We are still the most populous state you know.

From the start of the interview Fran sounded hostile, a fact not lost on her guest, who sounded increasingly frustrated with her seeming indifference to his answers. Every question asked was answered in a straight forward manner, without obfuscation, in fact it was a great pleasure to hear an elected representative being so open about a policy position. Despite that, Fran seemed entirely unwilling to concede that any good may come of allowing hunters to destroy pests in National Parks, she refused to accept that killing feral animals was a genuine conservation initiative and then bizarrely dismissed the entire idea because the hunters hadn’t killed enough feral animals to make a difference in the areas that they were allowed access to.

Hunters aren’t a group that elicit a lot of sympathy in the general community, most people’s ideas are probably formed by what they see on the cover of magazines like Bacon Busters or Wild Boar Australia at their newsagents, but the reality is that, like any group, hunters are a diverse group with a variety of interests. Popular culture might paint hunters as backwards rednecks, but  I would have expected Fran Kelley to be a little more open minded and professional.

I wonder how much of Fran’s attitude towards hunters comes from ignorance? Even in rural areas hunting is not a high profile activity, so I can only imagine that for people living and working in metropolitan centres the very idea of hunting would be something quite foreign. The reality is that the majority of people who hunt for sport are quite committed to it, spend a lot of time and money equipping themselves to do it properly and take great care when using firearms. Those who hunt on a commercial basis approach the sport with an enormous amount of professionalism and operate within a well regulated system.

Whether this bill goes anywhere will depend entirely upon the NSW government, but I hope that if they do decide to seriously look at it that the level of discourse is a little better than what was delivered on Radio National this morning.

Take a listen for yourself  

Before the state-wide 6pm news that everyone is familiar with, regional TV networks do their best to prove their local credentials by covering the important issues in the surrounding area. This is a difficult task as these networks cover large areas, have small budgets, and are mostly staffed by people desperate to leave for the capital cities. What you usually end up with is a combination of council meetings, football matches, photogenic school children and any visitor of note who passes through.

The other feature of local news is the ability to tie fame-worthy events and individuals to the local area. Sometimes this is easy, like Albury and Lauren Jackson or Mark Taylor and Wagga Wagga, sometimes it is a little more tenuous, like the time our local media decided to cover the wedding of a northern European lass into an obscure royal family on the basis that she’d spent six months in Wangaratta as an exchange student.

Because the hours between five and seven PM require fairly constant activity to get Buster Boy and the Troll Princess fed and to bed, seeing local news is a rare event, but I was reminded of how wonderful it can be earlier tonight when the mid-north coast news bulletin on Prime moved on to sport. The lead item on the sport report was an update on Le Tour de France, because they needed to report the progress of ‘Upper Corindi’s own Cadel Evans’.

I love local media.

Let’s put aside for a second the fact that any website on the planet can easily stop google from accessing their content, which News has chosen not to do, and compare for a second News’ words and actions.

The most profitable sites, in fact the only ones making serious money are the sites that aggregate news, like Google and Yahoo.

They pay nothing for content produced by newspaper journalists but make money by supplying it in easily searchable forms online. – John Hartigan, National Press Club – July 1, 2009

The Australian - July 4th 2009

Somebody get that man in the expensive suit a facepalm, stat!

This year’s budget is going to be disappointing for lots of Australians who have spent the past few years being conditioned to think that the federal budget is all about what new handout they will be receiving. During the mining boom, Peter Costello as Treasurer was lucky enough to receive enormous revenue from corporate taxation, which he then used as an electoral tool to bribe voters with handouts and tax cuts. The result of this as that our tax mix is heavily reliant on corporate tax receipts, which is fine during a booming global economy, but suicidal in the long term as the economic cycle inevitably turns, leaving a huge revenue shortfall.

The deficit budget that will be handed down tonight is due to the revenue shortfall caused by an over reliance on corporate taxation. We are all about to have to take our medicine for the unsustainable tax cuts that Howard and Costello used to win voters’ favour since the turn of the century. Naturally, the opposition will attempt to lay this disaster at the feet of the Government, and a lot of people will fall for it.

There have already been plenty of hints as to how this budget will play out, but the coverage of the it will inevitably focus heavily on people who regard themselves as being hard done by. Here is my list of predictions of people who will squeal the loudest about the budget, and why they should shut their whinging pie holes.

Self funded retirees. This is such a stupid and inaccurate phrase, the Howard government bent over backwards to keep the grey vote locked in and in doing so pretty much extended every benefit designed to keep pensioners out of poverty, like health care cards and other services, to people who were ineligible for the pension, but were over retirement age. In addition to this, these people were gifted enormous amounts of money through foolishly generous superannuation policies and by the debasement of the capital gains tax system.

As the baby boomers race towards retirement this mess needs to be unwound, it is unaffordable and unsustainable. Expect to hear this group claim that unless they are heavily subsidised by the government they will spend every cent they have and live off the pension, thereby forcing the rest of us to pick up the tab. So much for being self-funded. The reality is that most of these people would sell their own children rather than live on the aged pension and will simply whittle away their kids inheritance to support their lifestyles. Boom times for reverse mortgage providers.

High income earners. Another group who were trained to suckle at the government teat during the Howard years. One of Howard’s most socially regressive feats was instilling in people a sense of downward envy, demonising welfare recipients as being unworthy of government assistance, and then quelling the disharmony he’d created by handing out cash to people who didn’t need it. Policies like the Baby Bonus and the Private Health Insurance Rebate scheme should have been means tested from day one, because one of the basic tenets of the welfare system is that you only provide assistance to people actually need it.

High income earners, like talk-back radio hosts, op-ed writers for our major newspapers, and their friends, will be especially critical of any means testing, claiming that it is ‘unfair’. The reality is that everyone loves getting something for nothing, and free money is the pinnacle of that principle. Expect to hear this group claim that the changes are a disincentive to hard work and that their tax contributions entitle them to some government largesse, while their accountants desperately search for new ways to reduce their tax liability.

Businesses whose business model is leeching off taxpayers. The private health insurance industry is the first that springs to mind, but there will no doubt be plenty of other businesses whose profits are largely derived from providing services to the government who will foreshadow thousands of job losses, should their place at the trough be threatened. The reality is that if there is a genuine market for their products, then they will survive. Government interference distorts the market and usually ends up with all sorts of perverse unintended consequences, reducing these effects is a good thing.

People without children. Apparently people without children do not use any government services at all and are subsidising us breeders. Fuck off. Sleep in on a Sunday, go to a movie with your partner after dinner and hope like hell that the rest of us pop out enough kids to pay for your health care bills when you get old.

There will no doubt be others crying out this year, and the opposition will be full of sympathy for them as this will be their first real chance at drumming up some resentment towards the government. But the reality is that the massive budgets we came to expect for the last decade were underpinned by the same assumptions that have bought the commercial world to its knees in the past year, the boom could not go on forever, we could not keep deferring the cost of government spending and it is now time to face the consequences of our reckless actions during the good times.

The Australian coastline is roughly 25,760km long. That’s really big, which means that it takes a lot of people, planes and boats to watch all of it at once. Even it we only watch the northern coastline from Cairns to Broome, we are still talking about roughly 6,500km or 3,500 nautical miles.

The Royal Australian Navy has 14 Armidale Class patrol boats, which are the primary vessel used to intercept small boats, but of course due to maintenance and crew schedules they are not all active at once. There is usually one inactive in Cairns and one in Darwin.

Are you starting to see a picture forming Malcolm? Sharman? Big coastline, limited resources. Coastal radar only has a few hundred kilometres range, arial surveillance also has operational limits, we can’t simultaneously watch every part of our territorial waters at once.

And I realise it may be easy to forget this, living as we do in a prosperous, peaceful nation, but some people are being persecuted where they live because of their ethnicity or their political or religious beliefs. These people jump in leaky boats and try to escape to Australia, not because they hate us or want to destroy us, but because they believe that we are an egalitarian and just nation who will provide them with the opportunity to rebuild their lives.

Please try to remember these things before you start asking silly questions in front of TV cameras, it’ll make life much more pleasant for all of us.

While it’s true that buying goods helps our local economies, and that retailers deserve support, the most bang for your buck surely has to come from spending your money on something where the labour cost is a large component. Whether it’s getting an overdue service done on your car, having the gutters and down-pipes professionally cleared, getting a hair-cut or pampering yourself at a salon, your money will make a bigger impact in your community when it’s going to other people rather than to overseas manufacturers.

By all means use the money on goods that you needed anyway, but please think twice before buying stuff just because you can.

How did Crikey’s blogger charged with covering “politics, PR and Web 2.0″ choose to react to this story, which neatly tied together all of his fields of interest? He didn’t.

The Sydney Morning Herald covered the story, Telstra quickly made a statement on their Now We Are Talking site, and it was a big topic of discussion all day on twitter, but all Crikey’s blogger could string together today were two reposted stories from ABC news online unrelated to this story.

Undoubtedly Crikey will have plenty of good goss in tomorrow’s subscriber email, Fake Stephen Conroy has written for Crikey previously, as have some of his associates, but to let a story like this slip by without a mention on the public site, when you have a blog dedicated to this topic, is hardly a way to impress potential subscribers.

Technical solutions, especially those put together at short notice, will always have edge cases where things don’t work, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to meet the needs of the 99% for whom the solution is useful. I think the bigger problem that this highlights is how removed people are from considering their place in a broader community or environment and how little they value personal responsibility.