Dear Matt,
I am sure you have read more than enough about emissions trading, the change of Liberal leadership and all the attendant gossip and rumour.
So I won’t say anymore than that it has been a great honour to lead the Liberal Party and the Federal Opposition. I was disappointed narrowly to lose the Liberal leadership on December 1, six days after my leadership had been confirmed by the Party Room.
Nonetheless, I congratulate Tony Abbott on his election as Leader of the Opposition and wish him the best of luck.
And I regret that the party room changed its policy on climate change from one of supporting the emissions trading scheme legislation, as amended at our request, to opposing it.
For more comments of mine on the ETS legislation and its defeat, click here.
Many people have asked me whether it is possible to cut emissions without an ETS, a carbon tax or raising electricity prices. The short answer is “No”, but for more on that click here.
Without traversing the last, very difficult few weeks I want to pay a special tribute to my colleague Ian MacFarlane, who handled the negotiations with Labor’s Senator Penny Wong, the result of which saw the Government making very substantial concessions to save thousands of jobs.
This has been a tough period in politics and I want especially to thank my wife Lucy and our children Alex and Daisy for their love and support. I also want to thank my many friends and colleagues who agreed with me that the Liberal Party should be a progressive Party of today and tomorrow, a Party that responds credibly and responsibly to the great challenges of our time.
And finally I thank all of my supporters (and detractors!) around Australia who have let me know their views by email in the tens of thousands.
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Malcolm Turnbull
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Turnbull defiant
Somehow, at some point in time, I ended up on Malcolm Turnbull's email list. I think it may have been because during the last election campaign I pointed out to his office in an email that he was preferencing racist anti-immigration parties and LaRoucheian climate loonies ahead of both Labor and the Greens in Wentworth. Somehow his office decided I therefore must want to get regular emails about what he was up to. In any case, I was intrigued to get this one today, which I'll reproduce in full. It looks like he is still a strong critic of those who have deposed him; doesn't looke like he will be on the front bench anytime soon.
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Twitter, politics and the Lonely Planet effect
Twitter is good.
Following political events in real time on Twitter is better.
Following the Liberal party tear itself apart then stitch itself back together with key orifices switched around on Twitter is the best.
The last week or so has been a hoot and I've been glued to all the #spill action. As has been discussed elsewhere, this was the first major Australian political event to get a serious thrashing on Twitter. It was the perfect medium for getting the little details of the rapidly moving events out to a receptive audience and the press gallery journalists providing the info should be commended.
Much has been made of the 'conversation' between politcians, journalists and the public that twitter allows. Indeed, I will never wash my twitter feed again after I 'interacted' with none other than Annabell Crabb, the darling of political nerds everywhere. Sure she was just answering a stupid question that I could have found the answer to on the ABC website, but none the less it was an interaction that isn't really possibly in other forms of media.
So this is all great, but let's keep this in perspective. The only reason that a conversation between journalists and their twitter followers is possible is because there are so few of them. Even the most popular have only a few thousand followers, many of whom are probably inactive much of the time. I followed the #spill feed all week and in my view there was a solid core of at most a few hundred people, probably less, that were taking part in the conversation. For those of us involved it was fantastic, but it's still a small number.
But here's the rub, in order for twitter to retain its awesomeness in political coverage, it has to stay small. If you look at the #spill feed now it's nothing like the exciting conversation that all the cool kids where having when these recent events began. In the good old days (a week ago) there was plenty of great insight from the punters and the gallery and plenty of good conversations and humour. As the events drew to a climax, more people started tweeting on #spill, you couldn't follow it, there were no genuine conversations and the quality dropped substantially. Once the topic trended high enough, the spambots moved in as well. Quite simply, politics on twitter is like a secret little beach on an island somewhere, known only to a select few. As soon as you put it in a travel guide, the masses arrive and through no fault of any individual, the place is ruined, because there is just too many people.
I'm probably overstating the case a little, but the point is that twitter cannot be both interactive and influential, it can only be one or the other at any given moment. That's not a problem though, judging by the #spill feed 99.9% of those involved were not Liberal voters to start with, and in all likelyhood most of the people we may talk to about what we learned on twitter are not Liberal voters either. For all the great insight twitter broadcast, I doubt that even a single persons political views were changed by it.
Let's celebrate twitter's addition to politics for what it is: a great new way for a very small niche audience to meet and exchange ideas and information.
Following political events in real time on Twitter is better.
Following the Liberal party tear itself apart then stitch itself back together with key orifices switched around on Twitter is the best.
The last week or so has been a hoot and I've been glued to all the #spill action. As has been discussed elsewhere, this was the first major Australian political event to get a serious thrashing on Twitter. It was the perfect medium for getting the little details of the rapidly moving events out to a receptive audience and the press gallery journalists providing the info should be commended.
Much has been made of the 'conversation' between politcians, journalists and the public that twitter allows. Indeed, I will never wash my twitter feed again after I 'interacted' with none other than Annabell Crabb, the darling of political nerds everywhere. Sure she was just answering a stupid question that I could have found the answer to on the ABC website, but none the less it was an interaction that isn't really possibly in other forms of media.
So this is all great, but let's keep this in perspective. The only reason that a conversation between journalists and their twitter followers is possible is because there are so few of them. Even the most popular have only a few thousand followers, many of whom are probably inactive much of the time. I followed the #spill feed all week and in my view there was a solid core of at most a few hundred people, probably less, that were taking part in the conversation. For those of us involved it was fantastic, but it's still a small number.
But here's the rub, in order for twitter to retain its awesomeness in political coverage, it has to stay small. If you look at the #spill feed now it's nothing like the exciting conversation that all the cool kids where having when these recent events began. In the good old days (a week ago) there was plenty of great insight from the punters and the gallery and plenty of good conversations and humour. As the events drew to a climax, more people started tweeting on #spill, you couldn't follow it, there were no genuine conversations and the quality dropped substantially. Once the topic trended high enough, the spambots moved in as well. Quite simply, politics on twitter is like a secret little beach on an island somewhere, known only to a select few. As soon as you put it in a travel guide, the masses arrive and through no fault of any individual, the place is ruined, because there is just too many people.
I'm probably overstating the case a little, but the point is that twitter cannot be both interactive and influential, it can only be one or the other at any given moment. That's not a problem though, judging by the #spill feed 99.9% of those involved were not Liberal voters to start with, and in all likelyhood most of the people we may talk to about what we learned on twitter are not Liberal voters either. For all the great insight twitter broadcast, I doubt that even a single persons political views were changed by it.
Let's celebrate twitter's addition to politics for what it is: a great new way for a very small niche audience to meet and exchange ideas and information.
What's it all about?
This blog is all about Politics, Science, Technology and where they all overlap. I'll probably talk about sport from time to time as well.
One of my chief preoccupations at the moment, and something that will be a central theme of this blog, is the seemingly intractable problem of how to deal with an issue that affects the whole of society, but can only be truly understood by a small elite. Chief among these is obviously climate change, though there are many others. Before you protest, it's clear that, say in the case of climate change, understanding in general terms how CO2 and other gases contribute to the temperature of the Earth is not so hard. What is incredibly difficult though, is knowing how and why a particular concentration of a particular gas will have an impact of a given value on the mean temperature and other climatic conditions. That is the key question and the details and arguments are neccesarily technical; this is not something that can be decided by a debate in parliament, on talkback radio, twitter or anywhere else.
We seem to be stuck with having to trust the overwhelming view of the experts (which on this issue I do), rather than be able to come to our own conclusion. That fine, and the evidence does appear to be overwhelming, but that leaves us in a tricky position, and sets an uncomfortable precedent. I don't for a moment defend the public faces opposing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis; most seem to be driven by prior political, economic or personal agendas, I do feel some sympathy for members of the community with a healthy distrust of governments and authority and who could correctly point to the fact that many of those who support action on climate change clearly have prior politcal, economic and personal agendas which are supported by that idea.
For my own background, I have a PhD in physics and astronomy and work as a researcher in an academic environment. My particular field involves large computer simulations including hydrodynamics. I might therefore be expected to claim to be in a somewhat better position to understand the science behind climate change than most people in the community, but there's is no way I'd make that claim. If anything I'm even more painfully aware of just how tricky a lot of the details that go into climate modelling must be. That's not a reason to doubt the models out of hand, but it does suggest that reading a couple of 'climate sceptic' blog posts probably doesn't give you the neccessary background to argue with the experts. What would give you the neccessary background is 4-5 years of an undergraduate physics and maths degree and another 3-4 years of a PhD in climate science. Once you've done that you can comment. That leads back to my original point, this is an issue that affects us all, but one on which very very few people can make a genuinely well formed opinion.
I'll be discussing this and related issues over the coming months.
One of my chief preoccupations at the moment, and something that will be a central theme of this blog, is the seemingly intractable problem of how to deal with an issue that affects the whole of society, but can only be truly understood by a small elite. Chief among these is obviously climate change, though there are many others. Before you protest, it's clear that, say in the case of climate change, understanding in general terms how CO2 and other gases contribute to the temperature of the Earth is not so hard. What is incredibly difficult though, is knowing how and why a particular concentration of a particular gas will have an impact of a given value on the mean temperature and other climatic conditions. That is the key question and the details and arguments are neccesarily technical; this is not something that can be decided by a debate in parliament, on talkback radio, twitter or anywhere else.
We seem to be stuck with having to trust the overwhelming view of the experts (which on this issue I do), rather than be able to come to our own conclusion. That fine, and the evidence does appear to be overwhelming, but that leaves us in a tricky position, and sets an uncomfortable precedent. I don't for a moment defend the public faces opposing the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis; most seem to be driven by prior political, economic or personal agendas, I do feel some sympathy for members of the community with a healthy distrust of governments and authority and who could correctly point to the fact that many of those who support action on climate change clearly have prior politcal, economic and personal agendas which are supported by that idea.
For my own background, I have a PhD in physics and astronomy and work as a researcher in an academic environment. My particular field involves large computer simulations including hydrodynamics. I might therefore be expected to claim to be in a somewhat better position to understand the science behind climate change than most people in the community, but there's is no way I'd make that claim. If anything I'm even more painfully aware of just how tricky a lot of the details that go into climate modelling must be. That's not a reason to doubt the models out of hand, but it does suggest that reading a couple of 'climate sceptic' blog posts probably doesn't give you the neccessary background to argue with the experts. What would give you the neccessary background is 4-5 years of an undergraduate physics and maths degree and another 3-4 years of a PhD in climate science. Once you've done that you can comment. That leads back to my original point, this is an issue that affects us all, but one on which very very few people can make a genuinely well formed opinion.
I'll be discussing this and related issues over the coming months.
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