Your ABC?
The owner of this domain and I were recently having a heated debate about the merits of our tax money being used to fund the ABC. An article on Larvatus Prodeo today reminds me what a waste of that money the national broadcaster actually is. After the complaints of one Liberal Senator, Eric Abetz (he’s the weird-looking Tasmanian guy whose uncle was a Nazi war criminal), the ABC has resorted to soliciting for people with right-wing political views in order to make the audience for its panel discussion show Q & A look more balanced.
This raises a couple of points. Firstly, given the somewhat outdated nature of the left-right dichotomy, and given that most ordinary people don’t have political views which can be classed as left-wing or right-wing (only academics and political junkies think in those terms), should our tax money be used to perpetuate the left-right division? Secondly, even though I’m not a left-winger myself, surely if heaps of lefties turn up to sit in the audience for Q & A (12.8% of audience members are Greens voters, for example), maybe we should commend them for being interested in intelligent political debate, rather than whinging about the audience being unbalanced. If the right want their opinions heard, nothing was stopping them from going to the ABC studios before and getting a seat in the audience.
Thirdly, if the ABC is caving into pressure exerted by one Senator (a man who wouldn’t be in Parliament if Tasmania were actually represented according to its share of the nation’s population, and who was involved in that waste of resources known as the Senate inquiry into Tasmania’s non-existant AFL team), it kind of makes a mockery of the argument that a publicly-funded channel is necessary to provide an alternative viewpoint to the commercial networks. It would appear from stories like these the ABC can’t stand up to accusations of bias, and is going out of its way not to give its flagship political debate programme a left-wing, or at least non-right-wing, flavour. Only a privatised ABC, which would answer to the great Australian public rather than to Parliament, would be able to confidently provide the left-wing and small-l liberal sections of the country with the programming they desire.
May 28th, 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
New States
I agree with Senator Barnaby Joyce that Australia’s six States and two territories, whose boundaries largely date from the 19th century (or even the fifteenth century in the case of WA’s eastern border), are increasingly irrelevant. More and more powers previously exercised by State governments are being surrendered to Canberra, with little resistance, even from the State politicians themselves. Rather than abolishing the States and replacing them with some sort of regional government, or experimenting with two levels of government (which no other country of our size and population does), I’ve always believed the subdividing the existing States into smaller ones, with boundaries that reflect natural and cultural regions, is the answer. The idea of particular regions breaking away to form their own State is older than Federation itself (the New England, Riverina, North Queensland, and Central Queensland separation movements were all active around the turn of the century).
New States would free people in regional areas from State governments dominated by their respective State capital, allow more competition between States in areas such as taxation (it would be harder to get fifty States to agree to something like the GST than six), and hopefully lead to the decentralisation of Australia’s population and economy by growing our major regional cities. All six States have deliberately helped their capital to dominate the State’s population and economy (one of the worst examples is the Western Australian government’s decision around the time of Federation to let off some dynamite in Fremantle Harbour to make it bigger than Albany’s - prior to that time, Albany was the main stop for mail ships travelling from Britain to the east coast of Australia).
If the metropolitan areas of each of the five mainland State capitals became a State of their own, we still have enough regional centres left to create twenty or thirty extra States. For example, Albury-Wodonga could serve as the capital of a State of Hume, covering north-eastern Victoria and the south-eastern Riverina, the ACT could combine with the southern tablelands and south coast of NSW to form the State of Brindabella, and Gippsland forms a natural area, with Traralgon as its capital. They don’t need to have massive populations - Delaware had sixty thousand in 1776, and the populations of Canada’s northern territories go as low as thirty thousand, while Switzerland’s smallest canton, Appenzell-Innerrhoden, has a mere fifteen thousand inhabitants and exercises more powers than our States do. While we’re at it, we can transfer all of the administrative functions of local councils to the new State governments, thereby accomplishing the goal held by many Australians of abolishing one level of government (local councils would still exist, and could possibly be subdivided into smaller areas, as they would be freed from having to provide the range of services that they do at present).
Whatever the boundaries and sizes of the new States, it’s the ideal solution to our clapped-out federal system.
May 27th, 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Scalpers get in on the AC/DC bandwagon
Link: http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,28383,25539374-7484,00.html
It seems as per always scalpers are getting in on the act of buying tickets and chucking them up on eBay, and disadvantaging some poor die hard fan from getting either a ticket or good seats.
It annoys me as a fan being in the situation where I cant get tickets the propper ways, it happened initially when I tried to get Lily Allen tickets in Melbourne.
What I do not understand is how the promoter of the tour can say something like “But now the first two AC/DC shows have sold out, there is really nothing we can do about selling on eBay. We’ve just got to warn people.”
Having a good old think about this in the past has got me thinking why cant the big ticket companies adapt concepts off promoters of Australia’s great festivals and have identification procedures in place…….name printing on the tickets and Photo ID at the venue for entry, otherwise refund if you cant attend and some sort of reallocation scheme or transfer of ownership system would most certainly cut down or almost completely cut out the large amounts of it that goes on.
Another way to reduce it would be to cut out the ways of staff obtaining tickets internally before events, as I have heard there are ways they can manipulate systems to queue jump and get first serves.
May 27th, 2009 | Posted in Newsworthy | No Comments »
GIVE up lamb roasts and save the planet?
Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6350237.ece
I dont think I quite understand the greenies enough to fathom why the following article has surfaced.
Some intellects telling us to give up eating lamb and maybe even beef because they claim it is a fair contributor to global warming, yet as I spend my daily life navigating certain parts of the region and even country…..I see what I think is worse.
Have they ever thought about their own mode of transport, the equipment and fuels that are powering both their vehicle and the building they are sitting in writing the article, big smelly business or perhaps even the lighting/heating they are using?….I mean they are all contributing factors and several of them have precedence over the livestock of the world.
Why am I going on about this? well to drop meat is to drop health……after all we were born carnivores, and the thought of someone wanting me to put a dent in my fairly healthy way of living just to cut down “emissions” has me spewing!
May 26th, 2009 | Posted in That's Failworthy | 1 Comment »
Our fault?
One of the more disturbing trends in relations between governments and their citizens today is the tendency of those in power to blame us for their problems. We’re regularly told that our usage of carbon is causing global warming, because it’s easier to blame us than for government to blame itself or its associates in polluting industries. Over-crowding on Sydney’s train network, therefore, is not due to the State government not building vital rail links to places like the Hills District and the Northern Beaches or failing to put enough trains on the track, nor the Rudd government for giving New South Wales a measly $91 million to spend on infrastructure, the speculated reason for which being merely Prime Minister Rudd’s unwillingness to be seen to support the unpopular government of Premier Rees. No, commuters are to blame, if CityRail is to be believed. Apparently we bunch up together on platforms when trains arrive and this causes delays. A quick use of one’s common sense would reveal that people are simply heading towards the doors of the train. Perhaps CityRail would prefer that we enter trains via the windows?
May 26th, 2009 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »