Darkness at Noon

On Monday (12th) the AEC released the donations disclosure returns lodged following the 2007 federal election.

You can see them here.

The first point I’d like to make is that the AEC’s disclosure site continues to be a nightmare to navigate. But I’ve spent a bit of time there and I think I know my way around now.

However the second point is that it is just ridiculous how little has been disclosed.

For example, I started by doing a search on Donor to Candidate returns. What would you expect? A long list of people that have donated to political parties or candidates during the 2007 Federal Election campaign. What do you find? Three donors:

• Hills Transport Pty Ltd
• Manildra Group
• Mist Consulting Pty Ltd

So then I do a “list of candidates”. I’d say 90% have no declaration at all. Presumably people are donating the political party, not individual candidates. The problem is, you can get a list of all the candidates that declared “nil” donations, but don’t you want a list of all the non-nil candidates?

So we do it the long way, we scroll through the lists of hundreds of candidates picking out the ones that don’t have an ‘*’ next to them indicating that they are candidates that did not have and donations to declare.

First on the list is John Adams from the Climate Change Coalition. He received a meagre $1,414 in donations. So how many does he declare? None, no donations over $10,500 here. But then again, $1,414 aint much and there’s no real concerns about his funding sources here.

So let’s look for someone else. Rudd? Nope, no donations. Howard? Nope, no donations. So, at a quick glance I find Steve Gibbons, ALP Member for Bendigo. $19,849 in donations. How many donors listed? None. Same goes for every other MP I find that declare donations.

Of course (it slowly dawns on me) there will only be two candidates that actually declare donations from anyone, Tony Windsor (who received donations from Hills Transport and the Manildra Group and Sam Miszkowski who received a donation from Mist Consulting.

So this is really just a convoluted way of saying two things:

1. The AEC site is horrible. It’s obviously running off a database of some sort so why can’t we have access to the .csv file for our own examination. I have requested this by email and been told that this is not available.
2. A donation disclosure limit of $10,500 is absurd and makes a mockery of disclosure itself.

Is it just me, or has it finally dawned on Nelson that he’s in opposition?

Subsequently he can make rediculous claims - especially considering he’s 2 and a half years away from an election.

To paraphrase: “A tax on alcopops - that’s rediculous, I’m blocking it until July 1, up yours Ruddy. Looks, I’m holding a bottle! And as for petrol, IT SHOULD BE CHEAPER! You don’t have to be a Doctor to figure that one out.”

Really, it’s so rediculous.

What I’d like to see is Rudd turn around and say: “Blocking my Alcopops tax in the Senate hey, do the words ‘double dissolution trigger’ mean anything to you? How do you think your Senate majority will look after a full Senate election Dr 7%?”

Just a quick follow up to this post.

The people’s paper tells me that support for a republic is at it’s lowest point since 1993:

Despite Prime Minister Kevin Rudd raising the issue at the 2020 summit, just 45 per cent of Australians support a republic with an elected president.

Forty-two per cent want the monarchy to stay and 13 per cent are undecided, according to a new Roy Morgan poll.

If Prince Charles was crowned King, 56 per cent of Australians would support a republic.

More than half of Labor voters want a republic while more than half of Liberal-National Party voters back the monarchy.

“With an elected president” is clearly the key phrase here and for all my pro-democratic musings I suspect a bi-partisanly supported president with a purely cerimonial role is the best answer as the last thing you want is the office to be politicised.

But everytime I hear myself say that I feel uneasy.

Having just seen this site, I was pleased to come across this:

This one slipped my radar (but caught it thanks to looking back through some old RSS feeds via Law Front.)

Waugh Partners, with the financial support of sponsors, NICTA, IBM and Fujitsu, have released a report into the Australian Open Source Industry and Community.

You can download it from here.

I wasn’t at all surprised to read that Frenzal Rhomb guitarist Lindsay McDougall had been ‘duped’ into being part of an anti-piracy video. I’d almost expect it of the “Australian music industry” (presumably the Australian Recording Industry Assocation).

But what is interesting is the way the Age reported it:

Record labels are seen as the big losers from music piracy. While artists benefit from having their music distributed to as many people as possible and are able to reap significant returns from merchandise and concert ticket sales, record label revenue is dropping rapidly as people buy fewer CDs.

NO! As I’ve said earlier, the Australian Recording Industry Association’s own figures (quietly released the day before ANZAC Day) show that “the legal sales of recorded music climbed to an all time high in 2007 - a high that could only have been dreamed about in the years before the advent of downloading and CD burning.”

Let’s understand this issue properly. It’s very hard to quantify these sorts of things, but if anything the evidence is pointing to the fact that file sharing is actually making the record industry richer.

Update: This one got a run at Boing-Boing as well.

I was pleased to hear today that Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland will be removing discrimination against same-sex couples from 100 laws.

The Age article is here and there’s a bit of a summary by Paul at Buggery here.

I’ve never really understood why this is so difficult, both in a legal sense and a cognitive sense. Surely you just remove any mention of gender from the legislation. So instead of “couples, being made up of a male and female”, you just write “couples”. I’m sure it’s more complex than that though - it aught to be for $400 million dollars which is what it will cost “the tax payers”.

Anyway, onwards and upwards towards marriage, adoption and IVF - although I suspect they will be a bigger hurdle, I mean think of the caos if homosexuals could get married!

Bernard Keane (who I must say I thought is an excellent addition) in Crikey Today:

We’ve still yet to see any evidence that binge drinking is now any worse than in the past, when Passion Pop and rum’n’cokes, rather than RTDs, were the chick drinks of choice. But the debate has moved beyond that. The middle-class wowsers, keen to demonstrate their moral superiority, have politicians and the media convinced our yoof are going to hell in an alcohol-laden handcart. Not that either group, for their separate reasons, ever needed much convincing.

So that’s $500m a year in extra revenue for the Government, and the only dispute is over whether the Howard Government should’ve done the same a few years back. Nice work.

What’s alarming is that the Government felt compelled to justify the tax rise by declaring that a “significant proportion” of the revenue would be directed to the new black in health funding, preventative health programs. The concept is called “hypothecation” and it’s on the rise as politicians try to defend unpopular taxes. Apparently - and there’s no evidence to actually demonstrate this - taxation is considered more palatable if the revenue is directed into programs related to the area being taxed.

…

But it’s voodoo tax policy. People who want existing taxes redirected to their preferred cause are just like any other rent-seeker or lobby group, except they’re hiding behind some fake notion of fiscal justice. And they never explain what school or hospitals should be closed to cover the reduced funding that, say, more road expenditure would require. Proceeds from the Medicare levy don’t quite stretch to cover the nation’s health budget, for example.

And if there’s additional revenue, then all stakeholders should have the opportunity to argue where it would be best spent, not just the nanny-statists determined to stamp out recreational activities they disapprove of. If there’s a case for more spending on preventative health - and there is - then it should be funded from general revenue, not linked to specific taxes. That just reduces spending and policy flexibility for governments and establishes meaningless linkages.

And in any event, the people likely to be forking out this additional $500m a year are unlikely to care either way where the money is spent.

I don’t think there is much more I can add to that.

It will come as little surprise to everyone that I’m a republican. I’m just not one for archaine institutions and seem to have this irrational dislike for empire. Is it just me?

That said, it is far from the top of my priority list. There’s the whole Indigenous Australia business, universal healthcare etc etc that come befor it on my list of priorities.

But nevertheless, let’s just get on and have a republic.

The thing about that though, is that it seems to me that, with the honourable exeption of Alexander Downer, is anyone actually opposed to it?

From the reporting on it that I’ve read (and am too lazy to go and track down now) it sounds like it’s just an inevitability and that a referendum would pass with flying colours. This obviously isn’t the case. Presumably a lot of people are opposed to Australia becoming a republic.

So what are the percentages? Has anyone seen any pols on the issue?