How do we interpret Garrett's statement on Gunns multibillion-dollar pulp mill at Bell Bay in the Tamar Valley in northern Tasmania? He has withheld final approval for the project's environmental impact management plan for a further 26 months.

My interpretation is that Garrett gave the logging giant Gunns the go-ahead for the project, and then gave the appearance of toughening the Government’s stance on effluent outfall in Bass Strait ( 64 million litres of effluent) by adopting a precautionary approach required by the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. That toughening, in effect, was giving Gunns Ltd another extension. The conditions Garrett placed on the go-ahead require the company to provide detailed environmental data on the effect of effluent runoff into Bass Strait before the mill will be allowed to begin processing woodchips and to impose fines of up to $1.1 million if Gunns exceeds environmental limits. Garrett has given two years to Gunns to provide effluent data through hydro dynamic modelling.

So Gunns can go ahead and build the mill and muddle along on the modelling. All the modules except for the effluent disposal are approved. Isn't that a green light? isn't that a blow to the tourism, wine-making and fishing industry groups in the Tamar Valley? Why invest given the threat posed by the mill?

In Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption in the New York Review of Books Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, highlights a disturbing trend in modern medicine. She says:

No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.

The redefining of disease refers to the way that drug companies have perfected a new and highly effective method to expand their markets. Instead of promoting drugs to treat diseases, they have begun to promote diseases to fit their blockbuster drugs. The strategy is to convince as many people as possible (along with their doctors, of course) that they have medical conditions that require long-term drug treatment.

One of the issues the US needs to come terms with is its use of torture in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the CIA's secret "black sites, the policy of rendering and the Geneva Conventions not applying to the conflict with al-Qaeda signify the decent into torture.

In this review in the New York Review of Books David Cole says that Philippe Sands in Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values paints the following picture:

Through his interviews, he tells a story about how ordinary human beings, all working within an institution designed to fight by the rules, felt tremendous pressure to bend the rules—and in most cases did so without apparent concern or self-doubt. A narrowly pragmatic ethos guided virtually all actors. The real arguments were for the most part not about whether coercive tactics were legally or morally acceptable, but about whether they worked. But with the courageous exception of Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, few argued that coercive tactics were wrong because they were immoral and illegal, whether or not they worked.

Cole cals for an independent bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. Will this happen?

There's been a mounted of stuff like this from Mark Pesci written about Obama's use of new technologies for campaigning and now for what looks like a reasonable stab at some kind of participatory excercise with change.gov. It's literally a world away from Kevin07, the 2020 Summit and the fleeting glog, none of which suggest serious, sustained levels of engagement with the great unwashed.

Via Cam, there's an interesting series of coversations going on among American conservatives, Republicans, the GOP, the right, whatever you want to call them, over how best to make use of the net in view of Obama's success.

In Reinventing conservatism, one tweet at a time, Julian Sanchez has a bunch of links and interesting thoughts on an ongoing, networked converstation which appears to have started with RedState's Erick Erickson. Among other things, Erickson says "Duplicating Obama's technology effort is not the solution for the right and those who say it is are the first people not to hire." There are two reasons for this. "The left and right use the web in different ways":

Things continue to get worse in the cycle of violence that is the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Israeli tanks and troops have entered Gaza after a week-long air force offensive has claimed more than 460 Palestinians.

Aniel Barenboim says:

Palestinian violence torments Israelis and does not serve the Palestinian cause; Israeli retaliation is inhuman, immoral and does not guarantee security. The destinies of the two peoples are inextricably linked, obliging them to live side by side. They have to decide if they want to make of this a blessing or a curse.

This is the first cartoon by Bill Leak since he was hospitalised from falling off a balcony and hitting his head. It nicely captures the topsy-turvey world we now live in after the collapse of the fantasy of the eternal resource boom in never never land.

I do expect to see some finger wagging at us consumers for not spending enough and not maxing our credit cards, even though unemployment looms and our investment wealth has been halved. 'Tis a contradiction in neo-liberal Australia isn't it. No mention of the (former) masters of the universe, who said they seen the future and knew how it worked, mainlining on global speculation. No suggestion of the neo-liberal dream of the fusion of Canberra and corporate power.

The economic consensus is that 2009 will be worse than 2008 for Australia but that things are basically fine. They could have been worse. There is no place for pessimism. As an editorial in the AFR said:

Yes, the road ahead looks difficult. But this is no time to abandon our faith in the capacity for enterprises and markets free of oppressive state intervention to reinvent ourselves and bounce back. Human ingenuity will prevail, confidence will eventually return and the wheels of commerce will spin again. There is too much evidence that the world, despite periodic setbacks, continues to progress

Were the reasoning any more contorted it would be a circus act by aged mime artists. What needs to be pushed into the background is the idea of equilibrium: that market activities would balance themselves out and generate positive-sum outcomes all round.

I saw Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon filmic adaption of Peter Morgan's play about the back story of the David Frost television interviews with Nixon in 1977 yesterday. Only a hint of the theatrical origins are still visible. in this Hollywood adaptation. The film juxtaposes political power with media power through a series of interviews in which the two match wits for money in a kind of poker game played out on television.

It is a study in media and political character as both the grinning TV personality and the conniving ex-president hope to revive their careers by outfoxing their onscreen partner.The interviews are important because Frost got Nixon to admit that he had let down the country down.

The core of the film is Nixon's drunken phone call to Frost before the final interview on Watergate about Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal, for which he would have certainly been impeached had he not opted to resign. This is Hollywood and Frost gets Nixon to admit in the Watergate interview that nothing the president does could be considered illegal---"When the president does it, that means it is not illegal” a view that justifies any measure taken by a president, whether break-ins, pre-emptive strikes, torture or unauthorized surveillance.

Graham Young at Ambit Gambit has a post on blogging. He considers the argument that this kind of blogging in Australia has arisen in reaction to the flaws in a safety-first journalism:

So, a consequence of lack of experience, lack of understanding, lack of resources, lack of tools, lack of proper training and lack of aptitude may well be that journalists end up practising "safety first". Or it may just be that journalism is a social activity and we tend to herd in social activities, which looks like "safety first".

Young then adds that if practising "safety first" journalism in the mainstream media was so, then we would expect to see scuds of bloggers who disagree with each other. However, his observation is that this is not the case, as what tends to happen is that bloggers herd together in mutually reinforcing circles:

There may be more points of view than are represented in the MSM, so there is less uniformity and more niches, but as there are more bloggers than journalists I doubt whether this represents a real increase in the risk profile. In which case, perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards "safety first", but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don't reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.

One always hopes that things will improve in the Middle East. These are always dashed. This time round in the circle of violence Israel's strategic objective in bombing the Gaza strip appears to be to "neutralise" Hamas, and so forcing the movement to accept a new ceasefire on Israel's terms.

It is always more complicated than that, isn't it, given the imposition of a total blockade which prevented basic goods, like food stuff and medicine, from entering the Gaza Strip. Israel choked off supplies after Hamas won the elections almost 2 years ago. Israel wants to topple the Hamas regime, rather than end the siege of Gaza and allowing freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank could rehabilitate life in the Strip. The problem is that the state of Israel does not accept that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and nor does it accept that it is with that government that Israel must reach a situation of coexistence.

What then is the justification for this kind of attack on Hamas' centers of operation in Gaza is justified? Tom Segev observes that both the justification given for the assault on Gaza and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another. in which the lethal logic of belligerence dominates.

The Australian Minister Against Communications is not on his own in seeking to control what can and can't be done with the internet. The US has been toying with the idea for a while, and the UK is scouting around for an ISP-level solution that won't result in humiliation. It's hardly surprising that some would begin to suspect some kind of multi-government conspiracy against the people when the 'saving the kiddies' argument is so flawed.

Could the think of the children line simply be a smokescreen for repression of free speech? After all, I’m not exactly seeing protesters calling for repressive internet censorship anywhere in the world at the moment.

Could it be a play by big media to take back control of news gathering, or the movie and music industry to kill the internet so as to kill piracy (notably Burnham throws piracy into the mix).

And why left wing Governments? And more than one of them….at the same time, out of the blue.

A left wing conspiracy to kill the internet?

I know, far fetched, and a little loopy on the suggestion side, but we’re not getting the whole picture here, and something more than kiddies is driving this.

Comments sensibly point out that there's nothing left wing about it. Also in comments, Clarencegirl argues it's in the interests of corporate profits, which makes more sense:

2008 was warmer and drier than usual. Water storages are lower than ever in southern Australia. In South Australia the premier is saying that the state won't run out of water. He says little was about helping to install bulk-buy solar roof panels, or that the federal Government is sending a message that it's not prepared to make that leap into the future of renewable energy in a big way.

Little is also being said what rising sea levels in the future would mean in coastal South Australia. There is a vacuum around the significance of the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, or the possibility of the Arctic sea becoming ice-free in summer and Greenland's ice melting.

In Climate Code Red David Spratt and Philip Sutton warn that glaciologists are convinced the summer Arctic ice will disappear within five years, returning only as a thin layer during winter.

The Pope--Benedict XVI--- in the context of his Christmas "greeting" to the Roman Curia made some controversial remarks about gender and homosexuality along the lines of protecting the rainforests from destruction in the same vein as protecting heterosexuals from homosexuality. The full text is here.

The pope's concession to the environment is perfunctory and superficial – "Yes, the tropical forests merit our protection" – and subordinated to "the human being as a creature (which) merits no less protection – a creature in which a message is written which does not imply a contradiction of our liberty, but rather the condition for it."

An odd story about this, especially when the auto industry is in decline and dependent on public handouts to survive. By most most accounts, the Big Three US auto companies brought ruin upon themselves. The US is becoming the bailout nation.

What appears to be happening is that with the help of Nissan, Toyota, and BMW, the South is trying to replace Detroit as the center of U.S. automobile production, using low wages, anti-union laws, and low taxes to benefit from the outsourcing of industry from societies more advanced than the South, like Japan and Germany. A recession-plagued US is becoming a space for outsourcing.

Have a great day everyone. Thanks for dropping by, commenting and discussing politics and policy issues during 2008. It's been a great year blogging wise. Blogging is slowly gaining acceptance in Australia, despite the resistance.

Looking forward to many more discussions and debates on public and political issues after the Xmas holidays. It sure has been an eventful year, what with the crisis in financial capitalism and its impact of the global economy. That has made it a watershed year. When coupled with climate change (less rain, the melting of the Arctic sea ice, and temperature increases of 2 degrees are effectively already in the system) 2008 was an epochal year.

So we end the year on an upbeat economic note: big stimulus packages to kick start the economy with the rhetoric saying that things will get better soon. As Paul Krugman puts it in relation to the US: once a burst of deficit spending turns the economy around we can quickly go back to business as usual.


Steve Bell

However, Krugamn argues that things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis.

The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either.

Glenn Greenward over at Salon remarks on the the sneering references to "bloggers" and "blogs" in the mainstream media about bloggers ignoring evidence" with this characteristic being common for the blogging world. He says:

Given that virtually every establishment media outlet now regularly writes in this format, I'm really not sure -- nor is anyone else -- what distinguishes a "journalist" from a "blogger" these days. The terms have no real definition and no real purpose other than to allow the former some instrument for demonizing, sneering at, and feeling superior to the latter. So while these terms have long ago lost their definitional clarity, their true purpose means they're unlikely to disappear any time soon.

The conservative media----the right-wing noise machine in the US --- simply invent pure fiction, trade in myths and specialise in abuse usually hurled at the liberal bogey figure of the day.The latter is a form of preaching to the converted pioneered by Rush Limbaugh about two decades ago.

More generally the mainstream media help to implant false story lines in public discourse,and uncritically publish what they're being drip fed from their cherished "political sources", and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true and/or hearing any divergent views.

Stephen Conroy put his name to a curiously disconnected entry at the Digital Economy Blog today. The entries over the past few days suggest that the blog is being written by a group of people with different objectives and different understandings about what a blog is. Or someone who mostly has their mind on other things.

Friday came an entry headed Developing Australia's Digital Skills which started with a gesture at engagement:

Yes, we know you want to talk about filtering and we will be posting about it on Monday...in the meantime, we wanted to talk about digital skills

Commenters took a dim view of Sunday's