Politics

Dec 09 2020

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Our 30th Prime Minister

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Environment, History, Politics, Religion | 9 Comments

Our Prime Minister is not someone I have ever met. At 52 he’s much too young! The last PMs I knew moderately well were Paul Keating and John Howard. Morrison has been PM since August 2018, though it seems that he has been there much longer. Perhaps that’s because he’s been around for some time. He was the state director of the Liberal Party in New South Wales twenty years ago. He made his way into the Parliament as the MP for Cook in NSW in 2007, and served as shadow minister shortly afterwards in a variety of portfolios. In…

Nov 26 2020

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The art of helpful communication

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Language, Other, Politics | 5 Comments

Judith Curry published recently a short summary of a paper she admired, on scientific communication, and mentioned a longer version of it, which I went to, and found it equally useful. So here is my summary of the longer paper. It is important to me, because I try to follow the advice it contains. So much of what I read is biased in this way or that, and I fin I have to wade through the exaggeration to get to the point. And I don’t want to make the same mistakes in my own writing. Though the original paper is…

Nov 17 2020

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The sine wave in politics

By Don Aitkin | History, Politics | 12 Comments

I’ve had another a spell in hospital, with ‘septic shock’, and this essay was written, ready to go, a week ago. No matter. It makes no less sense (or more) now than it did then. A few weeks ago I was chatting with my grandson Jesse about his next assignment in Politics which centred on the right/left divide, and I put to him the issue of the slow move of bodies politic from one side to the other, a sort of sine wave, a gentle smooth regular movement like an ocean swell. You could see it happen over time, and…

Nov 04 2020

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Why do scientists disagree about climate change?

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Politics | 554 Comments

I promised a further essay on climate change, and this is it. It focuses on disagreement, the disagreement between scientists on various aspects of the issue. There is a belief, shared by climate activists, that all serious scientists are of one mind: that climate change is real, serious and potentially catastrophic unless we abandon the use of fossil fuels. If that were true, then the game would be over. There would be global agreement by governments, global action to phase out fossil fuels, and we would get used to much higher prices for electricity. What we would do for industries…

Oct 28 2020

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Meanwhile, back at climate change…

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Politics | 124 Comments

I keep seeing suggestions that now we know how to deal with Covid-19 (do we?) it’s time to deal with the biggest threat of all, climate change. Greenpeace and other climate-action voices are arguing, for example, that since New Zealand’s Jacinta Ardern no longer needs populist support to govern, there are no more excuses for inaction on climate change in that nation. The same source alleges that New Zealand’s agricultural sector is its main source of greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), ‘as large sheep and cattle herds belch methane…’ I’ve visited the land of the long white cloud many times, but…

Oct 21 2020

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Final thoughts on the US elections

By Don Aitkin | Politics | 87 Comments

This probably my last piece on the US elections, unless something quite extraordinary turns up. My focus here is on the issues, and my basis is some work done by the Pew Center in July and August, and published in August. Yes, it’s a while ago, but my own experience with election issues is that the real ones are pretty constant. What is also important is that there can be sharp partisan differences in the relative importance of particular issues. Issue X may be most important to Democrats, but not really important, or so important to Republicans. I’ll use some Pew…

Oct 07 2020

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The ACT elections

By Don Aitkin | Other, Politics | 12 Comments

I thought I might leave the USA and its elections for a week or so, to allow something to happen there other than wonder at what might happen next with the President’s health, and give a brief account of what is happening on my own doorstop — the four-yearly elections for the Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). To be able to do that properly, especially for those who live elsewhere, I need to say something about Proportional Representation (PR), because that is the system through which we in the ACT elect MLAs and thus a government. All…

Sep 30 2020

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The primary and the electoral college

By Don Aitkin | Other, Politics | 7 Comments

This is the second piece on the coming US presidential election. As I explained in the last essay on this theme, November 3rdis not simply an election of the President, but the election of a host of other candidates for a host of other offices. The ‘primaries’ are gone, but I mention them now because we in Australia don’t have them, and they are a good thing. The primary system is a device, organised a long time ago by progressives, to get the business of endorsement of party candidates out of the hands of the party machines and back to…

Mar 08 2019

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On the downfall of George Pell

By Don Aitkin | ABC, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Society | 81 Comments

I should begin by saying that I am not a Catholic, and not even a Christian in any practising sense. I have said this before, but it is a necessary opening to this essay. I add to it the fact that I have never spoken to Cardinal Pell nor heard him speak save on television, though I have read a good deal of what he has written. With these caveats in mind I would argue that the sentence on Pell was wrong in terms of natural justice, for the details of the alleged crime were simply improbable in the extreme. They…

Mar 01 2019

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Oh dear, elections are approaching

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Environment, History, Politics, Society | 20 Comments

For weeks now there have been short election ads urging viewers to vote for a new party, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. The really old ones amongst us, that is, people older than me, will remember another UAP which flourished in the interwar years in part because of a Labor split. But there have been no ads from the majors. It hardly matters, since the nightly news telecasts have abundant image and text about the coming election and the daily promises made by the leaders. But I guess we’ll see a proper Labor or Coalition ad once there is an…