simonbush’s blog

Hi - I am posting more regulalry on another blog site so go check it out at: www.p-p.com.au/blog

I will still post here but less often.

Cheer

Simon

Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in his seminal text on the social contract, Leviathan, that in a hypothetical state of nature when man could do anything to preserve his own life and liberty that life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In entering a social contract with the State we give up certain rights but the State in return protects us from the more brutish of human elements.

Two events this week have made me to consider the fundamental question as to how many rights should we now give up to provide ‘security’? The first is the now long detention of the Gold Coast Doctor who is working under a 457 visa without charge who is related with the terrorist doctors in the UK. These new anti-terror laws have asked many to question whether we are giving up too much in the name of security.

The second is the unheralded proposal that CrimTrac is to build an automated number plate recognition system. Many Australians would be aware of the gantries across Australia’s major highways which have cameras and are currently designed to monitor truck speed over two fixed points on the road. The proposal is to expand this system and have it scan every vehicle that passes beneath and run it through a new connected central database which uses complex algorithms to determine whether that car is in need of police attention. The detail on the CrimTrac website is eerily brief and out of date.

So what of Hobbes’s state of nature and the social contract we have all entered? Fellow Englishmen John Locke wrote in 1689 that if the state turned itself into a tyranny, Locke argued in favor of a right of rebellion.

From today's Crikey.com.au email:

Going face to Facebook with Kevin Rudd

Kevin Rudd’s Facebook “friend” Marcus Westbury writes:

Is this going to be remembered as the politics 2.0 election? Probably not, but candidates ignore the growing web 2.0 "social networking" communities on sites like MySpace and Facebook at their peril.

The dangers of leaving it to others can come back to bite you. In the US, Barack Obama's campaign has found itself  in a legal dispute with one of his biggest supporters over ownership of Obama’s MySpace profile and its 160,000 contacts.

So I was both impressed and amused when I found what seemed to be an "official" Kevin Rudd page on Facebook  and signed up as one of Kev’s friends. While the Kevin Rudd for PM MySpace page  makes it clear that it is run by a supporter (who ran it back before Kev was even leader), the Facebook page claims explicitly that it comes from "the Rudd team."

It lists Rudd’s actual electoral office number, his parliamentary email address and urges people to register to vote. It tells us, amongst other things, that Kevin’s favourite music is classical, folk and a bit of John Denver during long car trips.

His favourite TV shows include Monty Python's Flying Circus "especially the quiz show between Marx, Ulyanov, Mao and Guevara" and The Chaser’s War on Everything and the profile assures us that Kevin has "three wonderful kids."

It’s a motherlode of insight into personal Kev and I was hoping to write a piece about what Kevin’s taste in music, TV and children tells us about the way he will run the country.

When I called Kevin’s electoral office the Facebook-generation staffer said he too had seen the profile (I didn’t ask whether he was one of Kevin’s "friends") and was also wondering the same thing. Disappointingly, Rudd’s Canberra media unit ultimately assured me that "it’s not us".

So what, if anything is at stake? Any savvy band, artist, fashion label, boutique retailer or religious zealot will tell you it’s one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to reach the kids.

As of yesterday morning Kevin Rudd on Facebook had over 1,600 friends and growing fast – up 200 from the previous night. Facebook has over 125,000 signed-up members of their "Australia" network – and many times more using the site. The younger-skewing and more anarchic MySpace would be many times larger still.

The News Limited-owned MySpace plans to launch their political section MySpace Impact in Australia later this year and the Rudd team have said they will be part of it. Until then, anyone can have a go it seems and folks like C0nn0r who enthusiastically wrote "yeah ruddy.. hope you f-ck sh-t up next election buddy" on the Kevin Rudd MySpace site are doing it themselves.

Today the Prime Minister launched Australia's National Security: A Defence Update 2007. According the Minister for Defence's media release one of the key conclusions of the Update is that "Whilst Australia faces no direct conventional threat, nor is that likely in the foreseeable future, it recognises the need to prepare for a range of threats with less warning of imminent crisis".

If part of this focus is making a contribution with other larger forces in the region such as the US and Japan, our contribution to date has been around special forces and maritime capabilities. Small but effective.

Why, if there is no conventional threat to Australia's mainland, did the Ausutralian Government approve the purchase of 59 M1A1 Abrams heavy tanks? Tanks which until the new Globemasters aircraft arrive and new amphibious ships are built in years to come we have no ability to move off the Australian mainland without US help.

Here is an interesting online article and research piece from hotspotting.com.au I came across pondering the effects of drought on property prices.

23 June 2007:

Our “Oasis Change” report on what might happen if home buyers start adding water security to their investment criteria released a flood of opinions. There was an amazing amount of media interest and subsequent feedback from readers who agreed or disagreed with our premise. It was a great starting point and brought some interesting leads from those who live in water-rich places we did not mention, like Wagga Wagga and Armidale.   

Am i being far too cynical in suggesting that the new aboriginal policy of the Howard Government is an attempt at wedge politics? A game which Rudd is desperate not to play on such issues.

As a Queenslander, he knows how these issues can resonate in the metro / regional centre seats in that state which are crucial for both sides to win to form a government.

By Mark Bahnisch, political lecturer and blogmeister (this appeared in Crikey.com today):

Matt Marks provided Crikey readers with some interesting observations on the relative position of the American and Australian blogospheres yesterday:

Unlike Australia, the political blogosphere in the US breaks news, is deep, extremely well developed, is regularly quoted in the mainstream media, and, particularly for the Democrats, speaks for the base in a manner that talk radio does for the Republicans.

However, he fell into a trap that many writers do -- he failed to understand the basic differences that make comparisons somewhat pointless, as I've argued previously in my academic pieces on political blogging.

America's political culture is quite distinct from Australia's. While any number of differences could be cited, the relevant ones here are voluntary voting and a much stronger tradition of civic and political engagement. American blogs have given life to the Democratic base, because they've given it a voice it didn't have when the party was an empty shell called into existence every election cycle to suit the needs of big donors and prominent candidates. Thus, in an environment where the danger for both parties is that their own base won't be sufficiently engaged to turn out in large numbers, the Rove strategy of mobilising your own core supporters does have much to commend it.

While one could argue that the ALP is similarly disengaged from its base of supporters, compulsory voting means that in large part, Labor can take its voters for granted and focus on swinging voters. (The American notion of "independent" voters really describes a somewhat different phenomenon.) Does this render the political blogosphere irrelevant, as Marks claims?

I'd argue that it doesn't. One thing that should be absolutely obvious from this year of polls and spin without end is that perceptions matter in politics. The classic texts on political sociology, most importantly the work of Paul Lazarsfeld as long ago as 1948, demonstrated that most voters pay little attention to political news.

But, conversely, the role of opinion formers -- those in the community who do take an active interest -- is key. People interested in politics often have more influence than news media and pollies themselves on their family, friends and workmates. It's precisely that sort of engaged citizens who are the core readers and commenters on political blogs. Parties that can't enthuse their own faithful have a big problem. It's interesting, then, to observe that compared with a few years ago, the right-wing blogosphere devotes far less attention to domestic politics -- perhaps a sign that the momentum of enthusiasm is with supporters of Labor and the Greens.

It's also a poor argument to suggest that the Australian blogosphere lacks importance because it's rarely cited in the media. The blogosphere matters, because, both left and right (and the more non-partisan blogs), it's one of the few vehicles, aside from Crikey, New Matilda and On Line Opinion, for genuinely critical commentary at a time when the quality and focus of the mainstream media's reporting of politics could hardly be lower. It's one of the places you can go to for intelligent and informed discussion of issues such as climate change and the politics of work and the economy, and one of the places where the spin quotient of the commentariat can be called for what it is.

Marks is right about better broadband, though. Aside from a much smaller population, the lag in net use in Australia does make a difference.

Mark Bahnisch is a political blogger at Larvatus Prodeo

I think the federal directors of the main Australian political parties both have candidates in Howard and Rudd that could do with a bit of Obama viral marketing as the link below will demonstrate. Tim Gartrell and Brian Loughnane should check out this tribute to Democratic presidential hopeful Barak Obama. It convinces me!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

Who are your nominations for the tribute for Ruddy and Howard: THE Qantas hostess or Sydney 2000 girl now teen Nikki Webster?

Reports today that Channel 7 has done a deal with TiVo to bring its timeshifting and ad skipping technology to Australia is illustrative of a wider consumer shift away from free to air tv. We have witnessed the trend of particularly the gen x demographic of spending more time playing computer games and surfing the Internet than watching TV.

ACMA has also done some research which shows that more than 25 per cent of all Australian homes accessed video content from the Internet last year. With 2006 bringing download entrants such as Reeltime and Foxtel bringing out a timeshifting and VOD service and Telstra not flexing its muscles yet, the future of free to air television is clouded at best.

Post Script: One of the biggest selling TV shows on DVD in Australia last year was a show not aired on free tv at all - Fox's The Family Guy.

In case you were not certain that Our ABC really means Some of Ours ABC, NSW ABC weatherman Mike Bailey joins colleague Maxine McKew in becoming ALP candidates at the next federal election.

Does anyone at the ABC vote anything but Dems, Green or Labor? No wonder accusations of bias.......