Ubuntu 9.10

Another 6 months has gone by, another Ubuntu release.
Interesting is the media response. It seems that differentiating libre and gratis is still an issue. It's amazing how much the English language can help confound understanding.

"New" taxes

Just watched the lateline interview which was a head to head of Bob Brown and Barnaby Joyce.

An interesting argument which Joyce used was that the CPRS was a new tax. And, yes, I believe this is one way of thinking of it.

However, if you are going to make this argument, if you are going to be consistent (which I'm never sure about the Nationals) then you'd have to argue that they themselves support such taxes.

An example which comes instantly to mind are: patents and private monopolies.

Patents allow private companies to engage in price gouging for a fixed period of time due to the state allowing a monopoly over inventions (a concept which has been stretched a long long way). And thanks to the FTA with the US this extends to a wide variety of commercial products. The argument for this is that this is meant to encourage private research and development and hence is "worth" it. This is an argument that he would clearly be for. So you'd have to say that if a scheme meaningfully reduced our emissions and set targets which meant other nations would also reduce their targets had a small chance of avoiding dangerous climate change in which households incured costs would be supported by the Nationals if these arguments are to be consistent.

Another example of this is the sale of publicly held monopolies. The sale of Telstra is a case of this. Though they are regulated on their prices, Telstra does have a very large revenue base which is has and will use to lobby politicians. I think there is plenty of evidence to show that Telstra's copper phone lines in Australia are highly profitable under the current prices and the price is always jammed as high as it can go. This is a kind of tax which has been grated by the public sector. And from what I remember, the Nationals did support this.

I'm sure I could think up other examples, but for Joyce to make this argument is ever so slightly hypocritical.

Abetz again

Yesterday a motion was passed by the Senate to refer the whole Grech and Abetz issue to the Senate Privileges Committee. The motion passed, but how people voted in the division was the interesting.

It needs to be pointed out that Abetz appears in the paired votes. So he wasn't actually present in the chamber at the division.

Pairing is not an abstention. Odgers clarifies this:

By arrangement between parties in the Senate, a system of pairing operates, whereby a senator who is absent and who is expected to vote on one side in a particular question is “paired” with a senator who is expected to vote on the other side and who is either also absent or who deliberately does not vote in order to cancel out the effect of the other senator’s absence.

If you look at the votes, you'll see that the Liberal party voted against the motion, so implicitly so did Abetz.

In the event of a vote against this, you'd have to come to the conclusion that he is not being fully open an honest. For if he has given a full and honest account of the events, he will have no problem with others looking into this as they can only conclude that he has acted in an appropriate way. Furthermore, if he feel that he has a conflict of interest and cannot vote, then he can abstain from the vote.

I see no possible reason why (implicitly) he would vote against it, unless he had something to hide.

Climate Change and "Compromise"

This post is predicated on the assumption that you don't think that climate change is just some huge conspiracy or some kind of whacked out theory of loonies. Probably best not to read any more of this post if you fall into this category.

It is interesting to watch the "debate" around the CPRS. In particular the term compromise has been used to describe the numerical values in it such as the CO2-e targets and the compensation payments. If all other developed countries followed the slowest changer (which after the compensation payments may be Australia) then it would seem inevitable that the world would reach an atmosphere that will move the earth rapidly into a different climate (i.e. this runaway thing people talk about).

These features of the CPRS are said to be a compromise between interests. However, I don't see how this works. Either you have an effective policy or not. And it seems most likely that this is not an effective policy. The numerical quantities which need to be achieved to avoid tipping points cannot be moved by a compromise. Mother nature doesn't sit down at the table and say "oh, sure, I'll move the tipping point up 100ppm so you can maintain employment in your established industries for another few decades".

There is another point of view which says that it is a "good start". But that implicitly means that you think that it is inadequate but that somehow in the future, politicians who will be basically the same ones as today (remember if you get two terms in the Senate that is 12 years!) will just change their mind.

The less façades we have in our laws the better. So if you have a scheme which is highly complex and unwieldy which has no chance of achieving what is required, why have it at all?

Digital Radio - A step forward with a step backwards

Massive fanfare today with digital radio broadcasting starting in Australia.

Unfortunately the pill is slightly bitter and the blame lies on... politicians!! Say goodbye to any kind of digital radio enthusiasts who are able to make their own receivers. Because if they did they would be in violation patents covering the HE-AAC codec which is used in the DVB+ standard.

The issue here is that not only has a explicit monopoly been granted on this codec, but it is now legislated as the standard codec which everyone must use. By doing something as simple as listening to the radio you are forced to pay money to a private company.

The Grech issue and Abetz

There has been a lot of talk about the sad saga of the Senior Public Servant Godwin Grech and the role the opposition have been playing. But the media seem to be after the head of Malcom Turnbull in all of this ignoring the role others played, in particular Eric Abetz.

Now, unless this is a totally different liberal party to the one described on thier website, Abetz cannot claim to have no responsibility for his actions. With all those beliefs in freedom one cannot escape the requirement of responsibility for ones own actions. So if it turns out that the questions and answers which were recited almost verbatim in the committee were drafted before hand (and assuming that it wasn't a coincidence that the questions were identical, the quantum tunneling of macroscopic objects is probably more likely) then Abetz should be in a very difficult situation.

He is responsible for his actions and his party grants him the freedom of choice in this matter. He can pull out at any point because of the protections granted to him, but choose not to. This is a telling point on character, an attribute which seems to be less and less involved in the public's opinion making on politics.

The other big issue here is the lack of an independent judiciary on these issues. The opposition seemed to think that it was OK for it to be the jury on this issue and for parliament to be the forum for this. Of course this never works, and if there was some substance to this, it wouldn't work. This is almost certainly a symptom of not having body (at the federal level) who's sole purpose is the policing and prosecution of corruption. Great, MPs found out about something possibly nasty, but is should not be up to them to be judge, jury and executioner as there is a massive conflict of interest especially in a Westminster system where the Government ARE MPs.

Fitzgerald, Beattie and Bligh - Oh my!!

So Tony Fitzgerald has ruffled a couple of feathers on some old players in the chicken coup. Beattie and Bligh claim that they have done so much to make things so much better since the (in)famous Fitzgerald Enquiry.

I argue that all of this is rubbish. They have only tinkered around the edges. In the 20 odd years of ALP Governments in Queensland (bar a few years where they did not form a government) they have done NOTHING (and I'll say it again), NOTHING to reform the powers of the state to avoid these problems. Tinkering with a few things about how the public service works and donation and disclosure laws has not changed things and the Gordon Nuttall issue is representative of how little has changed.

At the very heart of the issue is the separation of powers. The one aspect of this that I will not go into here is the judicial power. Not that there isn't things that could be made better, but it isn't at the core of the problems. The problem is the separation of powers between the legislative and executive arms. Basically there isn't any.

To make matters worse, with an ALP Government and hence ALP dominated Parliament, there is little that the Parliament can do to overview the actions of the executive. If the ALP members vote against the resolutions of the party (i.e. motions put forward by the Government) then, as far as I know, they are in breech of their agreement with their party and will be put up for expulsion. If memory serves there was a case of this with an MP a few years ago.

This naturally tends to a Parliament is conformist to the Government's position. If the Government does not want something debated or brought up in the Parliament, then they can do that. If they want to "move that the member be no longer heard" then they can do that too. They can control committees, debates, particular wordings of motions, the actions of the speaker, and of course the legislation of the day. I'm pretty sure this isn't what was imagined for the Westminister system.

It is the legislative body's responsibility to debate issues and find information out for the public to know about. To suggest that it should be the role of private individuals is frankly ridiculous. Often the actions of a rogue Minister will be hidden away and need to be dug out. Basically a full time job of quite a few people. Meanwhile, people are already working full time jobs and using their spare time with their family! So I do not see how any one particular person or small group of people working in their spare time has the capacity to do this.

So an obvious question is why doesn't the LNP do this information finding. Well given that they must go via the rules of the Parliament which as I have already argued are totally against them, they have had very few MPs over the last decade and their political strategy has been to "be the next Government of Queensland". So they aren't overly interested in the committee work that would be involved. There are many dead ends in this kind of approach so it isn't the most politically attractive work. But it is crucial as it is much quicker at finding out information about the actions of the Government than any other method.

There are also independents in the Parliament. But again they are totally hamstrung by the way the systems works. Often finding it hard to even get a seconder for things.

So has the ALP does anything the change this situation? What kind of Parliamentary reform has the ALP done in Queensland to ensure that citizens can be confident that Government actions are in the public interest?

Sure, as Beattie and Bligh have been claiming, the shop window has been changed. The door is far easier to get through and the footpath outside the shop front has been cleaned. But there is still smoke billowing from behind the shop because the fire is still roaring away.

Without Parliamentary reform in Queensland, nothing with change. Things will continue to "slide back towards its dark past" after the last scandal was forgotten. As I argued, the Government has full control over the Parliament, so it can in the next session of Parliament change things (remember the Qld Constitution is an act of Parliament). I won't be holding my breath.