It appears the Cyclone Wati, which had followed the path of Larry won’t hit Australia after all (at least, that’s the best guess at present). But with the shift in the Southern Oscillation from El Nino to La Nina and the long-term effects of global warming starting to become apparent, we can expect more severe cyclones for at least the next few years, and a general increase in the severity of storms and similar events. It’s too late to prevent this happening (though we can mitigate the process over the long term) so we’ll have to adapt.
Cyclone Larry Appeal
Queensland premier Peter Beattie has launched a disaster relief fund to help Cyclone Larry victims, kicking off fundraising with a donation of $100,000.
To make a donation to the cyclone Disaster Relief Fund, you can ring 1800 150 411 with your credit card details, between 8am to 6pm, Monday to Friday.
Cheques can be made out to the “Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal Fund” with the account number being 064-013-1000-6800.
Donations can also be made at any branch of the Commonwealth Bank and any gifts over $2 are tax deductible.
Malaria Action Day
Today is Malaria Action Day. Coturnix has a bunch of links.
Larry
Cyclone Larry has just passed over the Atherton Tablelands, where quite a few members of my family live, having earlier crossed the coast near Innisfail, with winds up to 290 km/h. Cyclones weaken as they go inland, so hopefully there won’t be too much damage and destruction on the Tablelands, but the speed with which this one has moved means its still very strong.
No real news from Innisfail yet, but it sounds as though there have been quite a few houses destroyed or damaged and that the the banana crop has probably been wiped out. Best wishes to any readers in the region, and to everyone else there as well.
Lowering the bar
Miranda Devine’s latest piece has a friend in Iraq reporting from his bunker inside the Green Zone that everything is going fine there, or at least that things are not nearly as bad as “the French Reign of Terror, or the Russian and Chinese revolutions, not to mention the disasters that were Vietnam and Cambodia.” I was going to do more, but, as usual, Tim Dunlop has beaten me to it
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Is Howard defensible ?
The few commentators who were suggesting that the Howard government did not (at the least) know the general facts about Australia’s collusion with Saddam Hussein in stealing $300 million from the Oil-For-Food fund, and encourage the AWB quango to do ‘whatever it takes’ to push the deal through, have gone quiet after the latest revelation that our intelligence agencies knew all about the racket.
Is there a coherent defence of the Howard government’s actions in helping Saddam fund his regime, including its military, while calling for, and eventually participating in, war against him? I think there is, though not one we’re likely to see avowed openly.
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What I’ve been reading
What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy by Clive Hamilton. The latest Quarterly Essay is a restatement of arguments Clive’s presented a number of times before. The central argument is that, since widespread poverty is no longer a problem, social democracy is irrelevant and what is needed is a postmaterialist politics of wellbeing.
Not surprisingly, I have a lot of problems with this.
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Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Communications reform
My piece in yesterday’s Fin is over the fold. I go into full free-market mode attacking the government’s deal with the monopolists. Ken Davidson in the Age goes the other way, arguing for tight regulation in the public interest, but I can’t see this ever happening to Murdoch or even Packer jnr. On the other hand, I guess we’re not going to see their spectrum taken away and auctioned off either. On the whole, though, I think the only useful intervention here is support for a strong public broadcasting sector. As far as the commercial networks go, the best hope is to encourage the kind of outside competition made possible by digital technology.
The point on which Ken and I agree, I think, is that we now have the worst of both worlds: lots of intervention, but in the interests of monopolists, not the public.
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