6 February 2010
Patrick Cook
Dear son,
What days of wonders. It’s been a fair few years since your father and I squatted on the roof of the verandah in a deluge, watching the livestock swim through the bobbing chook houses and the tangles of fencing and 5k To Maccas signs and the gently rotating utes to the high ground. True, our topsoil is around two shires downstream by now, but the McCallisters’ topsoil will arrive from upstream any day, so we mustn’t grumble. We’re technically in drought, but a good flood is often a hint that rain is on the way. It all made...
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6 February 2010
Roger Underwood
Legendary Australian forester and administrator Alf Leslie had a favourite saying: ‘When it comes to public policy, stupidity nearly always wins.’ Had Leslie been alive to observe the 2009 bushfires in Victoria, and to have studied the factors contributing to this disaster, I can only assume he would have smiled ruefully, his philosophy reaffirmed. But had he read Inferno, Roger Franklin’s critical account of the fires and their genesis, I think he would have wept, as I did when I read it recently. Rarely can a disaster have had such obvious origins in bureaucratic mismanagement and political folly.
The...
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6 February 2010
Keith Austin
One of the great global successes of the past five years has been the explosion of bike-sharing schemes, for which Paris can take much of the blame. Despite the well-publicised acts of vandalism and theft, the silver Vélib bicycles are as distinctive a part of the Parisian scene as boulangeries or the unrepentant smokers blowing their crap all over your croque at the outdoor cafes (an unexpected downside to the Europe-wide no-smoking-indoors legislation).
Purists will argue that Paris is a vélo voleur, having nicked the idea from Lyon (which started its Vélo’v bike-share scheme in 2005) but it was the...
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6 February 2010
Christian Kerr
Alcohol is in the news. Australia, we are told, is in the clutches of a binge drinking epidemic. But it may be the health fascists who have the biggest hangovers as parliament resumes.
Along with tobacco and obesity, alcohol is one of the key targets of the government’s Preventive Health Agency.
The preventative health taskforce report that inspired the agency called for a string of new measures to save us from ourselves, including a ban on alcohol sponsorship of sporting and cultural events. It also recommended phasing out alcohol advertising from live sport broadcasts.
Legislation to establish the agency...
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6 February 2010
Tom Switzer
‘At one time or another, he had espoused almost every worthy principle, often repeatedly,’ Newsweek once observed of Richard Nixon. ‘But in practice he violated enough of them to make all of his protestations suspect.’
Could the same thing be said about Kevin Rudd? In Question Time this week, the rattled Prime Minister berated several Liberal MPs for changing their position on his emissions trading scheme: ‘Where lies consistency?’ he cried. Never mind that Copenhagen went up in smoke and that none of the world’s major polluters will cut back on the greenhouse gases that the increasingly discredited Intergovernmental Panel...
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6 February 2010
Peter Coleman
I agree with what Tony Abbott said in the Great Virginity Debate. So why did I feel uncomfortable? I think it’s because, if a man is called on to give his daughters advice on such matters, he will do so privately, not in the pages of the Australian Women’s Weekly. With that distinguo, I am sure Abbott will not lose votes over it. Apart from that, he has not so far put a foot wrong. As the global warming case unravels almost daily, his reversal of the Coalition’s policy on the Rudd ETS has been welcomed around the country (and...
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