This is what comes of having spent a long-weekend on-call, and hence being housebound:
Should anyone want a copy of them (presumably to take them on in a boxing match, I guess), just send me your Wii number in an email…
Category Archives: Politics
Dear NSW Catholic MPs.
Please keep in mind that you were not put into office by George Pell.
Oh, and ex-communication should be worn as a badge of honour.
Annihilation
In response to the news that the federal government is trailing the opposition by 20%25 in the latest Newspoll, Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said today:
“More importantly, we’ve got to work harder, we’ve got to show people the view out of the front of the bus. [If we] show people the vision out of the front of the bus, [we] give people the reason to stay on the bus for another three years.”
Maybe it would help, Barnaby, if your government wasn’t trying to run people down with that very same bus.
And if that 60/40 poll result were to be accurate? The Daily Flute has a list of who’d lose their seats in the unlikely event that the swing was that big – and uniform. There’s plenty of names there that I certainly wouldn’t miss.
Posted in Politics
Penalty rates
My local hairdresser charges $5 more for haircuts on weekends than they do on weekdays. Cinemas often charge more for weekend sessions than for weekday sessions. Petrol prices rise on weekends. Hotel rates are regularly higher on weekends than during the working week.
The stated aim of the government’s “Workchoices” legislation, a name that becomes more inaccurate by the day, was to introduce “flexibility” into the workplace, so that employers could make employees work overtime and shifts without having to pay a penalty. If it’s so beneficial to the country that we have to make employees give up their weekends for the same rates they get on weekends, why isn’t this good enough to apply to businesses and the surcharges they apply on weekends? If their employees cost the same on weekends now, employers don’t really have a reason to be raising their prices, anymore.
You watched it, you can’t unwatch it.
Today’s Digg user revolt should be a lesson to the various DRM interests in how not to handle bad news on the internet. Their heavy-handed attempts to block the publication of a 16-digit hexadecimal number have now resulted in it being distributed far more widely than it would have been if they’d just ignored the issue; and as an added bonus, there’s probably quite a few more people educated about the evils of DRM.
Governments have this problem too, especially the all-singing, all-dancing and all-censoring Australian government. If they hadn’t censored the 2002 film “Ken Park”, I probably wouldn’t have even heard about it. The resulting shitstorm that the censorship caused brought the film to my attention, and I made sure that I saw it – legally, while travelling in Norway, a country with a considerably more liberal attitude to its citizens’ abilities to make up their own mind about what they may see or do, than Australia is. And of course, the film was available via bittorrent, so the government’s banning of it did nothing to stop most people with decent broadband access from getting it.
So, some advice to anyone who’s had some bad news leaked onto the internet: don’t bother trying to suppress it. You’re only going to make it worse for yourself.
Oh… and naturally, I couldn’t help but contribute to today’s chaos myself 😉
The world’s worst copyright law: EU citizens, write to your MEP now.
The EU Parliament is preparing to vote on what has been termed the world’s worst copyright law. If you’re an EU citizen, then find your MEP and write them an email now, outlining your concerns. The vote is on Wednesday April 25th.
If you’re an EU citizen, but don’t presently live in the EU, then just do what I did, and pick a place where you’d like to live, in the country of which you’re a citizen, and write to your MEPs there. I chose Dublin.
Posted in Politics
Not praying for rain.
“We should all pray for rain”, says Prime Minister John Howard.
How can anyone take seriously a man who believes in a being that, apparently, is so childish that it withholds rain until we appeal to its conscience?
Liberal Party giving up on religion?
“I think religion is a very poor guide to public policy”, says Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull.
I hope someone is planning on telling Tony Abbott.
New media laws start on April 4th.
Governments always like to make potentially unpopular announcements when the media is preoccupied with other events; today, in the shadow of the boat crash on Sydney Harbour, the federal government has managed to sneak an announcement about the assention of their new media laws out, with barely anyone noticing at all.
There is certainly a risk in doing this now; prior to passing the legislation in the Senate last year, John Howard and Senator Helen Coonan swore black and blue that the new laws wouldn’t cause a rush of media mergers and then were left with egg on their faces when it happened within weeks. A sudden merger of media in Australia is not a good look in the run-up to the election; perhaps the government is counting on a buyout of Fairfax by a conservative leaning proprietor
So, expect Australia’s already dismal media to get even worse; where we have around ten or eleven independent commercial outlets in Melbourne and Sydney, this will now be able to drop to five. Expect newspapers to end up in the hands of TV stations, dumbing-down and endless cross-promotion.