass job destruction and that the only thing that’s keeping things from getting worse is deficit spending.

Nicholas Carr, the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, argues that we're in the midst of a transition in computing, moving from our own private hard drives to the computer as access portal to programming to data storage run by companies with big hard drives in out-of-the-way places.

The implications of this technological shift from an older client-server model to a web-based or utility based model is explored on his Rough Type blog. In this post on Google he says:

Google's overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the Internet, particularly to the online computing cloud that is displacing the PC hard drive as the center of personal computing. The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space.

There hasn't been much commentary about Rudd's series of recent speeches about Treasury's forthcoming Intergenerational Report entitled Australia to 2050: Future Challenges. Is it just the holiday season, or another sign of the decllne of the mainstream press?

Ross Gittins is an exception. He critically tackles Rudd's rhetoric. Gittins says that one of the effects of ageing is slower growth in our material standard of living due to to slower growth in the size of the workforce:

But, by my calculation... rather than rising by about 110 per cent over the next 40 years, our real incomes are projected to grow by a paltry 80 per cent..Rudd apparently views this gap with great concern and automatically assumes all of us do, too. He vows to take the steps necessary to prevent this slowdown in the rate of growth in the economy's production of goods and services..How? Mainly by increasing the rate of improvement in the productivity of our labour - the average amount of goods and services produced by an hour of work...If we could increase this rate of improvement to average 2 per cent a year, Rudd tells us, we wouldn't miss out on each being that last $16,000 a year better off by 2050.

In his 2010 Hugh Cudlipp Lecture Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor-in-chief, makes some points about paywalls and the new digital journalism that make a lot of sense. You don't hear these kind of media insights and arguments from the Australian media --Fairfax or News Ltd.

He begins by looking at one business model of journalism --the one that says we must charge for all content online. It's the argument that says the age of free is over: we must now extract direct monetary return from the content we create in all digital forms. He says that this this leads onto two further questions.

The first is about 'open versus closed'. This is partly, but only partly, the same issue. If you universally make people pay for your content it follows that you are no longer open to the rest of the world, except at a cost. That might be the right direction in business terms, while simultaneously reducing access and influence in editorial terms. It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.

Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves – and were perhaps considered by others – special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn't. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it – and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority.

After the global financial crisis there’s every incentive for the big bankers on Wall Street to engage in a repeat performance. Since they were bailed out by the state with few strings attached it’s now clear to them that they’re living in a heads-they-win, tails-taxpayers-lose world. After the global financial crisis, global financial capital hates any reform that restricts its casino like activities, which they equate with doing God's work.

There is an emerging conflict between the state and financial capital in the US. after Obama's stated intent to take on Wall Street by announcing plans for stringent rules on the banking sector to prevent commercial banks from making risky trades ups the stakes.This is not before time.

Martin Rowson

Obama is giving his support to two measures to make sure that Wall Street doesn’t crash into another financial crisis: (1) separating the functions of investment banking from commercial banking (basically, resurrecting the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act) so investment banks can’t gamble with insured commerial deposits, and (2) giving regulatory authorities power to limit the size of big banks so they don’t become “too big to fail,” as antitrust laws do with every other capitalist entity.

We don't really know much about China if we read the mainstream press in Australia. Their discourse is usually one of China's rapid rise to economic supremacy and aren't we oh so lucky that the Chinese need our minerals for their superfast economic growth. Shanghai is the showcase of Chinese ‘hyper-modernity’. If in the 19th century, Australia, like Europe, looked to America as the future, then In the 21st century, the West looks towards China in something of the same way.

Buried within this celebratory discourse, which is spun by the mining companies and the Australian state, is a subcurrent of fear that a distinctively Chinese modernity, rooted in the Confucian values of devotion to the family and respect for the state, will end the dominance of the West.This usually surfaces when state owned Chinese companies what to buy into the mining companies.

We don't get much of an account of the models of developed that have enable this economic growth. What strategies have been employed by the Chinese state to ensure this economic development and high-speed growth? It cannot just be the dynamism of capitalism since free markets in China remain half-strangled and deformed by a corrupt and self-aggrandising state, which denies its people liberty to manage their own economic affairs.

Funny how Australia has gone very quiet on the Iraq war whilst the British are conducting an inquiry into it. The Chilcot inquiry embraces the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and the aftermath and is providing further evidence that Tony Blair misled the British public in the run up to the war in Iraq in 2003.

Narry a word in Australia. The curtain has been pulled down. The silence is deafening.

Nothing is being said even though the Howard Government simply followed Washington and London on the need for regime change, on being committed from an early stage to a military invasion, and in deceiving the Australian public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There was no threat to Australia from Iraq even ttough and Howard, like Blair, had claimed that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMD.

If Barack Obama was elected to regenerate America --a politics of rebirth that has a strong Protestant salvation theme in it---then does the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts signify the end of that attempt to arrest the decline of the US amongst Americans? If the United States is still a superpower, then it is a superpower that faces tough competition from outside and difficulties within.

Is the U.S. an empire in decline? There is a pervasive sense of decline in the US. The case for America's decline is put by the economists J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen, both of Berkeley, write in their book, The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money.

Federal Cabinet was in Adelaide last night at the Norwood Morialta High School in the marginal, Liberal-held seat of Sturt. This is the third community cabinet held in South Australia. The local Labor marginals, Kingston to the south and Wakefield in the north, have already hosted community cabinets of their own.

This is a rustbelt state facing a crisis in manufacturing as the local car industry winds back production and exports due to GM crash into bankruptcy last year. As Hendrik Gout points out at Crikey, the Holden Commodore is no longer exported to the US, and production at Holden's Elizabeth plant is now well under capacity with shifts shortened or cancelled.

Exports were seen to be a key part of Holden's strategy to continue building large cars in South Australia in response to Australian sales of large sedans having dropped for the past 15 years. The outlook here is grim. is SA moving from the Rust Belt to the Green Belt.Is it a technology state focused on the future of green manufacturing?

As would be expected, the main issue to surface at the Sturt community cabinet was the lack of water flowing into the Lower Lakes of the Murray-Darling Basin, despite the recent deal that had been reached between NSW and SA that guarantees 148 gigalitres of floodwaters from NSW will flow into the Lower Lakes region, with a Federal Government injection of 20 gigalitres on top of that.

The Piping Shriek argues in The Failure Of Factionalism at New Matilda that the old political order in Australia is in decay. He offers two examples to make his case: the decay of the NSW Right and its business/union partnership model that defined Modern Labor Mark I into bankruptcy and Tony Abbott's ascension, which exposed the bankruptcy represented by the old guard of the federal Liberals.

He says that in late 2009 both dumped a leader that they called “experiments”, but were actually products of their respective loss of control. But in doing so, the dumped leaders blew the gaffe on their parties that signalled that while status quo may look as though it has been restored, to all intents and purposes, the game was up and that the last vestiges of the 20th century political order were coming to an end.

So there is to be a third Intergenerational Report, entitled Australia to 2050: Future Challenges, which analyses the key long-term challenges facing Australia for the first half of this new century. This is to be released in the next few weeks, but we have heard this account before from Peter Costello, when he was Treasurer in the Howard Government. Kevin Rudd adds little that is new. More problematically he says nothing about addressing the effects of climate change on the economy.

According to Rudd's Australia Day speech the ageing of our population is the key challenge. Rudd says that to understand its implications, we need to ask three basic questions:

First, how much are we ageing by?
Second, how will this impact on family living standards and the economy?
Third, what can we do about it?

No mention of ageing and wellness at all. For Rudd its all about the negative impact of ageing economic growth and prosperity. Rudd says that:

On the first question, the Intergenerational Report projects that our population will grow from 22 million today to 36 million by 2050... On the second question public finances will be burdened with the increased costs of looking after the needs of older Australians - in health, aged care and age pensions - but with a smaller proportion of Australians in the workforce, tax revenues won't keep pace with those rising costs.

I read somewhere that the ABC is planning to run a 24 hours news channel, bringing it into competition with Sky News. Fair enough, as it is where things are going, as the newsstand model of newspapers no longer meets consumers’ needs. But this is more the flow of ordinary news to the public than watchdog journalism.

Radio Nationals' Breakfast needs to do more than just accept that the broadsheet newspapers set the stories for the day, and then just follow their interpretation with little critical comment of its own. This is a convention of “good” journalism done on autopilot that wears the heroic mantle of truth-telling:

What is needed is not only a redefinition of journalism, but also of what it means to be a journalist in the world of Web 2.0, a fragmenting public, audience loyalty to news sites is minimal, many viewers have abandoned the news for entertainment, and the diminished public for journalism is becoming more partisan.

There is a clash of ideas between an angry public on Main Street angry over the fallout from the global financial crisis and the unrepentant bankers on Wall Street who have returned to business-as-usual with their runaway profits and bonuses that the bankers are achieving thanks to the support of a debt-laden taxpayer.

The contrasts deepen when the disaster and suffering in Haiti is bought into the picture:

But hey, this is capitalism and financial capital is very powerful. Stuff happens, according to the bankers. Capitalism has its booms and busts every six to seven years.The destruction is a way to clean out the weak. Its a way that the world works. The global financial crisis was like a hurricane that nobody could have predicted.

So there is no need for greater regulation of financial capital because the global financial crisis in order to prevent the pileup of up ever more debt, both by pushing loans on the public and by taking on ever-higher leverage within the financial industry.

John Kerin in the Weekend Financial Review outlines 6 policy issues that the Rudd Government fix. These are asylum seekers, the budget deficit, health, ETS, tax and water. No mention is made of urban expansion in the capital cities even though Rudd is a big population man.

Of course, we could interpret Spooner's cartoon as a dig on iconic tourism in a global economy. What is offered in Melbourne's Docklands is a replica of Uluru in the Kata Tjuta National Park, without indigenous ownership. This has been built to attract tourists and people to this urban wasteland, given that Melbourne cannot attract the name global architects to build iconic or self-aggrandising buildings.

A possible future neo-liberal scenario for universities in Australia as a result of needing to reduce government debt. That means deep cuts somewhere. Why not higher education? It is not protected by the ballot box in the same way that health is.

A possible future is one of increases in university tuition fees, reduced government funding, most universities delivering cut-price vocational training to all but those students at elite universities who overwhelmingly come from the most privileged social backgrounds; concentrating all research funding in a handful of elite institutions; denying academics at other institutions the opportunity to engage in direct research; research funding across all disciplines will in future be tied to measurable economic ‘impact’.

Realistic? It would have been under the Howard Government.This part of the political class did not want to have well-educated, independently-minded generations of young people asking awkward questions.

Their education policy meant the transformation of large numbers of ‘students’ into a ready source of casual labour; the attempted transformation of higher education into uncritical training for employment, and the explicit orientation of research towards the demands of business. This policy was symptomatic of a situation in which ‘business interests’, narrowly conceived, were allowed to organise the shape and direction of our educational culture.

And under Rudd? We will have to wait and see. The current university expansion agenda appears to mean that what is under the guise of ‘university education’ is a new form of tertiary vocational training for the service, retail and media industries. The market talk enframes us as competitive consumers, as opposed to the old (1970s) social democratic ideal of equality of access to an excellent university education.

As we know Google had allowed Chinese censorship on its search engine in order to gain access to the world's largest market. Google’s systems had succumbed to direct attack by China’s cyberwarriors that exposed the two different types of data which had led both to the theft of some of the company’s own intellectual property as well as details of two Gmail accounts.

The key paragraph in Google's statement about China's state sanctioned hacking is this:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

In politics the end is political power, to get it and keep it. For the Liberal Party, it is the religious and corporate constituency who are the people who help them do that, that is their base. A lot of money is raised from industry and a lot of votes come from the religious conservatives. So in that sense the modern conservative movement has a lot of electoral and political tendencies that put it at odds with science.

One of the disturbing aspects of the Liberal Party is the way that it has imported many of the policy stances and strategies of the US Republican Party. Disturbing because this intellectual dependency has involved the unquestioning acceptance of the war on science that was such a characteristic of the Bush Administration in the US. It's a strategy to give the conservative base what it wants.

True, unlike the US Republicans, the Liberal Party has not come out against evolution and embraced creationism, despite its ever growing embrace of the conservatism of Christian fundamentalism. Nope, the Liberal Party's war on science surfaces, and finds its expression within, its scepticism about climate change, even though its antagonism to climate change is also based on right-wing populists associate of climate change with the Left: --with socialism, communism, state planning and anti-individualism.

This kind of political opposition to government policies from Big business and religious fundamentalism around an emissions trading scheme, abortion, stem cell research suggests that the scientific consensus threaten their religious beliefs, their economic power or their social influence.

We live amidst a digital revolution and, as we adapt to its ever deepening effects, we realize that this revolution is continuing. As an editorial in The Australian says:

Fifteen years ago, mainstream access to the internet through the then-revolutionary Netscape browser banished the orthodoxies around the collection and distribution of information. Analysts argued that the net was as transformative as steam engines and rail transport had been in the industrial age. It looked like a big call back then, but in hindsight such predictions undervalued the impact the internet would have beyond the world of business and the extent to which it would alter perceptions of time, distance and knowledge. A decade ago, few appreciated the way the net would destroy traditional business models yet at the same time spawn a suite of new products and applications.

We are also experiencing a far-reaching convergence of technologies: eg., newspapers are both print and digital; art galleries are starting to make films and the digital, and the erosion of distinct media policy regimes about print media, television and the internet. Newspapers are becoming multimedia operation whilst internet companies are becoming content providers.

There are around 100,000 people defined as homeless, given an increasing population and high levels of family breakdown, substance abuse and mental illness, and Australia's dire shortage of cheap rental.

Homelesness is particularly noticeable in the capital cities and many inner-city Australians have become habituated to the homeless, even though we know that the category homelessness goes beyond beyond rough sleepers and just a lack of housing.

Historically people have thought about homelessness as being an issue for single men - the stereotypical view is a man with an alcohol or addiction problem. The reality is that there is a whole other group of homeless people emerging that include families and teenagers.

Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. That industrial epoch of capitalism had its own distinct geography, a post 1945 spatial fix of suburbanization based on mass production, cars and consumer credit.

Today, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries--what some call the knowledge economy. The decline in manufacturing is the result of long-term trends—increasing foreign competition and the relentless replacement of people with machines. This transformation will also have its spatial fix.

Adelaide is one of the older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past, and it has continued to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis of the early 1990s behind them. As a rust belt city it stands for a region in decline as the manufacturing industry has shrunk, whilst the local high-end services—finance, law, consulting—that it once supported have also diminished. This region is no field of dreams.

The policy question is: How does a city such as Adelaide prevent its stagnation and decline? Will it make the transition from a resentful, post-manufacturing tawdry inward- looking city to a cosmopolitan friendly, hip city open to the global economy? Or will the city and its regions continue to decline and become a relic of the industrial age? Can Adelaide reinvent itself?