Contradictory and confusing accounts of the Australia Day protest fiasco

There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the events leading up to the ugly demonstrations outside The Lobby Restaurant on Australia Day, as the accounts given by Julia Gillard and UnionsACT secretary Kim Sattler don’t add up:

“I heard it from the crowd.” — Kim Sattler, The Canberra Times, January 28, 2012 2:24 PM

“Mr Hodges accurately conveyed to her [Kim Sattler] the statement made by Mr Abbott.” — Julia Gillard, The Australian, January 28, 2012 4:29 PM

“I spoke to Tony Hodges on the phone… He mentioned that Tony Abbott had made a statement about the embassy, that it shouldn’t exist at all.” — Kim Sattler, Sunday Herald Sun, January 29, 2012 12:00 AM

“ACT union official Kim Sattler says reports that her account of events on Australia Day contradicts Prime Minister Julia Gillard are ‘inaccurate’.” — The Sydney Morning Herald, January 29, 2012 1:37 PM

Swan's explanation for replacing Professor Warwick McKibbin doesn't add up

Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan cited the length of time Professor Warwick McKibbin and Don McGauchie served on the Reserve Bank Board in the justification he gave to Ross Greenwood on 2GB for replacing these vocal critics of the Labor government’s fiscal policy.

Can I just make this point about the two departing members. They’ve been there for 10 years. I don’t think there’s ever been a situation where someone has been on the board longer than 10 years.

This is not true. Jillian Broadbent has been a member of the Reserve Bank Board since 1998. Swan didn’t have a problem reappointing her for a third five year term in May 2008.

Reality check: Facts about the threat posed by radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi plant

• People are exposed to an average of 3.0 mSv/year.
• People have a normal radiation acceptance level of 20 mS/year.
• On 17 March at 10am, helicopters measured 87.7 mSv/h at 90 m and 4.13 mSv/h at 300 m above the Daiichi plant.
• Other measurements of radiation levels taken within ~60 km of the Daiichi plant ranged from 0.7 to 170 μSv/h on 17 March.

Sources:

• FAQs: Japan nuclear concerns — WHO
• Fukushima reactor breach: radiation and health effects — Science Media Centre (New Zealand)
• Japan earthquake and tsunami Situation Report No. 9 — World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific

Fairfax paints a grossly distorted picture of earthquake sizes

An article by Fairfax on the magnitude 6.3 earthquake that devastated the city of Christchurch in New Zealand includes an interactive diagram of several earthquakes which are compared by the relative sizes of circles shown on a map.

Interactive diagram in a Fairfax article comparing the magnitudes of earthquakes.

The magnitude 7.9 earthquake that occurred in Sichuan, China on 12 May, 2008, appears nearly as large as the catastrophic magnitude 9.1 earthquake near northern Sumatra on 26 December, 2004. It is not a meaningful comparison, because earthquake magnitudes are measured on a logarithmic scale. An increase in magnitude by one unit represents a tenfold increase in the maximum amplitude of the seismic waves recorded by the seismograph and about 32 times the amount of energy released. Thus the magnitude 9.1 earthquake near northern Sumatra had an amplitude 10^{9.1 - 7.9} = 15.8 times larger than the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan, China, and 10^{9.1 - 6.3} = 631 times larger than the magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch.

According to an empirical relationship developed by Beno Gutenberg and Charles Richter, log₁₀E is proportional to 1.5M, where E is the energy released by the earthquake and M is the magnitude. This means that in terms of energy released, the magnitude 9.1 earthquake was about 10^{1.5(9.1 - 7.9)} = 63.1 times stronger than the magnitude 7.9 earthquake, and about 10^{1.5(9.1 - 6.3)} ≈ 15800 times stronger than the magnitude 6.3 earthquake.

Sportsbet closes bet on Labor leader at the next federal election

Sportsbet just closed the bet on the person to lead the ALP at the next federal election, but has kept open the bet on the Liberal leader. Bill Shorten was briefly favoured to lead Labor at $2.00 with Julia Gillard at $2.50 just after she announced her plans to introduce a price on carbon a couple of days ago. The bet was still available when Google captured a snapshot of the page on 26 February 14:14 AEDST.

Eric Ripper foolishly brings up Alannah MacTiernan in his attack on Troy Buswell

Eric Ripper might recall that Alannah MacTiernan lost her licence twice for drink driving and a third time for speeding.

She stayed on in the transport portfolio despite misleading the public about her previous driving offences.When asked whether it was her first time, she said "No, I lost my licence in '94, I think it was, yeah, '94"—she lost her licence for drink driving in 1986 as well as 1994.

MacTiernan's conduct was debated in Parliament on 2/5/2001:

• Address-in-reply — Motion
• Address-in-reply — Amendment to Motion

North Queensland has seceded, if you believe the Daily Mail

Any Australian who has been through our primary school education system would have immediately been struck by the Daily Mail’s article about the disastrous flooding in Queensland that was published on their website on 30 December, 2010. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the scale of the disaster that would have struck Australian readers, but the addition of a new breakaway state from Queensland displayed on their map of Australia.

Northern Queenslanders have long felt that they need a state of their own that focuses on the needs of the rural and regional communities living in this area. Outspoken independent Bob Katter recently said that Queensland needs to be split to save the region from economic ruin. While many Northern Queenslanders would welcome the splitting of the state across the 22^nd parallel south, they would have been just as unimpressed as the rest of Australia with this glaring geographical error.

Capricornia was the name for the proposed state dreamt up by Ian Johnston in his personal campaign for the creation of new states back in 2005.

How did they make such a blunder with a state seven times the size of the United Kingdom? Perhaps they ran a story on the North Queensland secessionist movement at some stage and accidentally used the map that includes the proposed state instead of the current map of Australia.

A little known truth about children detained behind razor wire

When Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the Labor government’s decision to release children and their families from immigration detention centres into the community, she evoked those well known emotive images of children detained behind razor wire:

I don’t think it’s the Australian way to have kids behind razor wire in the hope that will be a deterrent.

It was a misleading statement, because children seeking asylum in Australia are no longer being detained behind razor wire. Furthermore, contrary to what is widely believed, the previous Howard government actually abolished—not introduced—detention of children behind razor wire, and this was acknowledged by the Prime Minister in Question Time:

Mr FORREST (Mallee) (2:15 PM) —My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. I refer the Prime Minister to her statement: ‘I don’t think it’s the Australian way to have kids behind razor wire.’ Will the Prime Minister confirm that by 2005 the Howard government had overturned the Hawke and Keating governments’ policy of mandatory detention of children behind razor wire and that there have been no children held in these conditions since that time?

Ms GILLARD (Lalor) (Prime Minister) —I genuinely thank the member for his question. Can I say to him that I just referred to the 2005 reforms in my last answer to a question from the shadow minister and I respect the role that the member asking the question played in advocating those reforms from the back bench of the then Howard government.

…

Mr ABBOTT —Given the question that was asked by my colleague the member for Mallee, and given the Prime Minister’s answer, which referred to changes made by the Howard government in 2005, I ask her by way of supplementary question: why did she create the impression yesterday that there were still children behind razor wire?

…

Ms GILLARD —The question of children and razor wire is directly relevant to this reform, so I say again to the Leader of the Opposition: if he wants to say, ‘Good on the government, but the Howard government thought of this first,’ that is fine by me. …

Wyatt Roy entitled to his seat under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918

Section 34 of the Constitution generated some excitement among Labor supporters because they believed that it meant that the new LNP Member for Longman, Wyatt Roy, who is just 20 years old, is not legally permitted to hold a seat in Federal Parliament:

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA CONSTITUTION ACT - SECT 34

Qualifications of members

Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the qualifications of a member of the House of Representatives shall be as follows:

• (i) he must be of the full age of twenty-one years, and must be an elector entitled to vote at the election of members of the House of Representatives, or a person qualified to become such elector, and must have been for three years at the least a resident within the limits of the Commonwealth as existing at the time when he is chosen;

• (ii) he must be a subject of the Queen, either natural-born or for at least five years naturalized under a law of the United Kingdom, or of a Colony which has become or becomes a State, or of the Commonwealth, or of a State.

The first few words of Section 34 allow the minimum age for members and senators to be reduced by an Act of Parliament without amending the Constitution, and this was in fact done with the passage of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, which reduced the minimum age for members and senators to 18:

COMMONWEALTH ELECTORAL ACT 1918 - SECT 163

Qualifications for nomination [see Note 6]

• (1) A person who:

  • (a) has reached the age of 18 years;

  • (b) is an Australian citizen; and

  • (c) is either:

    • (i) an elector entitled to vote at a House of Representatives election; or

    • (ii) a person qualified to become such an elector; is qualified to be elected as a Senator or a member of the House of Representatives.

• (2) A person is not entitled to be nominated for election as a Senator or a member of the House of Representatives unless the person is qualified under subsection (1).

Newspaper Editorials for 20 August, 2010

The Australian:

One thing is abundantly clear, however: Kevin Rudd's big-government experiment was a disaster. Whichever party is returned, this ugly revival of old-style central planning must be buried and cremated. The Australian regrets taking Mr Rudd at his word in 2007 when he presented as an economic conservative who believed governments step in only when markets fail. The trouble was markets were deemed to have failed when Mr Rudd decided they had failed, and that was often. Long before the global financial crisis, the dead hand of government was touching the private sector in inappropriate places, and its behaviour grew steadily worse. GroceryWatch and FuelWatch were early signs of the hubris that resulted in the atrocity of a mining tax.

…

Our doubts towards Labor are about the party, not Ms Gillard, who has an abundance of courage and a talented frontbench team. Yet the financial crisis has revived a command economy culture we thought had been purged by Mr Hawke a quarter of a century ago. It was not big government that saved Australia from recession but the courage of leaders like Mr Hawke, Mr Howard and Paul Keating, who spent their own political capital on economic reform. The true test of a prime minister is not how he or she survives an external shock but how well they prepare us for the next one. It comes down to a question of trust in a contest between a leader who learned his trade under Mr Howard and one who served under Mr Rudd. On those grounds, we endorse Mr Abbott as our 28th prime minister.

The Australian Financial Review:

…By instinct, the Coalition would be less likely to waste taxpayers' money on risky projects than Labor, less inclined to sacrifice efficiency for "fairness" and protect weak industries, and more likely to embrace productivity-boosting reforms in welfare, tax and — hopefully by the 201 3 election — the workplace. Such reforms require real leadership. They are less likely to happen under Labor, which allows focus groups and unions to decide national policy and who should be prime minister.

We prefer the Coalition — which steered the economy through the 1997 Asian crisis and the fallout of the 2001 US recession. We hope, if elected, it learns better in office than Labor.

The Courier-Mail

This campaign has lacked detail on how to deal with those complex political and economic challenges, reducing the choice to a decision about what sort of country we want – one dominated by big government, or one where government gets out of the way to allow enterprise to thrive.

…The reason the Rudd/Gillard Government lost its way is that it believed fervently in the former and, in the process, squandered the trust and goodwill it received from Queensland voters in 2007, when it promised to confront contemporary issues more aggressively than the Howard government.

The past three years have been a story of government being presented as the solution to the nation's challenges, when in fact it only added to them…

…

This, in fact, is a strength and shows a commitment to the people he aspires to serve. We know well what Mr Abbott stands for because his positions are well chronicled. Like this newspaper, he stands for the strength of free enterprise empowered by less regulation and lower taxes. So does his party. The nation will be better for their return to government.