Budget speech …

I am pleased to be able to bring you Wayne Swan’s budget speech …

Madam Deputy Speaker, I move that the Bill now be read a second time.

The four years of surpluses I announce tonight are a powerful endorsement of the strength of our economy, resilience of our people, and success of our policies.

In an uncertain and fast changing world, we walk tall — as a nation confidently living within its means.

This Budget delivers a surplus this coming year, on time, as promised, and surpluses each year after that, strengthening over time.

It funds new cost of living relief for Australian families.

It helps businesses invest, compete and adapt to an economy in transition.

And it finances bold new policies to help Australians with a disability, the aged, and those who can’t afford dental care.

It does these things for a core Labor purpose:

To share the tremendous benefits of the mining boom with more Australians.

To create more wealth, prosperity, and jobs; spread more opportunity; and advance the living standards of millions of families and pensioners on modest incomes.

Tonight we make a forceful statement that ours is one of the world’s strongest economies and fairest communities.

Not even a sovereign debt crisis in Europe or unprecedented natural disasters here at home could deny Australia this substantial achievement.

The deficit years of the global recession are behind us. The surplus years are here.

Surpluses built on some difficult savings, which avoid vulnerable Australians and frontline services, and don’t compromise our investments in productivity.

Surpluses that provide a buffer against global uncertainty, and continue to give the Reserve Bank room to cut interest rates for families like it did just last week.

This Budget is about discipline and restraint but also about priorities; ensuring precious funds are redirected to the purposes and people that need them most.

Across the budget, by saving and redirecting $33.6 billion, we’re balancing the books.

Making room for $5 billion in new payments to households.

Finding an extra $714 million to help companies compete, on top of the $3.7 billion in small business tax breaks.

Funding the historic first stage of a National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Investing in dental services for those who can least afford them.

Strengthening the aged care system.

Investing in productivity and competitiveness by building on key improvements in health, education, infrastructure and clean energy.

Staying true to our Labor ideals and to the promise of a fair go, converting economic success into real benefits for the majority of Australians.

The deficit years of the global recession are behind us. The surplus years are here. Oh, whoops that was last year’s …

Jug ears …

Prince Charles recently criticised ‘corporate lobbyists’ and climate change skeptics for turning Earth into a ‘dying patient’. His pronouncements can be turned into legible English by the aid of a few insertions …

“If you think about the impact of climate change, [it should be how] a doctor would deal with the problem,” he told an audience of government ministers, from the UK and abroad, as well as business people and scientists. “A scientific hypothesis is tested to absolute destruction, but medicine can’t wait. If a doctor sees a child with a fever, he can’t wait for [endless] tests. He has to act on what is there …”

“The risk of delay is so enormous that we can’t wait until we are absolutely sure the patient is dying.”

The Prince is a well known advocate for homeopathy and an opponent of genetically modified crops. He is not famous for his intellect, grasp of science or medicine …

The Daily Mash sums it all up very nicely <HERE>. And they also have a very interesting range of T-Shirts.

Atmospheric …

Important announcement … 99.96% of the atmosphere is not CO2.

It wasn’t always so. The phanerozoic is the eon of abundant life on earth, that’s about 570 million years. All current life is descended from ancestors that existed throughout that entire span of time. For the first 150 million years or so our ancestors survived in an atmosphere that contained about 4000 parts per million of CO2, imagine that … only 99.6% of their atmosphere wasn’t CO2!

The graph is from Wikipedia, the present day is on the left, which may not be the best way to show it.

Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide

Carbon dioxide is essential to plants, the process of photosynthesis requires CO2 and releases oxygen. All the free oxygen in the atmosphere, essential for us to survive, is the result of photosynthesis. Oxygen is too reactive a substance to persist long in a free state. If photosynthesis stopped the atmosphere would soon be depleted of oxygen and animal life would cease.

Lovely day …

Melbourne is enjoying an Indian Summer, or at least a few days of one. I’ve just walked the dog along the beach, clear sky, no wind, calm sea and a top of about 25 degrees. Beautiful.

Or very alarming depending on your point of view, although it’s often said that if you don’t like Melbourne’s weather just hang around for a while.

Whilst not exclusively the province of old women, the weather does seem to hold a special interest for them, you often hear them discussing it. That is very interesting because old women are often witches. The Malleus Maleficarum(Latin for “Hammer of the Witches“) is a treatise on the prosecution of witches, written in 1486 and published the following year. It admits that men can also be witches but malificarum is the feminine form of the noun.

Outside certain backward parts of the world, witches are rarely prosecuted these days but it was big business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The trials spread throughout Europe and Scandinavia and were conducted by Catholics and Protestants, in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. The victims were disproportionately women, especially the poor and the widowed.

That period coincides with the Little Ice Age. Clearly no coincidence because as the Malleus tells us in a chapter titled “How they Raise and Stir up Hailstorms and Tempests, and Cause Lightning to Blast both Men and Beasts” witches can control the weather. The chapter concludes with “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that, just as easily as they raise hailstorms, so can they cause lightning and storms at sea; and so no doubt at all remains on these points.” Even then, the science was settled.

The end of the Little Ice Age can best be explained by a modern theory. The burning of all those witches released a great deal of carbon dioxide.

 

Sandwiches …

Miss Gillard had to duck a verbal sandwich from PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill.

He was fairly blunt in telling the prime minister of the donor country that props up the PNG government with aid money (this year about 8.5 per cent of the PNG budget) that many of his fellow compatriots are offended by Australia’s visa requirements.

Miss Gillard has announced that the visa process will be streamlined. I guess a woman has to be careful in Papua New Guinea …

In early February, a 20-year-old mother of one, Kepari Leniata, was stripped and burned alive in front of a crowd at a market on the outskirts of Mt Hagen.

She had been accused of witchcraft by her killers.

In Southern Bougainville last week, one woman was beheaded and another grievously injured when a mob accused the pair of practising sorcery.

and

A US academic says she was gang-raped by an armed mob in Papua New Guinea and wants to publicise her ordeal to raise awareness about rampant violence against women in the desperately poor Pacific country.

As Jean G Zorn puts it …

Rape is endemic in Papua New Guinea, and the courts in Papua New Guinea have not been effective at decreasing its incidence.

Plagiarism at the ABC …

Lies, damned lies and ALP spin …

Consider this Emma Alberici paragraph …

Back to that $96 billion “Labor debt” inherited by the Howard government in 1996 – which actually comprised $40 billion of Fraser government debt that carried through the Hawke-Keating years taking the true level of Labor debt in 1996 to $56 billion. Bringing down that debt wasn’t all about constrained spending and higher taxes, in fact neither of those things were characteristics of the Howard-Costello years. Government asset sales between 1996 and 2007 worth $72 billion wiped the net debt out entirely with $16 billion to spare.

Read Sinclair Davidson on its history and innacuracy.

 

Creature of the night …

Across the creek from the McGee country estate, in the Central Victorian Goldfields, is a bushland reserve.

Someone loves the reserve and has put up some nest boxes. I pass two of the boxes on my morning walk. Both are chewed and worn around the opening in the front, indicating that some creature has used them. One of them, though, has since been taken over by feral bees.

Having seen nothing come or go during daylight I deduced that the inhabitants might well be mammalian, perhaps there might even be gliders at the bottom of my garden.

One evening in summer I took a camp chair and staked out the box, through the twilight and into darkness. I provided a considerable feast for the mosquitoes but saw not a glimpse of a glider.

I subsequently bought a Trail Camera from Faunatech. It is mosquito-proof. I mounted it where it could see the box and also the canopy. It sat there for two nights and three days. It took pictures, almost exclusively of the canopy swaying in the breeze, by day this looks conventional enough, at night it uses infrared. I then examined more than 1200 photographs of a tree, a box and some swaying leaves and found four photos with a critter included. Here’s one …

IMAG1005

My working diagnosis is Sugar Glider but I am discussing this with a more knowledgable friend, a scientist with Parks Victoria.

Congratulations to the people who provided the box. I will be erecting a few on my side of the creek.