The New City

Comment / 1 July 2008                                                  nno.27

                 Why carbon trading and why now?

The government should rethink its commitment to, or timetable for, an emissions trading scheme ... [more]







              Iemma is right on power privatisation



An edited version of this letter from The New City's editors was published in the Sydney Morning Herald of 9 May 2008:

We attended Saturday’s NSW ALP debate on energy privatisation as observers and local branch members. While we were anything but surprised at the anti-privatisation result, we were appalled at the stridency and shallowness of the arguments against the sell-off. So we’re correspondingly delighted at today’s news that the Labor caucus has fallen in behind the Premier and the Treasurer.

The critics all advanced some combination or variation of the following: (1) Who does the party belong to? (By implication, it belongs to the few thousand mostly tertiary-educated activists in its branches, rather than the people it was elected to represent.) (2) Essential services belong in the public sector. (Why? And what about all the other “essential services” that have been privatised over the years?) (3) Energy jobs will be at risk if the industry is privatised. (Why should power industry jobs enjoy unique protection at a time when every other industry faces the pressures of globalisation?) (4) Energy prices have risen disproportionately in Victoria following privatisation. (Not true over the long term.)

Iemma and Costa challenged their critics with the sorts of questions you pose in your editorial of May 7. How would you pay for the extra generating capacity the state will need by 2014? Which schools or hospitals would you close to free up the funds? Answer came there none.

We believe there’s a useful philosophical way to approach the whole privatisation issue. Suppose you were building a modern economy from the ground up, in the context of intense global competition, in a state not especially well-endowed with the resources in highest demand. Would you allocate the retail energy industry to the public sector? Not bloody likely.
                                                                                Wednesday, 7 May 2008





                           Nice video, bad plan ...



Comment / 22 March 2008                                                           no.26

              Here comes Sydney's yuppie carousel

Morris Iemma's North West Metro is fine as an infrastructure project but fares less well as a strategic investment ... [more]



January 2008                                                                                    no.25

                       Green Labor or blue-collar betrayal?

That Labor’s return to office would be framed in grandiose terms, as a watershed shift from social conservatism to progressivism, was easy to predict. ‘But could this election portend a new progressive era?’, asked journalist Andrew West, hopefully. Predictable perhaps; but also delusional. Certainly, some symbolic ‘firsts’ have cascaded for the benefit of myth-makers: first female deputy prime minister, first openly gay minister who also happens to be of Chinese origin, first ministry containing so many women, and signing-up to Kyoto as a first item of business. The voters who mattered, though, were moved by more down-to-earth concerns. WorkChoices, the cost of living, interest rates and John Howard’s long time in office were decisive ... [continue]

                The perils of exaggeration ...

This British High Court judge found Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth contains nine major errors of fact. Read his judgment here.

November-December 2007                                                    no.24

                     Howard: enter stage dry, exit stage wet

Unlike many commentators, ranging from Alan Ramsey to Imre Saluszinsky, we don’t think Saturday’s election result is a foregone conclusion. Even though every poll since Kevin Rudd became Labor leader has strongly favoured the ALP, a substantial but not unprecedented last-minute swing to the conservatives, combined with their (grossly unfair) buffer of about two percentage points (which would get the Coalition over the line with barely 48 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote), may still be enough to save Howard’s bacon ... [continue]

           The madness begins ...



Greenpeace retreats to the Dark Ages. Read the truth about coal here.

September - October 2007                                                           no.23

Skills and collaboration, not WorkChoices, deliver economic success

If we weren’t the first to say it, we were certainly quick off the mark. In our March 2007 editorial, we said that compared to the prime years of economic reform and responsibility under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Howard Government’s economic record has been patchy at best.

We also said the ALP should not shy away from a campaign fight on economic management – first because it wouldn’t work (the electorate would quickly sense Labor’s discomfort and penalise them for it); second and more importantly because the courage and imagination Hawke Labor displayed in a much more difficult economic environment than Howard ever faced represents a positive message to put before the electorate ... [continue]

August 2007                                                                                     no.22

If housing depends on a vision for our cities, try ‘opportunity urbanism’

A much quoted assertion in the housing debate came from Rory Robertson, financial analyst at Macquarie Bank. ‘There’s this never satisfying compromise between proximity, being close to the action’, said Robertson, ‘and the size of houses and yards and as our cities get bigger, literally, there’s less room for everyone to be living in nice houses with big yards’.

Presumably, by ‘bigger’ Robertson means more populous. Hence population growth, according to his formula, plus wanting to be ‘close to the action’, equal the end of home ownership for the masses.

Australians have again been subjected to a round of claims and counter-claims about housing affordability. The issue is now deeply entangled in a pre-election web of partisan and federal-state rivalries. Clearly, the contenders are partial to one economic doctrine or another, but they also bring clashing assumptions, if not to say prejudices, about how cities work ... [continue]



June - July 2007                                                                               no.21

Value judgements, conflicting assumptions undermine Climate Institute ‘research’

On 28 May, ABC radio bulletins were abuzz with news of new research ‘showing power costs would rise less if the Government moved quickly to bring in a mix of measures, including emissions trading, than if it waited’.

The source of that research was not a university, research institution, industry association or government agency, but rather a ‘greenhouse lobby group’, as the ABC called it – the Climate Institute of Australia (CI). As a rule, the ABC isn’t in the business of promoting lobby groups. Why then was this research accorded such prominent coverage and presented as self-evidently true? ... [continue]



                          Joel Kotkin's

            OPPORTUNITY URBANISM

   An Emerging Paradigm for the 21st Century

                         read it here

May 2007                                                                                          no.20

                     Coal mining will outlast green hysterics

‘Not all jobs are good’, says former Liberal Party leader John Hewson.

That assertion, odd for an economist, fell from Hewson’s recent Australian Financial Review column lashing the Government and Labor for appeasing the coal industry over climate change. Neither, he says, will confront the ‘necessary transition’ to an economy without coal mining. ‘Some of those jobs, indeed some of those industries’, writes Hewson, ‘may not be able to be protected, nor should they be’.

More than anything, Hewson’s column encapsulates an important truth about our climate change debates – there is no absolute response; rather, it depends on your socio-economic standpoint ... [continue]

IT'S OFFICIAL. EARTH HOUR WAS A FLOP!
read about it here


April 2007                                                                                          no.19

       Carbon trading hasn't worked - mandate clean technologies

A delusional fog seems to have descended on climate change policymaking in Australia. How else to explain the breathless urgency attending moves to carbon trading? It’s not just that carbon trading has a dismal track record. It bears repeating that we produce a puny 1.4 per cent of global emissions. Assuming global warming is mostly man-made, even if we were to adopt a national scheme, and even if we hit a drastic target – say a 60 per cent cut by 2050 – the impact would still be next to zilch. As we have argued, atmospheric carbon will be stabilised by the giants of the northern hemisphere or not at all. We could reduce or raise our emissions by 100 per cent and it would make virtually no difference ... [continue]



March 2007                                                                                       no.18

                           Labor can relive its economic glory days

With Labor under Kevin Rudd currently enjoying a stratospheric lead in the opinion polls, there are no doubt many who think the election is done and dusted, even six months out from the likely date. To be sure, people seem to like the Rudd-Gillard leadership team, while on the other side John Howard and his ministers are looking shopworn and sounding shrill. Issues too, from Iraq to David Hicks to WorkChoices and even probity in office, seem to be running strongly in Labor’s favour.

Other people are more cautious. They know Labor has been ahead, sometimes well ahead, in the polls many times before, but Howard has an uncanny ability to jolt the electorate just at the critical juncture ... [continue]

February 2007                                                                                 no.17

                   Workers flee Sydney's unaffordable housing

‘Sydney must stop growing sooner or later’, demanded Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute recently. ‘If the “endless growth” mentality is not reversed’, he continued, ‘in 20 years time we will be reading in the Herald of the next plan to lever an extra million or so residents into a bursting metropolis’.

Hamilton hopes to turn back the tide. His anti-growth outburst is pure wind, even though the accompanying prediction may prove accurate (the NSW Government plans for an additional 1.1 million people by 2030).

Perhaps Hamilton missed the significance of last year’s astounding United Nations forecast. More than half the world’s six billion people will be urbanised by the end of 2007... [continue]

Dec 2006 - Jan 2007                                                                        no.16

                  Green judiciary a looming menace to workers

If you believe judges should decide every case on its merits, if you believe this is an essential feature of the judicial function, be concerned. If you believe judges should not be unduly influenced by their own socio-political preferences, sound the alarm. ‘Laws will only get greener, warns judge’ ran the Sydney Morning Herald’s headline. Not only did he escape criticism, but Justice Brian Preston, Chief Judge of the NSW Land and Environment Court, was celebrated after he told a recent National Trust breakfast ‘the principles of ecologically sustainable development’ were ‘here to stay’... [continue]

LET THERE BE LIGHT! PROTEST GREEN HYSTERIA. SWITCH ON THE LIGHTS AT 7:30PM ON 31 MARCH.
           www.earthhour.com.au

  November 2006                                                                           no.15

                    Don't sacrifice workers on altar of climate change

According to a recent Climate Institute survey, 54 per cent of rural Australians believe the government should do more to reduce climate change. Let’s accept the earth is warming. The Institute and its survey respondents are still grappling with an illusion - in fact, the Australian government is impotent to ‘reduce’ climate change. Even if climate trends are influenced by human activity, Australia’s carbon emissions amount to less than one percent of the world’s total. What Australia does has little impact one way or the other.

Environmentalists like to dramatise Australia’s role in climate change by damning our relatively high carbon emissions per capita. This means little on a global scale, however, given our small population... [continue]

               for more information visit the MINE YOUR OWN BUSINESS website

October 2006                                                                                    no.14

               Progressivism now a preserve of the privileged

There are two more books on a familiar theme: growing numbers of the upper middle-class are turning progressive.

Now Australia: Inside the Lives of the Rich and Tasteful by Andrew West and NEO Power by Ross Honeywill and Verity Blyth add to the list of labels for this ascendant class - ’culturalists’ and ‘NEOs’ (new economic order) join ‘knowledge workers’ (Peter Drucker), ‘symbolic analysts‘ (Robert Reich), ‘bourgeois bohemians‘ (David Brooks) and ‘the creative class‘ (Richard Florida).

While West, Honeywill and Blyth fail to draw out the full implications of their analysis, they accept that today progressivism is a worldview of the privileged. This has long been a bugbear for progressive opinion-leaders. Take Professor Belinda Probert, one of the country’s most prominent academics. Her centenary of federation Barton Lecture was a tortured attempt to disassociate progressivism from the sources of power in Australian society... [continue]

September 2006                                                                               no.13

                       Labor’s presidency hijacked by activists

‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. That proverb - often wrongfully attributed to Samuel Johnson - readily came to mind when Senator John Faulkner announced his intention to stand for Labor’s national presidency.

For those urging Labor along the difficult road to economic and social credibility, Senator Faulkner’s candidacy must be viewed with deep misgivings. Admittedly, such doubts would puzzle many. The senator enjoys extremely good press, and more than any other contemporary parliamentarian deserves the hackneyed label ‘darling of the Canberra press gallery’. That alone should ring alarm bells, however. Journalists tend to appraise political questions by markedly different criteria than most of the electorate.

Journalists are representative of the tertiary educated professional class, whose increasingly progressive views are championed inside the ALP by Senator Faulkner, amongst others ... [continue]

August 2006                                                                                    no.12

                            Blogosphere has little to offer Labor

It took a while – going on a year – but The New City is finally being noticed by the ’blogs.

We developed the web journal for two intertwined reasons: our dismay at the federal Labor Party’s apparent renunciation of the economic and social responsibility that characterised the Hawke government for most of its period in office, and our despair at its receding prospects of a return to national office anytime soon.

We witnessed too the increasing dominance within party forums of the view that ideological purity took precedence over voter allegiance – a view that we thought had been marginalised with the collapse of Whitlamism.

We suspected all along that our targets in the party’s hard Left would seek to deny us the oxygen of debate, and for many months they succeeded. But as our website came increasingly to the notice of thoughtful commentators, here and overseas, this strategy became less and less tenable. The misrepresentations and ad hominem attacks are gathering pace ... [continue]