So we are not to sell power just gut it and sell the arms and legs.
Would Costa and Morris along with a few trained pups have been better not to have betrayed the state ALP conference?
Yes they would!
But wait there is indeed more.
We now see the butchers knife cutting away to sell parts of our states power.
Do not for a second think the story's about support for a very lost leader are even close to true.
The attempts to dress up the party's image are not too much unlike the RTA resealing over potholed roads looks good for a while but is worse than it was before in just weeks.
Just weeks away from NSW ALP country conference this state is ruled by men who use threats and fear to force a vote in their favor.
Of all the people who ever dogged on the ALP I predict Morris and Costa will do more damage.
I do not betray my party with this thread.
I in fact defend it from men who should not claim to be in it.

Belly,

At a time when govts. are telling us that energy is to become the crucial issue of the 21stC why are they so keen to get out of responsibility for power generation etc? Surely this is the time for our elected leaders to bight the bullet and take control of this apparently crucial issue?

Giving Morris 10 or 20 billion to buy the next couple of elections would be criminal. He is such a transparently grubby little politician. His argument that 'we have failed to invest in our state infrastructure, so we must sell off our infrastructure so we can invest in our infrastructure' is just embarrassing.

These power assets have halved in value since Kerry Chicaroski tried to sell them and was howled down by union thugs, the labour party and members of the public like you Belly.

Thanks to you Belly and the rest of them the NSW tax payer is about 15 billion dollars out of pocket and you are carrying on like it is some sort of achievement to boast about.

Morris should sell all of them and spend the money where it is need on things like public transport.

Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to keep antiquated power stations at the expense of improving public transport and the like have logic which I am completely incapable of comprehending and I am sure most other sane people are as well.

The gross stupidity and incompetence of the NSW state government is infuriating!

Easy Times save your vitriol, how can you be so sure most want to sell?
And how can you over look it was Costa who lead the no sale crew then?
It is the duty of government to provide some things, surely power is one of these.
Union thugs? on what evidence ?
I do not value your emotional opinion but you may just see I do agree the government is a shambles.
Every privatization of power has seen much higher prices far worse service and public still paying for pensioner discounts as private enterprise only exists for profit.
I could take offense at the child like union thugs tag but understand it comes from the uninformed.
From the same tree as work choices it fails to understand most unions are in no way thugs.
some few are both thugs and mugs, some in the anti Union camp are too.

I don't have any experience in the NSW electricity generation or distribution industry. Can anyone tell me why it is that the value of the public assets that are the subject of contention has declined by 50% since Kerry Chikarovski proposed selling them in the early 1990s?

Had these assets been sold back then, what would NSW consumers have likely been paying for electricity over the intervening years?

Now that it looks like they are not being sold off, what effect will that have upon the viability of the Capital Wind Farms project at Bungendore, a project that has been billed as supplying ALL of the power requirements of the Kurnell desalination plant? The reason I ask this question is that Capital Wind Farms recently was awarded a 20 year contract for supply of electricity to Sydney Water (the desalinator operator) at a price of $0.05 per KwH (approximately equal to the retail off-peak price for electricity) at a time when the existing NSW generating capacity has a surplus of off-peak power to sell.

What I don't understand is how the wind farm project can viably contract to supply a round-the-clock power demand at an off-peak rate when it is itself a form of supply that is subject to intermittency. It must have offsetting arrangements with other base-load generators to maintain supplies to the desalinator when the wind is not blowing fair. How can it pay for offsetting power at peak times when itself only being paid at an off-peak price? It just does not seem a commercially viable situation.

Is the contract price of $0.05 per KwH so much better than the wholesale off-peak prices that it just does not matter? If so, who is getting ripped off and/or taken for a ride? Sydney householders, or the NSW taxpayers at large?

Do any interests in Capital Wind Farms or Babcock & Brown Wind Partners show up in the register of pecuniary interests of NSW parliamentarians?

Who really stood to benefit from this proposed sell-out?

It’s not about most wanting to sell it’s about common sense. Most people don’t want to pay taxes! Should we all stop paying taxes because most don’t want to?

Sure some unions do some good work sometimes but the unions trying to block the NSW power sales are not. They are acting in the interest of their members but it’s not in the interest of the NSW tax payer who owns the power stations. Since when has the employee been the boss?

Worse service? What kind of services do you regally need for an electricity company? As long as when I flick the light switch it comes on I am happy.

We could easily afford to subsidise the pensioners you talk about with 30 billion!

Belly I have a lot of respect for you on OLO but you are destroy your credibility by promoting dogmatism like this.

15 billion dollars gone.. Is this the biggest stuff up in the history of NSW? In the history of Australia? FIFTEEN BILLON DOLLARS GONE FOREVER!! And I am pointing the finger at people like you Belly.

Your propositions are not credible EasyTimes. You have *NO PROOF* for anything you've said...so that means that what you've said is extremely dogmatic- You're just throwing a tantrum like the NSW State leader.

EasyTimes, do you think it wise to give to these baboons who squandered their public trust by blowing years of windfall Stamp Duties, Land Taxes and GST revenues another go at a few billion?

Really have to ask what's in it for Costa and Iemma. Privatisation of electricity has occurred in UK, SA, Qld, Vic probably NZ so its clear for all to see the downsides of privatisation.

If the states keep abrogating their responsibilities you have to wonder why we have state governments. Maybe those Macquarie Street offices should be converted into the Newcastle Sydney Wollongong County Council like the Greater London Council - Oops that authority wields more power.

There is no option.NSW power will be sold because we are stone motherless broke.The PS Unions just want to shore up their positions of privledge.We just have too many fats cats and the PS unions don't want to lose their position of aristocracy.

They are an absolute disgrace,since they held the Iemma Govt to ransom at the last election.Coster wanted to stop the recruitment of bureaucrats but the PS Union did a deal with Iemma and the rape of our economy continued to pay for their excesses.

Hang your head in shame Billie,since your PS Union bullies have brought us to our knees.

Michael Coster is the only one who has the guts to speak the truth.

Public service bully's? quaint but so very wrong dogmatism?
It is an up hill battle convincing some unions are not all alike.
And while some act like idiots it is very much a minority.
The fact is my opposition to the selling of power is not about turning on a light switch.
This summer some time a storm will cut power to hundreds maybe thousands of homes.
Current management will have one task, no matter what cost,restore the power quickly.
Will private ownership care as much?
Can we all afford endless price increases?
30 billion Easy Times?
How did you turn the 10 billion into 30?
Or get the 50 from the first proposed sale?
You like it or not must understand unions, the best and majority of them, have always been interested in social justice.
Not socialism but true public interest.
In no Way different from so many groups from left and right opposed to this sale.
If you can find in this states history worse leadership than todays you will stun me.
And if you applaud the death of democracy that saw this grubby premier ignore the over 6 to 1 vote against him at conference you are blind.
If a party's rank and file have no part to play, can be over ruled by the rank and vile we are living in a dictatorship.

Dear Belly,

Firstly let me say that I know very little
about this subject. I live in Victoria whose
power has been privatised for quite some time.
Jeff Kennett saw to that.

I've scrawled several websites on this topic,
the jist of it seems to be that Iemma is determined
to go ahead with the sale despite strong opposition
from within the ranks of his own party.
To me that indicates that the man must have little
choice. As another poster said, it's a question of
finances... And I gather that if Iemma doesn't do it,
the opposition will, once they get in.

Belly, I realize that your heart is in the right place,
you're concerned about job loss, rising costs, and the
fact that Iemma is ignoring the will of the majority
within his party. However, the man has no choice. He's
trying to get out of a situation that's already bad, the
best way he can.

Anyway, that's my opinion for what it's worth.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understood the news bulletin of yesterday evening, the NSW government now plans to sell off just the electricity retailing business part of NSW power, Energy Australia. The government contends that it can do this without the need for additional legislation.

It is my understanding that these days, as electricity consumers, we have the right of choice individually as to which retailer is to supply our electricity in what we are told is a national electricity market. If this is true, what would happen if, as consumers, large numbers of NSW electricity users threatened to leave Energy Australia in protest, should such a sale look like proceeding?

Why would any new electricity retailer buy the Energy Australia business if by so doing they knew they might provoke a massive exodus of the customers who's business they were otherwise just about to purchase? Why would any electricity retailer already participating in the NEM buy custom that they could shortly have for nothing simply because customers were leaving Energy Australia in protest?

How would retaining the generating business and only operating as a wholesaler enhance the business prospects of electricity generation in NSW?

Is the threat of impending shortages just to scare us all? How does that threat stand up against the claim in OLO article "Fencing wire and mirrors: the world of the National Energy System" that "As a result [of the inception of the National Electricity Market Management Company], much the same amount of base generating capacity can meet our needs now as 20 years ago." See: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585

What would happen to the remainder of the National Electricity Market if NSW generation and transmission was withdrawn and used for supply of NSW consumers only? Has the rest of the NEM been avoiding shortages for 20 years on primarily the excess generating capacity of NSW? Why, if that is the case, should NSW consumers be facing shortages caused by failure of OTHER States or private operators to invest in infrastructure?

Others bludging on NSW?

FG it is indeed a complex issue and Foxy you would not be happy to know a great many ALP members are as upset as I am.
It is not that this government must sell.
Or is it just jobs.
Country people who have never voted Labor and never will fear the sale as much as I do.
Evidence exists that services do drop a great deal after we sell what we already own.
Prices rise, but profits do too.
If we are going to pay more in any case why not keep in in our hands?
I know no words or white wash can change the fact great numbers of ALP members, maybe a majority, have no time for this leadership team.
As I said well in advance of Rudd's win he would win well and be well liked, look at the polls.
But I get no joy in knowing without doubt, none at all, that the actions of this leadership team have already assured the opposition of a landslide victory.
And at least 2 terms in office.
My gut feeling is 3 terms, given they are colorless and seemingly without real policy's Morris has lost the election rather than them winning it he must go soon to avoid this.

Belly there are no options.If they don't sell,then their AAA credit rating will fall thus we the electorate will have to pay much higher interest rates.They need at least $15 billion to pay for urgent infrastructure.They have rapidly falling revenues due the economy's loss of growth.The more they tax us the less they get.

The reality is that your members don't want to lose their cushy Govt jobs.Right now thousands in private enterprise are losing their jobs and houses because of the ALP's excesses.

What should happen is that all NSW PS should have their salaries be made equivalent to that of Vict or Qld for 5yrs,until the economy gets back on it's feet.Govt Depts need to be amalgamated and 30,000 bureaucrats need to go.This will save us a minimum $3 billion pa.

Jeff Kennett fixed Vict,but I don't think that Barry O'Farrell has the balls to do what is necessary.Barry lacks intensity and passion.They cannot afford any more delays.

Yes Arjay, Jeff Kennett fixed Victoria, throwing thousands of public servants out of work, plunging the state into recession, forcing further layoffs as small business lost their customers. Many public servants and others thrown out of work were broken by the experience, their plans for their future financial security in old age in ruins as they faced unrelenting poverty as their ability to get a job equivalent to the one they lost disappeared. At the height of the 1992 recession the bailiff resumed ownership of most of the BMWs, LandRovers dropping little Johnny and Jane outside Carey Grammar in an effort to recoup the 20% non-payment of school fees. A fine morning for us smirking old Holden drivers.

Many people who work in mental health marvel at the irony of Jeff Kennett heading up Beyond Blue as he single handedly caused so much mental anguish to so many. He was the cause of many people's depression not their saviour.

15 years on Victoria's electricity generation is owned by Chinese consortium. There have been 7 electrical trades apprentices as opposed to 700 apprentices in NSW, power is expected to cost a lot more when the capping contract expires this year.

It has been argued that Victoria's apparent poor credit rating was simply a few accounting entries and if political will had been otherwise the state still had a AAA rating.

Commonsense says that state provision of electricity should be cheaper than private ownership because the state does not have to return a profit to its shareholders. I find your underlying assumption of the laziness, venality or stupidity of public servants grossly offensive. This might be the case in your mediterranean or asian homeland but you are in Australia now mate - that's why your family migrated.

Arjay no offense meant but I can not take you seriously.
In another thread you claim 50% of Sydney siders want to leave.
On what evidence?
You share my view about the state of the NSW government but defend leadership ignoring the will of the party.
You place all the blame for our weakness on public servants?
And I truly am baffled by your request for more infrastructure?
Why? to sell like we propose to sell power?
Fact is do we need a triple A rating?
Could we not borrow money build power infrastructure and charge about the same as private enterprise would but retain public ownership?
Over taxing in places that drove investors interstate is more to blame than anything.
Have a closer look at the actions of our ex treasurer.
I am sure you will not be concerned at my lack of interest in your view but in fact I do continue to read your every word to try to understand you.

Belly,that was done in a Roy Morgan poll published in the Tele.People in the Western Subs are not happy vegemites.How would the PS know anyway,they live another planet?

Arjay the western suburbs of Sydney is not the whole.
The idea that half, one in two Sydney siders wants to leave is not believable.
While we should not take newspaper story's on face value the weekend ones added to this debate.
Costa it seems is about to be rolled.
What a shame it was not 12 months ago.
Morris we are expected to think was a follower and not to blame?
He without doubt if that was true and it is not would not be fit to be in the house with a mop and bucket in his hands and he isn't.
Some who took to the podium at conference like our unfortunate Minister for health to insult the party machine are not forgiven or forgotten.
Had your leader supported the sale we could have had an election very soon.
I have no doubts the ALP would have split on this issue.
While party power brokers may be offended by my thoughts.
And want a healing.
It would do no harm to remember a brick building is built one brick at a time.
Each brick in this case is a party voter and they will vote without doubt as they think.
What would you think of a party that said your vote did not count at conference then told you to follow the line?
Morris must go, will go sooner the better.

Arjay, in June Iemma said that his infrastructure plans were not dependent on selling off electricity assets. Now he wants us to believe that we'll all be rooned if we don't sell. The likelihood is that his career will be rooned if he can't get his hands on 10 billion to bribe us for our votes, and NSW will carry on.

It's debatable whether we have too many public servants in most areas; but we have more than we can afford right now.

The Govt. has no mandate to sell/lease anything either with the electorate or within their own team. Liars is the appropriate word.

It amazes me that we accept governments telling us more and more how to think and behave while they get out of providing concrete services. I draw the line at the provision of power and water; even as a Lib supporter I want my govt. to provide these two basic services, at the very least.

Iemma thinks this sale is too important for Parliament to decide. His Communist daddy would be proud of his fascistic offspring. Perhaps he'll leave our kids alone on Saturday nights and turn the dogs onto his recalcitrant party members instead.

It's difficult not to feel contempt for this lying rodent, and his manipulative predecessor.

How about we reintrodue some FACTS into this debate.

Forrest Gump.

New South Wales is currently a net IMPORTER of electricity from the National Electricity Market. That is, NSW is not producing the electricity it needs to sustain its' own usage.
http://www.esaa.com.au/images/stories/Market_reports/2008_07_26nem.pdf

Victoria, (where electricity supply is privatized) is a net exporter.

For $11 billion in sales and services NSW needs 14,100 employees. Victoria needs only 5900 employees to generate sales of $8.3 billion. http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/C3C6498F956F6B12CA25720500243430/$File/82260_2004-05.pdf

Virtually every other state besides New South Wales has a deregulated power industry. Capital expenditure on infrastructure is significantly lower in NSW than the national average. And don’t forget that many of these other states with higher capital expenditures are net exporters of electricity to the NEM. http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/subscriber.nsf/0/C3C6498F956F6B12CA25720500243430/$File/82260_2004-05.pdf

Regarding Victorian privatization - From the competition watchdog.
>> The majority of customers are benefiting from the competitive process as firms continuously strive for competitive advantage against actual and potential rivals by improving their price and service offering in ways that better meet the preferences of energy consumers. http://www.aemc.gov.au/pdfs/reviews/Review%20of%20the%20Effectiveness%20of%20Competition%20in%20the%20Electricity%20and%20Gas%20Retail%20Markets%20in%20Victoria/aemcdocs/002Second%20Final%20Report.pdf

Billie,

Says >> “Commonsense says that state provision of electricity should be cheaper than private ownership ”

WTF? Besides that being totally incorrect, by your reasoning the govt should look after all our needs including services and manufacturing. This is really arrant nonsense. The state cannot do things like generate and transmit electricity more cheaply or more effectively than private enterprise. That fact has been shown over and over, including here in Australia.

The facts show that the most economically liberal 20% of countries are also the most wealthy, significantly outperforming the others. On the flip side, the 20% of economies which are least free are not only poorer than the rest of the world, they are actually less free politically as well.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp102.pdf

I fully accept that there is no mandate for this change at the present time and as such it should be shelved for later consideration. The Unions in particular, (although the moronic opposition should also wear some of the blame) have run a highly successful scare campaign.

Paul L,

Thanks for the links. My only quibble with you is as to your use of the word 'RE-introduce' in your first sentence. In both this thread, and the power sell-off debate at large, those of us who are not insiders to the electricity industry have been so far forced to operate in what is virtually a fact-free zone. Yours is the first introduction of what are claimed to be facts, and for that I thank you.

My overwhelming impression is that NONE of the actual players in this saga, government, opposition, NEM, or unions, have wanted to be open with the public (who right or wrong own the business in NSW), and that is what has been so profoundly irritating.

The bar chart in your first link showing the extent to which each State is a nett exporter or importer of electricity is most revealing. NSW is indeed a nett importer, to the tune of what looks like around 6% of its total demand.

Victoria, contrary to what you state, is neither a nett importer or exporter.

Tasmania is a nett importer to the tune of around 20% of total demand. SA is like Victoria. Queensland is the only nett exporter, effectively meeting the NSW and Tasmanian deficits. WA is a separate grid, not part of the NEM.

What's the problem? Queensland is being paid for its exports, is it not? Is Queensland facing electricity shortages, either temporary or long-term?

What really worries me is the claim made in the OLO article "Fencing wire and mirrors: the world of the National Energy System" http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585 , that NSW (and Victorian, Queensland and Tasmanian) electors have been totally disfranchised in favour of SA electors with respect as to the making of the legislative framework for the NEM. No government had, or has, any mandate to hand off its responsibilities like that!

Looks like the NEM just wants to hike prices across the nation, and our public NSW electricity business is in their way!

Good job, Fatty O'Barrell!

Paul L I remember attending a funeral in dec 2000 when there was no electricity because the electricity retailers had turned off Victoria to supply South Australia because South Australia was paying a higher spot price. Legislation was hastily passed to stop that occurrence happening again until 2008.

I am totally against overseas board rooms making decisions about our utilities and infrastructure, they do not wear or see the pain of their wrong decisions. And you will find there is no australian organisation considered big enough to purchase the power generating capacity at throw away prices.

As Naomi Klein would say where are the World Bank and IMF bureaucrats who are pulling the strings.

Lets face it if we in NSW run out of power it will be because of decades of failure to build new stations.
Not failure to sell the lot.
And a sale is only possible if it is seen as a good investment.
NSW stands to find some very big industry leaving, Aluminum is one such.
Not sure why conservatives failed to follow long term policy, but how do they ask us to sell if ,well when elected?
In truth Iemma is gone only he does not know it, in 2 weeks the NSW local government elections may highlight the damage he continues to do to this states ALP.

Belly,

You raise an interesting point in referring to the aluminium industry. I recall seeing somewhere (probably in an OLO article, but maybe in a post) reference being made to the amount of electricity used for aluminium production in relation to total generation. As I recall, the claim was made that 40% of Victorian generating capacity is used by that State's smelter.

I don't know what proportion of base load power the NSW Tomago aluminium smelter absorbs.

What I would like to know is what the price is that these operations are being charged for their round-the-clock supply of electricity.

I would also like to know the precise nature and duration of any formal contractual arrangements with both Victoria and NSW for electricity supply these smelting operations may have. Is the Australian public, and NSW in particular, being effectively asked to either pick up the tab for continuity of supply to an industry that may be a particularly big contributor to our collective 'carbon footprint', or alternatively face restrictions in electricity availability so this industry can continue receiving supply at concessional rates?

Important as the above questions may be, there is a major issue with respect to thermal power supplies that is to my knowledge going unaddressed: that of waste heat utilization. Whatever may be the rights or wrongs of coal-fired power generation in an ideal world, the existing operations are going to continue for some considerable time: they have to, and they will waste a huge amount of energy in the process run the way they have been.

Waste heat utilization from existing coal-fired generation may itself provide a pathway to expansion of sustainable BASE LOAD capacity to the point of eventual total replacement of coal firing, within the remaining life of those thermal electricity generating facilities. See:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=495#9790 and

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5616#75523

Isn't it shameful to have to formulate critical national policy strategies on the General Discussion threads of OLO, 350 words at a time?

Forrest, you quite rightly asked:

>>>Is the Australian public…. being effectively asked to either pick up the tab for continuity of supply to an industry that may be a particularly big contributor to our collective 'carbon footprint', or alternatively face restrictions in electricity availability so this industry can continue receiving supply at concessional rates?<<<

Yes and the Victorian public will foot the bill for the proposed water de-salination plant that also stamps a huge carbon foot print on the environment, requiring massive energy to produce potable water.

AND

>>>Isn't it shameful to have to formulate critical national policy strategies on the General Discussion threads of OLO, 350 words at a time?<<<

Absolutely correct.

I think it is great that rank-and-file Labor members such as Belly are standing up against Iemma and Costa on this issue.

And, as much as I am not normally in the habit of praising Liberal Party and National Party politicians, full marks should be given to the NSW state opposition for having blocked privatisation. (Face it, Belly, they put most members of the NSW Labor Parliamentary caucus to shame. Without them, privatisation would now be law.)

Glad to see that here, at least, Paul.L acknowledges that the NSW government does not have a mandate to sell the electricity assets, the rightful owners of which emphatically oppose the sale. As I wrote elsewhere, "taking an asset from someone without his/her consent is theft" (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#43228)

It says a lot that this fundamental moral principle counts for nothing with nearly all other proponents of privatisation.

---

Other material relevant to this discussion can be found at:
http://candobetter.org/NswElectricity
NSW Upper House leader Michael Gallacher's incisive and informative speech of 28 September at http://candobetter.org/node/754 http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/hanstrans.nsf/V3ByKey/LC20080828
"NSW electricity privatisation can be stopped" at http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2481 http://candobetter.org/node/742
"ABC gives free kick to Iemma, NSW electricity privatisation" at http://candobetter.org/node/665
"Mike Baird Should Make His Move Now" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2109&page=0#44422
"Winning the war in Iraq" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#43150
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/29/privatising-democracy/
Peter Debnam's FaceBook Page "Support Clean Energy NOT Privatisation of NSW Electricity" at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22663528365&ref=mf
Peter Debnam's statement against privatisation at http://www.peterdebnam.com.au/news/speeches/electricity_privatisation_statement_by_peter_debnam_mp_-_12th_may_2008.htm

Fractelle's introduction of what at first might be seen as a red herring, the Victorian desalination proposal, into the electricity sell-off debate is in fact fortuitous.

Much of the existing coal-fired NSW generating capacity is in the Central Coast and Hunter regions, where coal reserves, coolant water, and the market are either co-located or close at hand.

The Central Coast is an area experiencing chronic water supply problems, so much so that an unequivocal commitment was made prior to the last State elections to the building of a major new water reservoir, the proposed Tillegra Dam.

One of the ironies (and that is not a strong enough word) of the sell-off proposal is that an opportunity to combine waste heat utilisation with desalination, large scale solar pondage energy collection, AND hot dry rock geothermal energy, is about to be walked away from by probably the only entity large enough to coordinate, and provide the market for, such a project: the NSW government.

The existing coal-fired capacity, far from being an embarrassingly redundant contributor to carbon emissions for the remainder of its service life, will actually provide the physical means for its own supplanting by solar, or hot dry rock, or a combination of both, as a means of BASE LOAD electricity generation. The concentrated brines that are a by-product of desalination and that are normally considered a disposal problem, in this scenario become a valuable asset as the temperature inversion collection layer in solar pondage.

All of this is achievable from the waste heat of the existing coal-fired generating capacity.

Kevin Cox's (OLO userID 'Fickle Pickle') article 'Hot Rocks Rock' http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7662 should be read in the light of this most ill-advised sell-out proposal. There are some most interesting ideas therein. The associated comments thread is http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7662&page=0 .

Kevin suggests power production costs from hot dry rock are less than half those involved using coal.

Solutions, and prospects of savings, too!

WHY SELL?

Tomago is not the only smelter of Aluminum in the Hunter.
Kurri is looking at doubling its size, power and its price is a factor.
If it becomes a problem it may leave Australia.
Water in fact has been transfered to the central coast from the Hunter.
The Tomago underground water has never run dry.
We do need those jobs in the Hunter, in fact in Australia.
ALP rank and file just as conservatives in my often stated view must confront bad leadership of their party's.
My party right or wrong is in fact near insanity.
Watson told us he is leaving today.
The great shame at his loss can not hide the truth, had it been Costa and Morris I would dance for joy in the street as I did on the day NSW Labor won the seat that let us govern in our own right.
And with the very same joy , yes I am fair dinkum, on the night of the last federal election.
I will get that dance, but if it does not come very soon it will be on the bones of the party I love the NSW ALP.

I think Paul.L needs to locate the source of his claim:

"The facts show that the most economically liberal 20% of
countries are also the most wealthy, significantly outperforming
the others. On the flip side, the 20% of economies which are
least free are not only poorer than the rest of the world,
they are actually less free politically as well."

... a little more precisely than to just simply provide a link to a 20 page pdf document at http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp102.pdf At least he should have provided us with a direct quote.

I downloaded that document and failed to find any of the words 'economically', '20%', 'significantly' 'outperforming' (or even just 'performing') within it.

We shouldn't be expected to wade through a 20 page document, and a poorly written one at that, in order to be able to verify Paul.L's claim.

As it turns out, the document is "The Klein Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Polemics" by Johann Norberg of the 'free market' think-tank, the Cato Institute. It was published in May and is the first serious attempt to demolish the thesis presented in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" published one year ago.

As it turns out Naomi Klein has responded to this article in the article "One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks" at http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks

Anyone who is under the impression that Norberg's article may be credible should read Klein's article.

Dagget,

I understand that not everyone knows what a quintile or a fifth is so I thought 20% might be an appropriate replacement.

Here is the direct quote

" Poverty and unemployment are lowest in countries with the most economic freedom. In the freest fifth of countries, poverty according to the United Nations is 15.7 percent, and in the rest of the world it is 29.8 percent. Unemployment in the freest quintile is 5.2 percent, which is less than half of what it is in the rest of the world. In the least economically free quintile, filled with the kinds of restrictions on private property, businesses, and trade that Klein claims are ways of helping the people against the powerful,poverty is 37.4 percent and unemployment is 13 percent."

To suggest Klein demolished the arguments of Norberg is simply preposterous. Among the weakest refutations I ever read. The best she could come up with to demonstrate Friedmans "support" of Pinochet is the letter he wrote to the dictator outlinig the economic reforms Chile should undertake.

There is NOTHING in that letter which suggests support for Pinochet or the coup. Friedman believed that the economic reforms he was proposing were in the best interests of ALL Chileans. He gave similar advice to Yugoslavia and the USSR. That didn't make him a communist supporter either.

It is a total slander to suggest that Friedman was behind the coup in Chile. Not only is the claim totally false but you have provided NO evidence to the contrary. The coup was carried out by the military. Friedman involvement was highly limited, confined to just one meeting and one letter to the dictator.

Belly,

I'm not trying to make the aluminium smelting industry out to be the bogyman in a 'them against us' scenario. It's just that it contributes seemingly very significantly to base load demand, because such smelters absolutely must be kept going 24/7. If some or all smelters were to be shut down, we might not have an impending 'peak shortage' problem.

Unless, however, some or all of those smelting operations are already on the brink of unviability and should close anyway, the only solution for NSW, and Australia at large, is to increase base load generating capacity. The only ways of doing that in Australia, in the absence of spectacular breakthroughs in electricity storage technology, is via nuclear, hot dry rock geothermal, solar pond collection and storage, posssibly wave power, natural gas fired, or coal fired generation. Of these the most proven and immediately expandable is coal fired, the current global warming bete noir!

In the uncertain regulatory climate now prevailing, what privatised operation is going to attempt to increase base load generating capacity without first having, if they are able, hiked prices through the roof?

Clearly, the continued intent of the present NSW government to sell off the retail business while retaining the generation side of it is indicative that it is to create the ability for unrestrained price-hiking in the privatised segment of the electricity supply industry that is the primary, if not sole object of the exercise.

I have absolutely no sympathy for the private investors who were prepared to take on the erstwhile public owned utilities with intent of participating in, and perhaps setting the prices in, a National Electricity Market the existence of which in its present form is effectively dependent upon the abdication by State governments of their Constitutionally preserved areas of freedom of action.

Indeed, the collusion of five States, and the Commonwealth, in effectively allowing one State, South Australia, to dictate the legislative framework for the NEM smacks of an attempt at evasion of the provisions of the Constitution.

They knew the people would not approve their plans!

In his article, 'Hot rock rocks', Kevin Cox (Fickle Pickle) makes the statement, in relation to funding hot dry rock geothermal electricity generation, that "To get $60 billion a year we need to increase the cost of energy by 4 cents per kilowatt hour."

Seems too easy.

My first question is: does that mean that the aluminium smelters pay 4 cents per KwH on top of however much (or little) they are presently paying for electricity, and if so, is that business still viable under those conditions? The same question applies to Sydney Water; instead of paying 5 cents per KwH, would they be paying 9 cents per KwH, and what would that do to the cost and consumption of water?

My second question is: if the consuming public are to be asked to pay this earmarked-for-investment extra component of electricity price, why should they not own outright the new enterprise they are 100% funding into existence?

Why would we first sell off all generation and sales business, then fund the development of an entirely new non-greenhouse contributing generation and transmission industry (at Inna-bloody-minka, for heaven's sake!) and allow it to be owned by private unaccountable interests? Why not strive to have that industry owned and run more like a co-operative business? The requirement to wean from coal-fired generation is now a 'force majeur' applying as much to existing utility owners as it does to us all as individual consumers. That being so, those owners may just have to accept that they may have made a real dud investment. Convert at their own expense, or go out backwards.

Paying the 4 cents investment levy, the NSW electricity consumers could fund the progressive conversion to a combination of Solar Pond collection and HDR geothermal generation, in the process progressively converting the existing coal mining output to the Fischer-Tropsch conversion of coal to liquid hydrocarbon fuels in a co-generation situation. The reaction is exothermic.

That way, the co-operative would go some way toward addressing 'peak oil'.

Is all this too hard?

Forrest I can not find a word in your posts I do not agree with.
However on one point I have concerns ,smelters, they provide a great number of well paying jobs and I would wish to see them stay.
Once we as tax payers via our government owned a great deal more than we do now.
Power can only be sold to private enterprise if it has value to them, profits.
Why can we not spend borrowed money to keep the profits and price under our control?
What can be behind a government over turning its own party machine to press on with the sale?
I am one of a minority in my party on Nuclear power, I think we one day will use it, and that we should.
On one side we say coal is too dirty yet stand against a cleaner fuel so much of the world is committed to using.
I am not a socialist, but we can not forever build a world that values money more than people.
I know of few businesses that do operate for much other than profit and wonder how much we will be paying for power in ten years, and how much new poverty will be the result.

I don't think Naomi Klein or I claimed that Friedman was personally behind the coup, although a good many disciples of Friedman trained at the Chicago School of economics were. If that impression was gained from my use of the term "Friedman's Chicago Boys" then I apologise.

I think people need to see for themselves the letter written by Milton Friedman to General Pinochet on 21 April 1975 at http://wwww.naomiklein.org/files/resources/pdfs/friedman-pinochet-letters.pdf

It begins:

"Dear Mr President,

"During our visit with you on Friday, March 21, to discuss the
economic situation in Chile, you asked me to convey to you my
opinions about Chile's economic situation and policies after
I had completed my visit. This letter is in response to that
request.

"May I first say how grateful my wife and I are for the warm
hospitality that was showered onus by so many Chileans during
our visit. We were made to feel very much at home. The Chileans
we met were all aware of the serious problems your country faces;
all realised that the immediate future was going to be difficult;
but all displayed a determination to surmount those difficulties
and a dedication to working toward a happier future."

... presumably by continuing to jail, torture and murder Chileans who had repeatedly and emphatically rejected Milton Friedman's economic prescriptions at the ballot box, and by assassinating outspoken exiled critics of the regime including Orlando Letelier who had denounced Friedman as a moral accomplice to Pinochet's crimes (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#44052).

Clearly Paul.L has not read "The Shock Doctrine". If he had he would understand that Klein accounts for the differences in policies in the early days to those in 1975, and the fact that some of the Generals merely wanted to return Chile to the way it was before Allende's election in 1970. In fact, there was a second coup, in which those elements that Paul.L referred to as "corporatist and paternalist" (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#44210) were ousted in a second later coup.

Policies carried out in the wake of the coup were what were prescribed by his Chicago School advisers:

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

"For the first year and a half Pinochet faithfully followed the Chicago rules: he privatised some, although not all, state-owned companies (including several banks); he allowed cutting-edge new forms of speculative finance; he flung open the border to foreign imports, tearing down the barriers that had long protected Chilean manufacturers; and he cut government spending by 10%---except the military, which received a significant increase. He also eliminated price controls--a radical move in a country that had been regulating the costs of necessities for decades.

"The Chicago Boys had confidently assured Pinochet that if he suddenly withdrew government in all areas at once, the 'natural' laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium, and inflation---which they viewed as a kind of economic fever indicating the presence of unhealthy organisms in the market---would magically go down. They were mistaken. ..."

Paul.L wrote of Naomi Klein's article at http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks "Among the weakest refutations I ever read."

Of course, Paul.L would say, that, wouldn't he?. I suggest that those who prefer not to accept Paul.L's verdict as the final word, read Naomi Klein's words for themselves. And I would suggest that it would be well worth their time and definitely well worth the RRP of either AU$32.95 or AU$28.95 (from my recollecting) for the latest penguin edition. As another initially skeptical person wrote:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#42987
http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/03/20/weekend-reflections-rudd-edition-2-2-2-3/#comment-208523
"I’ve just finished reading Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’, which Daggett has been ceaselessly recommending on this blog lately. Now I remember being somewhat underwhelmed by the heavily-hyped ‘No Logo’ circa 2000, but this new book is of a totally different calibre. Get it and read it, it will knock you flat." 20 March 2008

As for the stastitcs of the supposed superior economic performance of 'free' economies over 'non-free' economies, which Paul.L has attempted to use a sweeping trump card to answer every possible objection to 'free market' economic policies, he has built an extremely shaky edifice.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

The original source of the UN source statistics cited by Norberg, are not to be found in his document, rather he merely refers to another Cato institute document "Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report" linked to from http://www.cato.org/pubs/efw/, but neglects to tell us the page it is on.

It appears that Johann Norberg is either incompetent or not telling the truth. When the original source is supplied I might be prepared to comment further.

I just heard the fantastic news that the NSW Labor Caucus has (finally) acted against Costa and Iemma. (Thank goodness they weren't taken in either by the facile "good cop/bad cop" routine that they had performed for their benefit.)

Good riddance to both of them!

But, why did they wait so long to act?

If they had done this the moment that Iemma and Costa stated their intention to ignore the 702 to 107 vote of the NSW Labor Party conference against electricity privatisation, they would have spared themselves and the NSW public months of trauma and expense.

Had the Opposition did as many were expecting them to and supported the privatisation legislation privatisation would be law today with disastrous social, environmental and social consequences. Thankfully (unlike the majority of the NSW state Labor parliamentary caucus at the time) they were principled enough not to.

Let's not forget the names of all those who backed them to the hilt in their efforts on behalf of the corporate sector to steal the electricity assets, rightfully belonging to the NSW public: former NSW Premiers Unsworth and Carr and Greiner, former Prime Minister Paul Keating, former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, current Victorian Premier John Brumby and all the other 'Labor' premiers who have been urging them on, either overtly or covertly.

And let's not forget the unconscionable misreporting of this issue by nearly all the mainstream newsmedia. Just a few names which come to mind include Imre Saluzinsky, Miranda Devine, and Jennifier Hewitt and Toni Matthews (see http://candobetter.org/PropagandaWatch for some examples.)

Bit out of breath, been dancing in the rain and the street, true.
Heard the great news on ABC radio on my way back from a very wet and closed job site.
Remembering that day I and my old warrior mate danced in the middle of a Sydney freeway I did my solo dance.
Great joy and pride.
Quite sure some motorist thought I was mad , yes I was, with happiness.
Once more NSW ALP center unity has got it right, at last.
Not kidding home now rained out I found that old track dancing in the street and have played it many times.
Watching with pride as the government begins to rebuild only place to go from here is up.

Dagget,

As any normal person could tell you, Friedmans' letter contains NO reference to his support for the coup, nor his support for Pinochet. He is polite but he limits his comments to the actions that Pinochet could take to improve the economic circumstances of his country. That is his area of expertise. He also wrote and gave lectures containing similar sentiments to the leaders of many other nations, including communist countries. That did not make him a supporter of communism.

I see you are backing off rapidly from your claim that it was Friedman behind the coup. Yet you insist on bringing up Letelier, who’s views regarding Friedman have been proved to be wrong.

You say >> “Clearly Paul.L has not read "The Shock Doctrine". If he had he would understand that Klein accounts for the differences in policies in the early days to those in 1975, and the fact that some of the Generals merely wanted to return Chile to the way it was before Allende's election in 1970. In fact, there was a second coup, in which those elements that Paul.L referred to as "corporatist and paternalist” were ousted in a second later coup.”

If you had done a little of your own research rather than just forming a cheer squad for Naomi Klein you would know that Pinochet's junta took power on September 11,1973. There was a failed coup attempt by Colonel Roberto Souper in concert with the Patria y Libertad in June 1973. But your suggestion that the policies of 1973/4 were different to the policies of 1975 because the regimes were different is patently NOT true. As I have stated earlier, the Pinochet junta were not interested in micro economic reform initially.

TBC,

cont,

“ The reality was that military officials were in charge of the economy at first. They were often corporatist and paternalist and opposed the Chicago Boys’ ideas about radical reforms. For example, the air force blocked pro-market reforms in social policy until 1979. It wasn’t until this way of governing the economy led to runaway inflation at the time of Friedman’s visit that Pinochet threw his weight behind liberalization and gave civilians ministerial positions.” http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9384

This is where your and Kleins attacks on Friedman fall down. Most of the repression and violence occurred soon after the coup in 1973. Friedman didn’t visit until 1975.

You say >> “The Chicago Boys had confidently assured Pinochet that if he suddenly withdrew government in all areas at once, the 'natural' laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium, and inflation---which they viewed as a kind of economic fever indicating the presence of unhealthy organisms in the market---would magically go down. They were mistaken. ..."

More rubbish.
“ While the 1980s have been described as the "lost decade" in terms of economic development for the rest of Latin America, since global recession in the early 1980s Chile's economy under Pinochet has enjoyed a sustained strong expansion.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet

See a chart of Chiles economic growth vs the rest of Latin America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chile_GDP.jpg

I can’t get access to the original document where Johan Norberg quotes the statistics of the freest economies. So I’ll provide some that I can.
Here is Wikipedia’s list of the freest economies globally. The top ten are, Honk Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Australia, the US, NZ, Canada, Chile, Switzerland and the UK. Now lets have a look at the least free. North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Libya, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, Iran, Belarus, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Guinea – Bissau. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom

I’ve got too much to do to bother adding up their GDP’s etc but I think I can safely say that it is the countries which have freer economies that are not only wealthier, but also politically more free. And vice versa.

Very happy for you Belly. I hope you realize that the chances of the ALP being reelected again in the near future have been destroyed. Once again the faceless men of the party have overturned a Gov't elected by, and responsible to, the people. What a great day for democracy and the labour party.

Imploding while governing. What a joke.

The article 'Is privatising power a real turn-off?' http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7839 published Wednesday 3 September, is currently languishing a bit.

It would be a pity if paucity of comment there were to be taken as an indication that OLO users were not interested in this subject. I suspect that it is rather the detailed explanations of political philosophical theory that is gone into by the author that may be the turn-off with respect to that article.

With genuine respect for the detailed research that both daggett and Paul.L. have contributed on this thread, I would observe that a debate as to the merits and demerits of privatisation or public ownership has moved a little off-topic here. Right or wrong the public in NSW presently own the electricity business, and 80% of them are far from satisfied about it being sold off from under them. They see it as a failure in duty, fidelity, and imagination on the part of governments that sale even has to be entertained as a solution to what we are told is impending shortage.

This thread is fulfilling the function of showing public perceptions of the consequences of even the retail sell-off, and providing some imaginative suggestions, imagination that has clearly been lacking at Parliamentary level, to solve the problems we all now have, not resolve whether we all arrived here for the right political philosophical reasons.

I think the consensus is that both sides of politics are seriously out of touch with public expectations and ideas with respect to electricity supply. Don't let's debate on ground of politicians' choosing.

Continuing such a debate in the comments thread on Carolyn Currie's article may indeed be quite productive, as indeed discussion of a past coup in Chile may be interesting. This is not meant as a put-down. I just don't think going further down that road on this thread does Belly's rather courageous stand the justice, and consideration, it deserves. After all, we have a coup in Australia to discuss.

PaulL you and I have crossed swords in the game of verbal tennis before.
This is not an attempt at humor just the way I truly think.
I think you are quite wrong.
I share non of your views, not one of the many I have read here.
I like the side track the thread has taken, it interests me.
But Paul I am from the right within my party, and maybe wrong but on the evidence you give me in your posts you are just about as right as you can get in your party.
I can only put my thoughts, true honest belief in this post.
I truly think NSW has better government as of a few hours ago.
And that we will win the next election, remember no longer can conservatives wait for Labor to fall over.
Watch the polls and in 12 months tell me we lost anything to day.

Yah Belly, a good day for us all. With 2&1/2 years to go before the next election we needed this change. Iemma the Inept has gone. We need good governance.

Where does Rees stand on the power sell-off?

Will he push for the privatisation of the retail side?

When will Bob Carr get his come-uppance?

Belly

>> "And that we will win the next election, remember no longer can conservatives wait for Labor to fall over."

What??

Labour has already fallen over. The party has rolled a sitting premier and treasurer on the same day. It is the first time in 117 years this has happened apparently.

The only up side for the labour party is the gormless twats from the opposition who defied Liberal policy on privatisation to score cheap political points. They have done their party a serious disservice as well.

You say you are from the right wing of the labour party but that is nonsense. Privatisation is a policy staple of the right wing of the labour party. Paul Keating, one of my very favourite politicians, is the godsfather of the right faction of the NSW ALP. His grounbreaking economic reforms were the major reason the Australian economy has been travelling so well since the last recession. There is little doubt they were painful initially, but they were the right decisions.

Mostly, the right wing of the labour party understand that good economic management will provide the outcomes working people want and need, not unions selfishly protecting their little empires.

PaulL your self assurance is misplaced.
To over value your own opinion and under value your opponents is not a good debating tool.
Center unity is my home, that faction was Iemmas, and it got rid of him.
Rees while from the left is non factional now as a result of his promotion.
His deputy is from the left too.
But do not look for any lurch away from center unity pathways.
Paul again very very wrongly throws mud at unions/me/and the party.
Remember this is the party taking control, a return to party standing policy's and directions, and I will remind you often Paul the party hit rock bottom yesterday, and found its feet this day.
Hard times ahead for NSW but my party is again united.
The conservatives ran away from their own policy had they went with the sale the ALP would be in internal war right now.
And would have lost an early election forced not long after Christmas maybe before.
The failure to find a heart or a brain is the ALPs win, maybe the last chance for conservatives to govern this state for a decade.

As I said, Paul.L I didn't ever claim that Friedman was personally involved in the coup, so there is no claim I need to back "off rapidly from". However, as Klein has shown, a good many of his followers collaborated intimately with the coup leaders. This is a fact that Friedman tried to conceal in an interview on 10/01/00 (1 Oct 2000(?) or 10 Jan 2000(?)) he claimed that their presence in Chile at the time was 'accidental' (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_miltonfriedman.html#10).

Whether or not Friedman explicitly supported Pinochet's crimes, the clear evidence, as I have shown, is that his economic prescriptions could not be applied with the consent of the people. They were emphatically rejected again and again at the polls and the same applies in Australia.

As for the statistics of the much ballyhooed "Chilean Economic miracle" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Chile_GDP.jpg a close examination will reveal that the Chilean economy was doing quite well until the time of the capital strike of Allende's government.

I see Paul.L evaded my point about the disastrous consequences of the free market policies implemented by Pinochet immediately after the coup in 1973 on the advice of Chicago School trained economists, by referring to the economic boom in the late 1980's.As another document at http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part2/chapter3 http://www.citizen.org/documents/chilealternatives.pdf shows much of this was due to unsustainable exports of raw materials and the pursuit of ecomic policies by Pinochet and his successors which were contrary to economic neo-liberalism.

---

How quickly Paul.L forgot his words "I fully accept that there is no mandate for this change at the present time ..."

... when he complained of ...

"the gormless twats from the opposition who defied Liberal policy on privatisation to score cheap political points."

While I will continue to debate if the thread continues I want to re state a fact.
My thoughts and actions are not ever anti ALP ,I fought to return my party to its rank and file.
No false wet cheeks at the grave side for me, I rejoice at events and truly think we are better for it.
No looking for the good in some of the victims, unless it is Those 700 plus who I stood with at conference.
today once again I am proud to be ALP.

If the caucus hadn't done it, sooner or later the Governor would have had to do it.

I don't know enough about the dynamics of the NSW ALP to know whether John Watkins, had he not just quit politics the day before, would have been an acceptable replacement for Morris Iemma in the eyes of his parliamentary colleagues. As a member of the public, I can only think Watkins' departure is NSW' loss.

Likewise, I don't know enough about Nathan Rees to know whether he will make a good Premier. One thing that does disquiet me a little is that as Minister for Water, he was really heavying the Wyong Shire Council on the NSW Central Coast to agree to transfer its water reticulation infrastructure to a yet-to-be-formed Water Corporation intended to take over that Shire's water infrastructure together with that of Gosford City. A Water Corporation, even if government owned, is the first step toward the privatisation of water supply, and the hiking of prices.

This selling-off of existing public owned infrastructure in the form of electricity generation and distribution assets, and the overwhelming public opposition to it, has been at the heart of this dispute. I just hope it is to a genuine change away from such sell-off policies that Nathan Rees is committed, not just to a different pathway to achieving those privatisations.

With an ALP Federal government, surely now is the time to address the sleeper in this debate, the chronic inequity in the distribution of Federally collected revenues to NSW. Nobody has seemingly been game to raise this matter, for understandable reasons. It is ,after all, the basis of Canberra's pork-barrelling ability under either major party's rule. Together with this, the last thing the NSW public wanted was a fresh injection of cash, no strings attached, for the Iemma government to continue to squander.

Keeping the COMPLETE electricity business, redressing inequitable tax distributions, and achieving economies in the cost of the NSW public service, are what the Rees government will be measured against.

This was posted to the "Winning the War In Iraq" discussion at
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2052&page=0#44663

The issue may seem remote to some, but the basic principles of democracy, accountability and ownership rights aren't fundamentally different:

100 DAYS TO STOP BUSH AND CHENEY PRIVATISING IRAQ'S OIL WEALTH

Friday, 29 August 2008

http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/2008/08/100-days-to-stop-bush-and-cheney-sat-11.html

George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney are putting immense pressure on the Iraqi government to pass a controversial oil law before they leave office. Iraqi trade unionists are fighting the law, which would effectively hand over Iraq’s oil to foreign companies such as BP and Shell for a generation.

Join the Hands Off Iraqi Oil (http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/) procession through London on Saturday 11 October to launch 100 days of action to stop Bush and Cheney. Come and help a team of Oil Law resisters lasso a giant Dick Cheney and keep him away from a barrel of Iraq’s oil. There will be a samba band banging (oil) drums and corporate pirates too!

Date: Saturday 11 October 2008 Time: 12 noon

Assemble: Shell House, SE1 7NA (Opposite Waterloo train station. Nearest tube: Waterloo)
Route: Through central London: Shell House - BP HQ - Grosvenor Sq. Photo opps @ every stop of the tour

Belly,So Rees has advised the irrelevant Refshauge, the incompetent Knowles, the criminal pervert Orkopoulos, the inept ex Iemma And is the harbinger of a rosy future? Maybe, but don't expect anyone to believe that he has suddenly left the Socialist Left faction to become non aligned.

$10 says the retail arm of NSW power gets sold off/leased?

Yeah, the Iraqi representatives have the same simple choice our NSW parliamentarians have: cave to the pressures (whatever form they take) or simply stand their ground.

What's the big threat that the US oil interests have over the Iraqis? 'If you don't pass the oil law we'll withdraw all the troops and leave you to your own devices!'? If that threat holds any terror of substance so far as Iraqi representatives are concerned, it would appear to be a self-defeating one for Bush and Cheney so far as the securing of continuity of supply to the US is concerned. Maybe there has ultimately got to get to be a Chinese policeman on every street-corner from the Pamir Knot to the Mediterranean and Red seas before everyone comes to their senses in that region.

All the more reason to focus on looking after our own energy security here in NSW, and regaining the sort of focus of people like Essington Lewis and the others that were behind the industrial defensibility of Australia achieved by the time of WW2.

Given the seeming need to both expand generation capacity at the same time as reducing emissions and confronting peak oil, we urgently need to stop wasting OLO electronic page space advertising street demos and start using it to throw up the innovative solutions that seemingly are beyond our elected representatives to recognise and develop.

South Africa has been producing something like 40% of its liquid petroleum fuel requirements by conversion of very inferior high ash coal via the Fischer-Tropsch process for decades at a price competitive with that originating from oil wells. Why are we not developing such processes in a co-generation context for the expanded generation of base load power our governments now belatedly tell us has not been invested in? There would be effectively NIL carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity component of the co-generation. The emissions from the vehicle fuels component can't be practically sequestered anyway, and in any case simply substitute for those presently coming from oil well petroleum.

Forrest Gump,

I agree with most of your post and I am glad to see that you are familiar with the material covered in Andrew Ross's "Armed and Ready - The Industrial Development and Defence of Australia 1900-1945", as your mention of Essington Lewis, Director General of Munitions in the 1930's indicates (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7859&page=0#122487).

However, I have one point of contention. You wrote "... we urgently need to stop wasting OLO electronic page space advertising street demos ...".

Do you think the sell-off would have been prevented without 'street demos'? Granted the Liberals and Nationals (who, themselves, are more often than not the targets of 'street demos') to their enormous credit, blocked it in Parliament, but do you really believe that they would have made that stand usually unexpected of right wing political parties, if not for the efforts of dozens of ordinary giving up their time to argue their case on street corners, shopping malls, in letters to the editors, on talk-back radios and in online forums such as this, and by attending 'street demos'?

By all means, we need to seek innovative technological solutions to our predicaments which are sustainable, but if our destiny remains (had remained) in the hands of the likes of Costa, Iemma or their interstate and Federal counterparts, then the most most optimistic possible technological innovations still won't save us.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who wants to organise 'street demos' or whatever to help turn our society back from the brink is more than welcome to advertise those demos on our web page at http://candobetter.org The reason more demos aren't advertised there is that we don't have time, so anyone who would like to help, please get in touch.

Palimpsest do you think Rees is dirty because he worked for them?
I would have expected another poster to highlight his employment by that pedophile not you.
Soon events will prove me right he can not rule this state as a left wing member.
He will not take easy paths but will do extremely well.
More fallen heads last night from the lost cabinet will assist him.
Daggett you wast nothing in highlighting that demo, I am not offended by it however we are getting close to diverting the thread.
Lets state this clearly Watson is a loss he is from the left and was always unlikely to leave that faction.
His action bought about the end of the worst government my party ever claimed ownership of.
The actions of current leadership of the conservatives let us off the hook.
Time will prove me right hard times to fix this mess but the right team to do it watch the polls.
Rees soon will be very high in them all.
Center unity is the National driving force of the ALP in NSW it has the numbers and controls directions, center unity equals the right of the party.

When I posted that advertisement for a demonstration against the threatened privatisation of oil in Iraq, it was to point out the essential similarity between what is happening in this country and what is happening in Iraq.

(Obviously very few people, who are participating in this discussion, will be able to attend that protest, but, nevertheless, I put in the details on the off chance that someone in the UK might look.)

If we look past the often sectarian violence committed by Iraqis (in addition to that committed by the occupying U.S. forces), there are fundamental issues of democracy at stake, just as there are here. It is instructive that, as in Australia, the principle social force opposing the theft of the people's assets are the unions that work in that industry.

However, on the question of the role of the NSW unions in this, I think it still needs to be said that they should have fought a little harder. For example, why did they never issue a clear ultimatum to Costa and Iemma: either withdraw the privatisation legislation in accord with the clear wishes of both the NSW public, the unions, and the Labor Party, or we strike?

If they could not win public support with 79%-86% opposed to privatisation, when could they ever have hoped to?

Had they done so, there can be little doubt that Iemma and Costa would have backed down very quickly and the NSW public opinion would have been spared months of trauma.

However, instead, the fate of NSW's electricity assets was allowed to be ultimately decided by the normally pro-privatisation Liberal/National opposition and, thankfully (unlike the Federal Opposition which voted to pass Keating's legislation to fully privatise the Commonwealth Bank, which was contrary to Keating's 1993 election pledge) they acted in a principled and decent fashion.

What would the unions have done had they, instead, voted to support privatisation, or even just have allowed the minority in their ranks in support of privatisation to have done so? (See also comment "Why won't the ETU take on Iemma?" of 22 August at http://candobetter.org/node/742#comment-1079).

In the fifth post to this thread I raised the issue of that monument to the Iemma regime, the Kurnell desalinator, or more accurately the seeming inconsistencies in the claim that an INTERMITTENT generation source would supply a 24/7 operation with ALL of its electricity requirements.

Friday's palace coup should not be allowed to push this unresolved inconsistency into the background.

We already see Nathan Rees recognising enormous budgetary problems for NSW, and saying that some capital expenditure plans will have to be deferred or axed completely. Let's start the axing in the right place: stop the Kurnell project dead in its tracks, not because its desalination (which is good), but because its the thin end of the wedge for 'privatisation' of the water utilities. (For 'privatisation' read 'sell-off to foreign interests'.)

Now I reckon that the inconsistencies between the public claims with respect to the electricity provision for the Kurnell project is the tip of an iceberg of massive impropriety. I suspect the improprieties to extend from not just the fiduciary but perhaps all the way up to sabotage of the Constitution!

My guess is that the Iemma government abused its position of public trust in the deal made with Capital Wind Farms, featherbedding that enterprise right from the outset. Don't anybody misinterpret me to say that I am accusing Babcock and Brown Wind Partners of having engaged in any impropriety; I do not suggest that at all. The improprieties I suspect will have come from the other side of the contracting table.

I'm guessing that the Wind Partners entity is/was intended as an investment vehicle for the all but exclusive benefit of a privileged elite: various State and Federal parliamentarians and senior public servants and 'government consultants', and maybe the odd political party as well, just for good measure.

I'm guessing that the speed with which both Opposition and Government moved in the face of public outrage over the proposed electricity sell-off was motivated more by a desire for cover-up than performance of public duty.

What say you?

Just so viewers can get a fuller picture, I will refer them to the discussion topic 'An absolutely capital wind farm, far from Kurnell'. This link, http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1825#36141 is to the opening post in that discussion. In it I have quoted the public claims made about the wind farm, together with the sources for those claims.

The first link in Paul.L.'s first post, the 21st post in this thread, is to a PDF document containing some statistics on the National Electricity Market (NEM). Page 5 of that document has a table containing electricity futures pricing for the NSW region of the NEM. The wholesale price for off-peak electricity for calendar year 2009 is quoted as being $27.21 per Megawatt hour, which equates to a price of $0.02721 per KwH. For 2010 it is $35.37 per MwH, and for 2011 $37.83 per MwH.

Futures for peak load supply (between 7 AM and 10 PM daily, 7 days per week) are quoted at $63.25/MwH for 2009, $65.59/MwH for 2010, and $54.56/MwH for 2011.

Futures for flat load supply (a term the precise meaning or applicability of which I am unsure) are quoted for the same periods as $43.30/MwH, $48.86/MwH, and $45.30/MwH.

Now if I had an absolutely capital wind farm with a 20 year government contract to supply at $50.00/MwH, how could I possibly lose? Only by the grossest of gross mismanagement, I should think. If I was moderately attentive to the operation of the wind farm, however, I would have the continuing opportunity of a price differential of near 100% for supplying off-peak electricity. Even if my wind turbines were becalmed all night I could buy in wholesale and resell under my contract at nigh on 100% profit! If becalmed between 7 AM and 10 PM I could buy in electricity and still probably break even reselling it to meet my contract. That's what I call featherbedding.

Getting it?

Hey Forrest,

Why don't you borrow a couple of hundred million and do it yourself. Surely NO ONE else has ever looked into whether wind generation is profitable. I mean, the great BOGEYMEN of this century, the entrepeneurs, aren't interested in making a profit are they. The only other explanation is that they haven't looked at the numbers themselves and were waiting for some socialist blogger to point it out to them. Thats POSSIBLE isn't it.

And how hard can it be to make money in this type of venture anyway?

I lost it totally when I read your post where you said "Maybe there has ultimately got to get to be a Chinese policeman on every street-corner from the Pamir Knot to the Mediterranean and Red seas before everyone comes to their senses in that region."

Mate you are just a razor sharp analyst. What we really need in the Middle East is the new pretenders to the position of Hyperpower, the Chinese, because those guys are "straight shooters", right?

I mean they play hard but fair in Tibet don't they? Or in Tianamen square? What a JOKE.

Go on, tell me the Chinese Communists are just a bunch of nice boys who are totally misunderstood.

Paul.L.

We might be arguing at cross purposes.

It is precisely because investment in wind turbine generation does not have to be done with hundreds of millions of dollars all committed at once that it can be an attractive investment for much smaller capitalists, like, for example, recently retired parliamentarians or senior public servants in possession of a superannuation lump sum. Business entities like Babcock & Brown Wind Partners simply provide a vehicle for mobilising and managing such investments in wind energy.

There are probably many other small Australian investors who would have welcomed an opportunity to invest in such a seemingly soundly based and sure to be profitable enterprise. The point is that ordinary Australians never got a chance. I am simply questioning why that might have been so.

Another point is that there is a limit to the proportion of grid demand (typically from 15-20%) that can be met from intermittent sources of supply, which wind turbine generators are. There is consequently a limit to the number or extent of investment opportunities in relation to any grid being supplied from such sources. First in, especially with a guaranteed market at nearly twice the going off-peak sale price, may not be merely best dressed, but part of a privileged few who get to be dressed at all!

It was the Iemma government that was in a position to approve such seemingly very favourable contract arrangements for Capital Wind Farms. I am questioning whether there was any effective conflict of interest in its so doing.

I am also beginning to wonder whether the projected shortages in electricity supply that that government was talking about as creating the necessity to sell off the power business were not derived from the electricity futures quotes. The electricity futures quotes are determined by the bids of the relatively few supply corporations in the NEM. It would be possible to create the indications of an impending shortage, without that shortage actually turning out to be real.

The NEM could make it SEEM like NSW had to sell, without there being any real need.

It's been remiss of me to have neglected to mention a book "The Final Energy Crisis (2nd Edition)" edited by my good friend Sheila Newman (http://candobetter.org/sheila (blog at) http://candobetter.org/SheilaNewman ) recently.

One of the contributors, Alice Friedemann, describes it thus:

"This book condenses thousands of peer-reviewed, difficult technical
journals into science-writing that the public can understand across a wide range of energy crisis topics. There is no other book like it on the market."

Having read the first edition, and most of the second edition, I can thoroughly recommend it. Unfortunately, due to the Australian distributors, having underestimated the demand, it seems to be as rare as hen's teeth, at least in Brisbane. I bought one of the few copies left in Brisbane as a father's day gift. The RRP is AU$44.95.

The contents are:

1. Introduction - In the Beginning by Sheila Newman

Part I: Measuring our predicament

2. 101 Views from Hubbert's Peak by Sheila Newman
3. Prediction of World Peak Oil Production by Seppo Korpela
4. The Assessment and Importance of Oil Depletion by Colin Campbell
5. Coal Resources of the World by Seppo Korpela

Part II: Geopolitics

6. The Caspian Chimera by Colin Campbell
7. Update to the Caspian Chimera by Sheila Newman
8. The Battle of the Titans by Mark Jones
9. Dark Continent, Black Gold by Andrew McKillop
10. The Chinese Car Bomb by Andrew McKillop
11. Venezuela, Chavez and Latin american Oil on the World Stage by Sheila Newman

Part III: The Big Picture: False Solutions, Hopes and Fears

12. No Choice but International Energy Transition by Andrew McKillop
13. Population, Energy and Economic Growth: The Moral Dilemma by Ross McCluney
14. Renewable Energy Limits by Ross McCluney
15. Peak Soil by Alice Friedemann
16. Notes on Terra Preta by Sheila Newman
17. Nuclear Fission Power Options by Sheila Newman
18. Fusion Ilusions Michael Dittmar
19. Geothermal by Sheila Newman

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

Part IV: After Oil

20. France and Australia After Oil by Sheila Newman
21. North Korea:The Limits of Fossil-Energy Based Agricultural Systems by Antony Boys
22. How will Japan Feed itself without Fossil Energy? by Antony Boys
23. The Simpler Way by Ted Trainer
24. In the End: Thermodynamics and the Necessity of Protecting the Natural World by Sheila Newman

For more information, please visit http://candobetter.org/TFEC

Overnight, Forrest had come up with a brilliant idea for his absolutely capital wind farm that he hadn't yet actually had to fork out any (well, much) money for to buy the turbines and pylons with. Forrest was no 'socialist blogger' (he was actually more a running dog monarchist imperialist war-mongering capitalist colonialist interventionist reactionary revisionist male chauvinistic peeg, if it was possible to label him at all), and he did his own ideas!

What if, Forrest thought, he didn't actually build his absolutely capital wind farm, but just took out a lease with option to buy over a nice Sydney CBD penthouse apartment with 360 degree views, and rented not-too-ostentatious office space just a lift trip and a moving footpath walk away from his digs? He could simply run an electricity futures and trading business, having, as he did, that nice 20 year government contract for $9 million worth of off-peak electricity at a present price differential of 100% over market rates. Maybe worth to Forrest around $4 million a year, nett of expenses.

Of course, the bonanza might not last the full 20 years, but hey, so what if it didn't? Forrest could pull the plug at any time, and still be well in front. Still, it would be good to be able to take full advantage of that $180 million indexed to inflation cash flow for the full period. Mustn't be greedy, Forrest reminded himself. $4 million a year was not to be sneezed at!

Always look on the bright side of life, Forrest reminded himself. Even if he didn't actually build his own Wind Garden of the Dispossessed, Forrest knew that plenty of others would build theirs. Wind farms were all the rage. Forrest reckoned that by the time 2011 had passed, he would probably be able to buy peak electricity futures backed by real producing assets having an even greater price differential with his gilt-edged contract to supply.

Forrest suddenly felt very good about not having actually built those wind turbines.

Privatised life was marvelous!

Forrest changed desktops now that the video-conference had ended. For all of his digital saurianism, Forrest found Ubuntu a real cool operating system.

The huge 48 inch CRT screen that Forrest had been able to afford soon after moving into his CBD penthouse made it seem like people were right there in the room with you in such circumstances. It was always a pleasure talking with Hu. Had it not been for the video-conferencing capability, Forrest would never have really believed that Hu it really was when he had first been approached to provide foreign affairs consultancy services for the Middle Kingdom. The thing was, it was hard to digitally fake a vidconf, especially when the things you were given advanced knowledge of or were able to preview later got televised on the news services world-wide. So Forrest knew these little chats, through the interpreter, were the real deal.

Hu had been completely bowled over by Forrest's suggestion of appointing the Dalai Lama as governor-general of the prospective Gouvernement General of South West Asia, as it was referred to in English. That move, Hu could see, would do much to cement the legitimacy of the occupation forces in the eyes of the rest of the world. Everyone knew that the GG of SWA needed a cultural revolution, even if they didn't dare say so out loud, but Forrest had and did, and Hu was forever grateful.

Only the Middle Kingdom could do cultural revolutions the way cultural revolutions needed to be done.

Hu had learned from Forrest that Australia had had a Ming dynasty, too. One that had done so much in just a few short years to advance the Middle Kingdom's interests.

"'The kid fist in an iron glove': is not that the saying in English?", Hu had asked in Mandarin, with just the slightest trace of a smile. Ever one to oil the wheels of progress, Forrest had agreed that that was pretty much it, rather than spoil things by revealing anything had been lost in translation.

Hu was sometimes misunderstood.

Just about everyone seemed dazed by the palace revolution.

Just about everyone knew something had to be done to really change things up, but equally recognised that there was no visible viable alternative to effect it, politically speaking.

The new Premier was talking of a billion dollar hole in the budget. Forrest reckoned he knew where the hole was: it was halfway between the new railway stations of Far Kurnell and Towkesville on the proposed loopline serving the Kurnell Peninsula. It was the desalinator! It was against Forrest's own pecuniary interests to even hint at this, but he had actually spoken out quite forthrightly against not so much desalination, as against this particular pathway to that end at that place.

Forrest had indicated desalination could be effected much more economically in conjunction with NSW's coal-fired electricity generation using waste heat in reduced-pressure distillation of seawater rather than by reverse osmosis with all of its concomitant ongoing expendables costs. He had indicated this in various posts throughout this here OLO thread: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=495&page=0#9790 It seemed incredible that OLO would not have been being monitored by someone in Macquarie St at the time, and that those doing the monitoring would not have recognised the relevance of the suggestions in a NSW context. Maybe they found the posting dates of some posts a little off-putting.

Even the power station near Wallerawang could have seawater piped to it for cooling purposes and subsequent desalination and then discharge into the Cox's River, with the desalinated water ultimately ending up as extra inflow into Warragamba Dam.

As usual, nobody had paid the slightest attention to any of the advice Forrest had freely given.

Admittedly, this waste heat utilization for desalination did seem to depend for its implementation upon NSW hanging on to its electricity business. Perhaps that was the problem. It seemed as if all State governments were somehow committed to selling out from their electricity businesses no matter what.

It seemed there was somehow a South Australian connection involved.

I have taken the time to look at possible outcomes from the power sell of.
Rees having been handed the poisoned challis in my view will sell the arms and legs.
The next elected government from what ever side will sell the rest.
We will all pay more for less service.
What next?
What will we no longer own?
I do have faith in Rees, he and his team will indeed give it a red hot go, but we will pay for others sins.
In time some form of people power will arise and it must to see an end to the idea private ownership of things as important as power, water health and maybe education is the best way.

Forrest pondered the South Australian connection.

SA was where most of the wind farms were. And for good reason, too: that was where some of the best wind was, blowing for more hours out of 24 than just about anywhere else in Australia.

With the advent of the NEM the South Australian government effectively had access to a much larger grid against which to balance the nevertheless somewhat variable generation output of all those wind turbines. With SA having somehow cornered the market for determining the legislative and permission-giving environment within which these renewable energies would operate, it was a veritable haven for such developments. More investment opportunities for the 'little men (and women)' of Australian public life to take advantage of as they all reached the apogees of their individual and collective brilliant careers.

Most people didn't think too much of these 'little people', but that hardly made them into the 'forgotten people' so beloved of the great Ming in a former time when Aussies were real Aussies.

Somewhere along the pathway of the years the country had taken a wrong turn, and somehow kept doing it. Now here everybody was, in the middle of nowhere, at Inna-bloody-mincka, importing ever increasing percentages of their liquid petroleum requirements in the face of peak oil, and bloody nothing seemingly being done about it except the selling out of existing assets to foreign interests who could then charge the local market whatever they liked for energy. Brilliant careers indeed!

Of course the real problem, in the face of peak oil, was not that there was any shortage of renewable replacement energy, but that there was such a huge potential overplus of it! In Australia, few local interests were game to go first, because they knew they could be out-competed by the 'Big Boys' of trans-national corporatism if once those 'Boys' decided they wanted a slice (or all) of the Aussie pie.

It seemed anti-Australian interests must have somehow (and somewhere) got control of the ballot box.

"Had it happened first in South Australia?", Forrest wondered.

Belly wrote, "The next elected government from what ever side will sell the rest."

Why so, Belly?

Do you think we live in a democracy or don't you?

If you think we do, what makes you fear that the clearly expressed will of the majority is likely to be ignored following the next elections?

Do you think that acceptable?

If not, what do you think should be done about it?

Daggett - Belly is correct, we are on the slippery slope and the rest of our utilities will be sold off to a public private partnership at a vastly inflated cost so Macquarie Bank can make their million broking the deal [Why do you think they are called the millionaires factory?]

Our democracy is in the capable hands of News Limited run by crusty old Rupert who brags that Australia elects the givernment he wants. In the United States News Limited is trumpeting a McGain Victory. Old Rupert makes more money from privatised utilities he is rich enough not to worry about the common good.

On a more cheerful note have you read Nicholas Gruen's latest piece? http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7881 "Iemma's power out"

billie read the link thanks, daggert I without shame am an activist and want much the same as you.
I was at conference and saw our betrayal.
I am not looking forward but back at what we have lost, I see no reason to think we will be treated Any better in the future.
But one day a word I regard as not dead just resting, solidarity will lead to people power, far too many forget just what past generations who lived by that word won for us.

And that was another thing about South Australia. Back in 2006 its Legislative Council had censored Hansard, the record of Parliamentary debates! OLO contributor Anthony Marinac had written an article called "Shaking the foundations of parliamentary privilege" about it. See: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4919&page=0 . Forrest had posted a comment on the article, here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4919#71768

Forrest remembered having gained some sense of a special South Australian role or involvement in the early days of the (unlawful) centralizing and digitising of the keeping of the Commonwealth electoral rolls, back in the eighties. "That's right", Forrest recalled, "there was a discrepancy of several hundred thousand enrolments Australia-wide between the rolls as printed for the 1987 Federal elections and the published monthly certifications of total enrolments, and the separate keeping of the enrolments for SA on the SA government computer system had given the lie as to when that discrepancy had arisen. There had been a surge in total enrolments before the rolls closed, and the SA figures had constituted a benchmark which indicated that the surge had happened before the elections were announced, contrary to claims that the announcement was the cause of the surge!"

The OLO Article "Fencing wire and mirrors: the world of the National Energy System" by Gavan McDonnell, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585 , had highlighted the effective disfranchisement of NSW, Queensland, Tasmanian and Victorian State electors so far as legislation affecting operation of, or participation in, the NEM was concerned.

"Could some unidentified anti-Australian interests effectively have nobbled BOTH sides of politics in Australia", Forrest wondered, "working through the ballot box?". It seemed incredible, but all the signs were there. If it was true that hundreds of thousands of somehow suspect enrolments could be moved about and then used to claim votes, then it was pretty much game, set, and match for the hijacking of Aussie public policy!

With respect to democracy, that all looked to Forrest pretty much like three strikes! Someone should be out.

Forrest looked out over the harbour to the heads, and beyond.

It was another perfect Aussie day, not a cloud in the sky from horizon to horizon. Just like yesterday.

September the 11th had come and gone without any aeroplanes flying into the building. Yesterday, too, had seen Forrest succeed in having the lift music changed. It was astounding how much influence, if not power, one could wield as the penthouse occupant with the building management without even having to pull rank. They had ever so willingly put the theme music to 'The Thomas Crown Affair' on in his personal express lift.

'Windmills of the Mind' was so evocative! Every time he heard it Forrest could just see (and hear) those gigantic blades that funded his lifestyle now rising, now falling, gracefully, smoothly, relentlessly, making dollar after dollar as they turned. The wind was no longer free: Forrest was able to charge for it, and that made him proud. And to think, he hadn't had to pay for a single one of those windmills! The Wind Garden of the Dispossessed in SA really was an absolutely capital wind farm. All in all it really gave one quite a lift.

Bungendore. It sounded like something out of J.K.Rowling. Perhaps it was the name of a wizard. That'd be right! Bungendore, the Wizard of Oz. "Gone with the Wind, more like", thought Forrest, "first you see him, then you don't".

Down in Macquarie Street the farce continued apace. The new government, or at least part of it, had been caught with its pants down! "Not my problem" thought Forrest, as he refocused upon the real issues confronting Oz.

All this recent talk of Chile and Allende and Pinochet that had infested the thread had somehow caused the penny to drop in Forrest's mind. Oz really needed for there to be a coup! How to have one, yet avoid the situation of the cure being worse than the disease, that was the problem.

Forrest had the answer.

Ta Daaa. The vidconf alert! Hu wanted to talk.

Hu could not hide his amazement at Forrest never having met the Governor-General of Australia. "You must have killed an Englishman in a former life", said Hu, in his usual inscrutable way. (Their wasn't much point to being Middlekingdomian if you weren't inscrutable.) The interpreter added, "it is just a Middlekingdomian expression" when he had seen the puzzled look on Forrest's face.

Face. That was the key to everything, in the Middle Kingdom.

Forrest's consultancy was sought after because Hu, and the vast majority of the Middle Committee, recognised that he, Forrest, had a rare grasp of the intricacies of the appointment of Governor-General, and the enormous potentialities for the creative exercise of power in unexpected and, indeed, face-saving ways, that it offerred.

(Power was what this thread was all about, right? Forrest was determined the thread was not going to go belly-up just because of a dearth of ideas in places that were supposed to count. If there was to be a helpful spin-off from his chats with Hu, Forrest wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. It beat talking to oneself!)

"Free Tibet" asserted countless unauthorised graffiti-like advertisments across the world. It was a source of profound embarrassment to the Middle Kingdom, an embarrassment only compounded by the increasingly frequent graffitic responses, "where do you get this free Tibet?". The Middlekingdomians knew better than anyone that there was no such thing as something for nothing, and their inability to satisfy this pent-up demand and expectation had been causing loss of face.

Forrest's explanation of how, by appointing the Dalai Lama as governor-general of the GG of SWA, the Middle Kingdom would be seen to be addressing Tibetans in the terms of "Most Honourable Opponent", was well received. With this status accorded, in circumstances where every extra policeman posted to the occupation forces in the GG of SWA may well have meant one less in Tibet, an honourable face-saving withdrawal could be achieved in the face of a common external threat.

Orchestrating a coup in Australia was not going to be easy. There were a number of obvious hurdles that would need to be overcome if it was to be achieved.

First, and most obvious, was the fact that Spanish was not the native language. There was no real English word for 'Junta' (pronounced like 'Udson, wiv a haitch). 'Dictator' just wouldn't do: the English had tried that briefly after the events of 1642; it just wasn't a word you could use in polite society, and in any case did not imply plurality. And, as everybody knew, you couldn't seriously be regarded as having had a proper coup unless you ended up with a Junta, a plurality of power holders. Like a power board! We're talking electricity here, right?

Secondly, in time of peace, there was hardly significant 'military' in Australia from which to get your 'Junta', even if you did find an English word for it. Juntas always came from the 'military', didn't they? And in any case, such pitifully little military as Australia ever had in peacetime was nearly always on full rotation to the various overseas live-firing training grounds where they kept up with the state of the art. No pool of generals from which any could be spared for a Junta, in contradistinction to the situation commonly prevailing in Spanish-speaking countries where the generally more relatively numerous military hardly ever saw an overseas live-firing training ground. Apart from all of which, there was a profound and historic reluctance on the part of Australian senior defence force officers to have any involvement with politics whatsoever.

Indeed, it was precisely because of this aloofness from politics that recently retired senior officers had been so acceptable in the appointments of Governor, and Governor-General, over the years, in Australia. That, and the fact that such military service almost inevitably meant that any given Vice-Regal appointee had been prepared to put his life on the line for Australia at some point without having the option of resignation in the face of difficulty.

Forrest looked out across Botany Bay to the Kurnell Peninsula from his conservatory style penthouse' southern balcony. The desalinator was a distinctive ugly scar in the distance. It was good being able to make this power play on the 'NSW Power without pride' thread, Forrest thought, as if there was to be any trouble over plotting a coup it would be Belly that would get the blame for it. It was his thread, after all. Belly was responsible for anything that started here.

Forrest finished his long black cafe arabica, and returned to the task at hand: plotting a coup in Gert-by-Sea.

After pondering the two obstacles described in the previous post Forrest realised there was, of course, the further obstacle of the deep-seated Australian revulsion at openly autocratic rule, which would logically be expected as the likely consequence of a coup.

Although there was seemingly an unspoken consensus that various elected bodies were performing less than satisfactorily, Ozzians were very leery of anything that threatened to take away, or negate, their democratic institutions. Whilst the vast majority absolutely loved it when there was that very rare event, a dismissal, most also knew that it was soon to be 'more of the same' with essentially no effective choice possible that would give them a fresh, yet workable, electable alternative to the Liblabs or Lablibs.

It was all profoundly frustrating.

As usual, the solution was right under everybody's nose.

It was contained within a little-known work that had first been published in July 1900 in the United Kingdom. Anyone with whom the name Muir Mackenzie rang a bell probably had a copy of it, although almost certainly not a first edition thereof. Whether, being in possession of it, they had ever read it with understanding, was another matter. Few had.

It was, essentially, a handbook for a coup d'etat.

It bore the facsimile of a circular seal showing the Crown of St Edward above stellar backgrounded doublecrossed Mace and Rod.

Its title was "The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia", ISBN 0 644 06322 X.

While I have enjoyed your posts FG I am a bit of a rough diamond and tend to look at recent events in a different way, nearly.
Yesterday the ALP got a boot in the bottom, oh yes a very big boot.
Mostly earned by rodents now leaving the ship, and a few welded on of little use but hard to remove.
We will still see our power sold.
In small steps.
Because I come from that party forgive me for thinking we got of lightly.
And for understanding we will be better for the kicking, after all we could not be worse could we?
Nathan ,bloke I note you once handled rubbish bins, a skill you may still need.
I had better not put into print what 9 tenths of my party is saying but if JT gets near a half full bin tip him in mate please.

The Constitution was an inspired document. The first twenty one words of its Preamble explained how.

Getting the Constitution had been, for the people of Oz, very much like the borrowing of money. Provided you didn't really need the money, you could always borrow pretty well as much as you liked. So it had been with the Constitution. Drafted and debated by the best in the business at the time, many of whom were far from convinced of the real need for the Federation for which it was to become the ground-rules, it was a Constitution money could not buy. Rock solid.

Those that wanted Federation got more than they were asking for. They got the Constitution. They deserved it.

Forrest loved reading the Constitution, line upon line.

Even the seemingly dullest bits sometimes yielded absolute gems of insight. Forrest also liked reading between its lines, where some of its most exciting possibilities, lying hidden in plain sight, yielded themselves up to the discerning and inquiring mind. Necessary implications were such fascinating things!

Politicians in Oz, by and large, hated having the Constitution read to them.

Row upon row of them, year upon year, had revealed nought but the dullest appreciation of its content. They saw it not as the infallible guide to the discharge of their public trust, but rather as something to be 'got around', it seemed. Even when in opposition from time to time, they had failed to notice how unconstitutional some of the things were that had been done; yea, indeed, how at least one purported alteration to the Constitution had not even secured the necessary 'double majority' required by Section 128!

Australia, it seemed, both needed, and was ready for, a sabbatical from such *discerning* politicians, be they Lablib or Liblab.

The coup Forrest was advocating, and that the Constitution permitted, could bring that political sabbatical about.

GrahamY, and Belly, breathed deep sighs of relief. The shadow of the Commonwealth Crimes Act that had seemed to be hanging over OLO as a facilitating agency in the plotting of a coup had moved away.

Forrest looked out from his penthouse to the east, over the electoral Division of Wentworth. It was a grey, overcast day in Sydney. Forrest was guessing it was a grey, overcast day, figuratively speaking, over all of Gert-by-Sea. Yesterday there had been a power-grab. The names Hindenburg, Eckener, and ..... Godwin came to mind. It had been a bit of a battle to remember the last name in time.

Not to worry. This thread was about power without pride. First, the lablibs had embraced Iemma (who had his own power agenda) and duly imploded. Now the liblabs, hell bent on imitating the lablibs, had embraced a new Leader, who was on record as standing for much the same thing. Soon there would be no power for Ozzians (perhaps not in any sense or at any price), so that pretty much took care of the pride aspect of things, didn't it! Forrest felt, all in all, somewhat vindicated in his views on OLO expressed, re Malcolm B Turnbull.

Veni, vidi, vindi. (I came, I saw, I used vindimills.)

Neither Forrest, nor any of his 'vindimills', was any fan of Le Grand Mal.

To Forrest, Le Grand Mal was a bit of a constitutional epileptic. Not a good fit. Not in a fit.

Better not come on the Forum. Might get stabbed in the portico!

The more he thought about it, the more Forrest reckoned that the grand plan went something like this:

First, create a National Energy Market (with fencing wire and mirrors) in a way that is in effective violation of the Constitution;

Second, strip and scramble all the erstwhile public assets of the States into a NEMMCO, or NEMMCO acolyte;

Third, have all State governments run dead and get really on the nose with the public;

Fourth, arrange for Le Grand Mal to become Leader of the liblabs;

Fifth, arrange for the leader of the lablibs, Federally, to 'elevate' the discussion to that of 'a republic' and also get on the nose with the public;

Sixth, have an election and destroy the Constitution.

Mal's your uncle!

Yes, I also find Forrest's posts amusing, although the relationship to the topic at hand is sometimes not obvious, as I am sure Forrest himself would agree.

Forrest, I think you would do everyone a great favour, if would consider copying your posts to a blog site and adding tags which indicate the subject which the posts relate to and find other ways to structure them.

Just leaving them in often inaccessible parts of OLO is a bit of a waste.

(I have been intending to do the same with my OLO posts for years.)

---

Anyhow, I have written an article which analyses the grotesque newsmedia misreporting of the electricity privatisation issue which may be of interest. It is called:

"Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate"

... and can be found at http://candobetter.org/node/765

The teaser is:

Analysis of the reporting of electricity privatisation initiatives
in New South Wales brings disturbing confirmation that the major
Australian newsmedia does not accurately report essential facts on
issues of vital concern to us. Indeed, it often acts as a conduit
for propaganda against our best interest.

---

Comments either there or here are welcome.

Forrest had, in recent days, been going over some old Constitutional ground: the 1973 challenges to the constitutional validity of the Senate (Representation of Territories) Act 1973. He had read the decisions of the several High Court Justices in that case.

Forrest had found, hiding in plain sight, a seemingly unrecognised necessary implication of the Constitution!

One which, moreover, had seemed to have escaped the notice of all the learned Justices of that day sitting in judgement on that matter (although Murphy J. came very, very close to recognising it), if their several published decisions and reasons therefore were anything to go by.

In all the judgements no recognition had been seemingly given to the necessary implication of the words of the fifth paragraph of Section 128 of the Constitution that "No alteration diminishing the proportionate representation of any State in either House of the Parliament ..........., shall become law unless the majority of the electors voting in that State approve the proposed law.". So, by necessary implication, there were at least TWO types of referendum provided for by Section 128, one being express in connection with proposed ALTERATION to the Constitution, the other being necessarily implied as being required at any time the Parliament EXERCISED ITS POWERS UNDER SECTION 122 with respect to the representation of territories in either House of the Parliament.

Given that the validity of the 1973 legislation was upheld, there should then have been a referendum held in every State, in two parts, as to whether a majority of the electors voting thereat approved of the necessarily diminished proportionate representation of their respective State in the respective Houses thereby proposed. It would have to have been approved in every State for the territory representation legislation to have taken effect. This, however, had never been done!

Forrest marveled greatly.

Of course, this discovery had little to do with power, be it the temporal or electrical sort. Forrest certainly had none of the former sort. It did have a little to do with pride, or more correctly, credibility, however. Forrest's, that is.

'Nil Bastardum Carborundum', Forrest thought.

OOHHH,

Its all a grand conspiracy in which even our supposed guardians of the fourth estate have been co-opted. All those free thinkers out there who can see through the capitalist conspiracy will be glad that you, Dagget, are out there exposing the lies and deception. Maybe you should start your own newspaper, or would that just arouse the ire of the military-industrial complex.

They could be watching you, right now.

DOH!!

Daggett,

You are quite right in saying, in relation to some of my posts, that "..... the relationship to the topic at hand is sometimes not obvious, .....". Where a thread like this one has seemingly run its course with respect to topicality, it can perhaps reasonably be used, without disrespect to the opening poster or the hogging of the discussion, as a vehicle for the provocation of further thought in relation to the subject so opened up. Or as a means of putting something on public record that may not presently be recognised as accurate or relevant, but which one strongly suspects will in future become so, and can then be linked to from within (or outside) OLO.

As an example of this, see the link contained within this recent post of mine to the Macolm (sic) Turnbull topic: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2144#45459 .

Seldom can a new perspective be introduced in just 350 words. So I must post serially. If the serial has to be read in its totality to get the point across, its component parts desirably need to be entertaining in themselves. I strive to make them so. Now I have no way of knowing what proportion of OLO viewers use the index page settings to display more than the default 5 topics per discussion area in order of recency of posting, which would seem to be one of the ways in which viewers could monitor a particular thread (like this one) as it otherwise gets pushed down the sequential list of topics.

I suppose the other way of monitoring would be for a viewer to use the 'Find out more about this user' icon, and follow my (or any others') posting history in the users index area. Do many users do this? I have no idea.

Interesting, the claim on this site: http://www.beyondlogic.org/southaustraliapower/#Economics , under the heading "Australia’s Greenhouse Future ‘lies’ in the hands of Roam Consulting - or does it?", that Geodynamics Ltd (Hot Dry Rock) has Hunter Valley prospects!

Why go to Innamincka in such circumstances?

FG I would not miss your posts for quids, sorry old term for real money.
A great man from unions NSW has a great end to his latest mail outs I can not remember the words, but it amounts to we beat the buggers.
I looking back on the thread can not but revel in the stack of lost heads from post one till now, and nothing beats the sweet smell of revenge.
My hurt is gone my joy at the fall of those heads each one of them is endless.
My hopes for my party restored, after our impending flogging in the by elections we just may stabilize.

Forrest seemed to need less sleep these days. He had been awake since long before dawn. He had been thinking thoughts.

Forrest's 'thinking room' in the very extensive penthouse had a northeast aspect. Magnificent harbour views. The room itself was far too big to be called an office: it had some of the characteristics of a boardroom, yet at the same time some of those of an intimate restaurant or private corporate dining room. Definitely not a smoke-filled backroom!

There was no doubt about it, Forrest was reaping where he had not sown, and drinking from wells he had not dug. This penthouse was the very antithesis of any ante-bellum sesquicentenial plantation mansion. It had the most stylish and elegant of mod cons. Real Finnish. How he had fallen into it, well, frankly, Forrest didn't give a damn. It had come with the wind! And this morning was another day!

Forrest awoke from his little reverie, and looked up.

The east was red!

The sun was about to rise.

The realization suddenly came upon Forrest, like the first rays of the rising sun, that Peak Oil could be real good for Oz, if Oz played its hand right.

What needed to happen was to get stuck right in to phasing a mixture of Hot Dry Rock and Solar Pondage energy storage into base load electricity co-generation with a mammoth coal-to-liquid fuel conversion project. NSW could concurrently use market forces to relatively quickly take over the NEM, perhaps driving some ill-advisedly privatised operations in other States to the wall in the process.

Oz could hugely exceed the internationally desired targets for conversion to renewable energy sources, saluting the global warmist flag in best, most sincere, Aussie 'three bags full' style. All the while making lots of exportable refined liquid petroleum products to a desperately short-supplied world. Oz wouldn't need no 'free trade agreements'. Oz would set its own terms of trade with the rest of the world. Oz wasn't Gert-by-Sea for nothing.

And no oil company involved anywhere!

Horus looked towards the growing hole at Kurnell.
Was it the site of the desalination plant – or something a whole lot more sinister?

Was it mere coincidence that a black hole had appeared in NSW labours budget about the time the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was turned on. A hole that sucked labors best & brightest into political oblivion.

Others were also showing an interest in Kurnell.That Belly character, who nightly came in to the karaoke bar dressed in his union T-shirt and sang “we have the power”. And then there was that Forrest character in the northeast penthouse. He’d seen them both more than once staring out towards Kurnell.

Suddenly the building vibrated, The exterior lift, Forrest aboard, dashed by in express mode. Speak of the devil! He made an entrance like the mail man at the Chevy Chase Funny Farm. Must do that a dozen times a day! And what’s with the harlequin outfit?

He’d been keeping tabs on Forrest through his trusty PROED100-SKY scope but since the new tenant, with his portable terrace garden, had moved in between , he couldn’t see the Forrest for the trees.

Think he’d make some adjustments to that express lift. He chuckled to himself , he’d like to be there to see Forrest’s face when the lift jams between 20 & 21 and his 60ish muzak morphs to full on rap, but, by that time he’d be rifling his apartment.

He gave thought again to the CERN –Kurnell connection.
There were two mooted side affects.
Blackholes – he ticked that box.
But what of the other, a visitor from the future?
How would you even recognise such a person?
Well… they likely have superior intellect, charisma, be inspirational.
Has anyone meeting that description been evident recently, he scratched his head.

Then the morning papers lobbed onto his desk.
The headline shouted: ‘Turnbull elected lib leader’
He gave the second box a big tick – case proven!

Horus I must do something about my voice.
Or was it the rum?
Me and the blokes went out for a beer or five.
See yesterday was THE day.
The day the Italian stallion was formerly gelded.
Song I was singing was meant to be solidarity forever, maybe it was the rum.
You should have joined us my shirt is a bit second hand this morning, pie stained and smells like , well we know what it smells like .
Should have changed it before bed, usually do, but could not find my Kevin 07 shirt.
Thanks bloke, my head hurts , self inflicted but your joke about Mal got me laughing again.

Forrest hadn't intended to brag about the fact that his personal express lift was external to the building. It was not as if he had determined the building specifications himself, or that the exterior lift represented some outworking of his personal drive or genius in any architectural sense. That credit was due to others. Forrest was simply doing the best he could with what he'd got.

Whether anyone could observe his comings or goings was quite outside the scope of his concern. Building security overall was excellent. You couldn't even access the express lift from anywhere but the secure basement building reception lobby, which had all of the security of bank premises. The lift itself was bullet-proof, and contained both an emergency floor-to-ceiling window exit and a combination rocket belt and ballistically deployable base-jumping parachute kit. You could not activate the exit unless the kit had first been donned. Forrest could understand why someone may have misidentified the two coloured blue and high-visibility yellow action-back overalls he frequently wore as a harlequin suit, especially if such an observer had not done a day's manual labour in his or her life. C'est la guerre.

Forrest idly checked the MP3 player in the helmet of the bale-out kit to ensure that it was playing in full synchronism with the lift music. It was. The architects had thought of everything. Nothing was to be permitted to interrupt one's train of thought, or auditory enjoyment, not even a lift failure.

The building manager had let slip to Forrest that building management were on the lookout for a lobby receptionist. Desirably female, early to mid-thirties, well groomed in a PR sense, full of a sense of her own importance. Ideally, the sort of receptionist that would make anyone who did not have genuine essential business in the building want to turn and go the other way on sight. Forrest said he would keep that in mind.

Debouching from the lift into the penthouse, Forrest remembered a perfectly qualified candidate.

Reba.

The coup. The political sabbatical. That was the task at hand, Forrest reminded himself.

It was going to be all the more necessary, if Ozzians at large were going to be able to ride the wave of opportunity represented by Peak Oil to their advantage, to get this coup on the road as quickly as possible.

A very interesting point had been raised in the OLO article 'Decay in a time of penury', by Des Griffin, see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7915&page=0 That point was that if NSW, being in a position of having a very low ratio of debt to gross State product and well able to borrow safely, was to borrow significantly (in this case to implement the coal-fired generation waste heat desalination/solar pondage accumulation/HDR project) it would have to get Loans Council approval. Such approval not being, in the normal course of events, anticipated, any coup would have to encompass not just the Commonwealth, but most, if not all, of the several States, if anticipated difficulties with respect to Loans Council approvals were to be forestalled.

An infrequently considered aspect of the office of Governor-General, given the indissolubility of the Federal Commonwealth, is that of its implicit co-ordinative role with respect to the offices of State Governors. In circumstances, for example, of a Governor-General coming to the reasonable suspicion that both Commonwealth and a number of States governments were acting, or had acted, together, in a manner subversive of the Constitution, then under the terms of Section 61 of the Constitution that Governor-General may well have a responsibility to co-ordinate dismissals of State governments simultaneously with any possible required or indicated dismissal of a Commonwealth government.

It would seem in such circumstances there to be an implicit subordination of the respective State Governors to the Governor-General.

This begs the question as to what could possibly move a Governor-General to take such a view, and then, in turn, take such a course.

Forrest suspected complicit evasion of the Constitution's Section 99.

Section 99 of the Constitution says:

"The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, or revenue, give preference to one State or any part thereof over another State or any part thereof.".

Gavan McDonell, in his OLO article 'Fencing wire and mirrors: the world of the National Energy System' ( http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585&page=0 ), made the statements:

"In the early 1990s, with a national system now technologically possible, economically cheaper and socially more secure, governments faced a constitutional question: is it legally possible? A national electricity system wasn't an option considered by the writers of the Constitution.";

and,

"There were, however, problems in getting it all together. One law covering all that was needed couldn't be passed by the Commonwealth, because the Constitution didn't allow it. And at any rate the states wouldn't accept it. They were jealously guarding their energy assets, which were, in fact, milch cows, each year providing steaming flows of public revenue.".

It would have been nice to be able to ask the writer as to exactly what he saw the constitutional problems as being, by posting a comment on the article. This was no longer an option, as the discussion had been closed by OLO and archived. Still, Forrest reckoned that he had some idea of where the pressure to privatise NSW' electricity was really coming from.

Forrest reckoned it was from the Future Fund, and those who stood to benefit from it in due course.

If power could be privatised in all States, then it would almost certainly be that one way or another the Future Fund would be able to secure at least a hefty slice, if not the whole, of the electricity pie, via shareholdings in foreign corporate ownership of those power assets. Great for all the retired politicians and Commonwealth public servants. Nowhere near so great for all the other Ozzians. The National Electricity Market business was a sure fire thing in an increasingly uncertain world, almost as good as holding the power of taxation!

TBC

Forrest fumed.

"Talk about abuse of power and snouts in the trough!" thought Forrest.

Gavan McDonell had also observed in his OLO article (linked to above) that:

"South Australia could have the debates and voting and all that carry on, and everyone else, including the Commonwealth, would pass what is called an Application Act. ...........those Application Acts also provided that if the South Australians amended the law at any time, after agreement with all the other jurisdictions, then those amendments would apply everywhere else, without further debate in any of the other Parliaments, including the Commonwealth.".

Forrest reckoned that those Commonwealth application acts were the smoking gun in a case of collusive evasion of the provisions of Section 99 of the Constitution. It was seeming evidence that the five eastern States', and the Commonwealth, governments had all knowingly been party to this evasion. It couldn't be any other way! The five eastern States had either been advantaged, or disadvantaged, whatever the case might turn out to be, with respect to Western Australia. It didn't matter which. WA was not part of the NEM! The Commonwealth had acquiesced in the giving of preference to one State over another State!

"That had to be worth a gubernatorially generalistic bullet" Forrest thought. "On second thoughts, one gubernatorially generalistic and five plain gubernatorial bullets", Forrest thought yet again for the fourth time, "just for evading the Constitution".

But it gets worse. As McDonell says, "We have all been disenfranchised. .... we - you, me, all of us, even the South Australians - have been dudded on democracy. Do you think they would use this malarkey for, say, a national child care system, or a national medical scheme? Of course not - the mums and dads would be in the streets. But in as crucial an area of policy as energy, they use it BECAUSE THEY THINK IT'S TOO TECHNICAL FOR THE PUNTERS TO NOTICE.".

No wonder Costa had been trying to talk up a $billion hole in the budget! Bum-rushing the sellout on behalf of all the Snouts that had been in the trough!

Forrest pondered the Governor-General's possible options, should she act pursuant to Section 61 of the Constitution.

Section 61 had been a prime target for removal for the republic push in 1999.

Section 61 said:

"The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen's representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth."

There was no intention that comparable responsibility would ever be placed upon a president in any republic that might have replaced Australia's Constitutional Monarchy. So should it have ever been that covert electoral fraud took hostage to any extent the political process in Australia, the 'safety fuze' currently effectively provided in the form of the Governor-General's reserve powers to send a government to the polls would be gone.

Now there was a conundrum, wasn't there? Electoral fraud having taken hostage the elective political process, a Governor-General sends a fraudulently electorally assisted government back to those self same tainted polls!

How could anyone be confident the outcome of any fresh election was truly representative of the electorate's choice? And what if any alternative political organisation available for the electors to choose had also been effectively taken hostage over the years by the same fraudulent process?

The present situation in Oz was a case in point. The opposition is now led by the person who led the republic push in 1999. Should a Governor-General send, directly or indirectly, one Commonwealth and five State governments (all being presently Labor governments) to the people over the power swindle, what real choice would exist for the electors? That between Tweedledumb and Tweedle-even-dumber?

No wonder, in the face of all those little niggling worries and signs of something being not quite right in Oz Election Land, so many refused to face the possibility of widespread insidious electoral rorting. Vehement denial of such a thing had to be a Dogma, an Article of Faith!

But Forrest knew a completely lawful way out.

It had been entertaining seeing the Great Republican display his knowledge of Sections 53 and 56 of the Constitution, and simultaneously the lack of it amongst the rest of his colleagues, and also government members, in his little stunt in relation to the single pension. They'd had to get the Clerk to explain the Constitutional position to them!

Woo Hoo!

Forrest felt the need to pause for a while before resorting to the Constitution yet again in furtherance of the coup in Oz. Good and all a diet as the Constitution was, many were simply not used to such food for thought, and might easily get legislative indigestion if they had to cop too much at a sitting.

Around the OLO traps there were frequent observations being made by posters that the differences, policy wise, between the major political parties were becoming all but indistinguishable. Now, of course, such a phenomenon could well be a natural consequence of all persons of influence in both party groupings just happening to have a uniformly sound grasp of the realities of governance in Gert-by-Sea, and just happening to come up with similar policies as a result.

Alternatively, this perceived indistinguishability could have resulted from the outworking of an across-the-board nobbling of politics by means of many years' of sustained electoral manipulation having produced a crop of likemindedly ductile politicians across the political spectrum, the idea being that those behind the nobbling would get the policies they wanted irrespective of which major party was seemingly 'in charge', or happening to get elected.

It would be a worry if the latter scenario applied, because that would mean that even if the Governor-General gave the gubernatorially generalistic bullet to the Commonwealth government, and the five eastern States' Governors did likewise in their respective domains, the relevant electoral law as at the time of the Big D (or Big A, as you prefer) applying would have no prospect of being changed was it revealed to be in any way facilitative of electoral rorting.

But this minor detail didn't faze Phorrest.

Just had to sneak back.
COSTA!he is gone.
His head sits on the top of the heap.
Post one in this thread told of betrayal.
Of fear the party had fallen into private owner ship.
This post revels in the sweetest fruit.
Victory.
Revenge
Even hope for a future I thought we never had
Give it to them FG
My cup runs over with joy.

As the days were lengthening at their most rapid rate during the year, Forrest was waking earlier and earlier.

This morning had been slightly different though. Forrest was woken by the email alert at 4:38:58 AM. There had been a new post on the '9/11 Truth' topic! The last but one had been just after one o'clock, and Forrest had seen it already. Clearly Forrest wasn't the only one whose mind was occupied by some of the more unsettling aspects of high-rise living.

Forrest had immediately gone for a ride in his lift. It helped focus his thinking, riding in the lift: 'Windmills of the Mind' and all that jazz. Besides which it was quite environmentally responsible just riding in the lift in the early hours of the morning. Off-peak electricty was plentiful. Pity not to use some of it up. "Puts a few more pennies in the budget black hole" Forrest said (as in respect to just about everything when it came to Forrest talking) to himself.

The real world of OLO was obtruding a bit these days upon Forrest's otherwise single-minded pursuit of truth, justice, and the Australian way. Black ops were always a worry, and never more so than when one was in the middle of planning a spectacular demonstration of Constitutional Monarchy in action.

Could the WTC job have been the mother of all black ops?

One thing that niggled Forrest concerning the suggestion that a controlled demolition may have been also involved in those buildings' collapses was the fact that some years earlier there had been what seemed to have been a terrorist attack in the basement of one of those buildings. What an opportunity the subsequent crime scene investigation would have provided for the very sorts of people who characteristically could be expected to have expertise in black ops to have had unimpeded and unobserved access! They could even have emplaced any demolition preparations at that time! Forrest wondered.

Through the one-way bullet proof glass Forrest carefully observed the outside face of the building.

The Governor-General can't go for a minute without a Federal Executive Council.

It has been conventionally the case that the Governor-General chooses Federal Executive Councillors from amongst the membership of the Parliament. It is not binding upon the Governor-General that she do so.

In circumstances where, for example, the across-the-board integrity of the electoral process itself may be in question, temporary apparent departure from the convention upon which responsible government is based, ie. that ministries be chosen from the Parliament, is defensible. Section 64 of the Constitution prescribes a conditional limit to the tenure of office of Federal Executive Councillors of three months.

Was there to be such an unprecedented departure from convention as to the appointment of a Federal Executive Council from elsewhere than among the membership of the Parliament, The Governor-General is constitutionally free to appoint whomsoever she will to such office. Such choice, unless it were to be made by lot, would necessarily involve the exercise of political judgement on the part of the Governor-General. Aloofness from the making of political judgements has heretofore been a characteristic of all who have held this office.

Constrained thereby to the making of such choice by way of lot, the Governor-General would be confronted by the absence of any legal power to compel such as upon whom the lot falls, to serve as Executive Councillors and Ministers of State. Recasting of the lot, in any attempt to substitute for those who may beg off in the absence of there being any legal compulsion to serve, would only degrade the integrity of the process of selection by lot.

What if, however, there existed a class of persons, outside the bounds of what could normally be regarded as 'politics', that had already been chosen by lot and were potentially under legal constraint to serve should the Governor-General so command?

Forrest called to mind the dictum of never asking a question, in Question Time, to which you did not already know the answer.

Forrest was abiding by it here.

Back to the Constitution!

Well may it be said "Back to the Constitution", but with nothing saved to pay for the acts of the Governor-General in effecting a coup in Oz, how?

When it came to appropriating money from the treasury, the good old Constitution was tighter than a proverbial piscatorial anus. Section 83 of the Constitution provided that "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury of the Commonwealth except under appropriation made by law."

Withdrawals for payment of the salaries of the Queen's Ministers of State were clearly Constitutionally provided for in Section 66, as was that of the Governor-General herself in Section 3. By necessary implication, so too would be moneys required to conduct Federal elections, should ongoing provision not already exist in the estimates already voted by the Parliament as at the time of any dissolution thereof. That was about it.

Supply: the money needed to sustain the business of government.

It was the rock opposite to the hard place in which, increasingly, it was now coming to be recognised that the nation of the Ozzians was between. The hard place being the increasingly widespread disdain and distrust of the offerings by way of would-be representatives endorsed by the established political parties, nobbled as it was suspected they all were, on the part of the Ozzian electors at large.

Supply, the lawful appropriation of moneys from the treasury, was utterly dependent upon being voted by the Parliament. Without a Parliament sitting and voting supply, the money for running all of the apparatus of government could only be kept being lawfully drawn from the consolidated revenue fund up to the extent of the last vote thereon. When the moneys already voted ran out, functions of government would have to start shutting down.

The Governor-General could not run the country on executive authority alone for any extended period by drawing upon the Treasury.

Should many Ozzians, between them, be prepared to subscribe to a fund set up by the Governor-General, not under the Commonwealth Treasury, perhaps Oz could be run somewhat longer on executive authority alone.

Forrest ruminated.

It was interesting remembering Tirath Khemlani.

Once, many years ago, some Federal Executive Councillors were thought to have been intending to circumvent the requirement for the voting of supply by borrowing lots and lots of petrodollars, but ultimately nothing came of the plan.

How they were going to satisfy the lenders that it was an official borrowing by the Commonwealth of Australia without the funds being first deposited and receipted into the Treasury was beyond Forrest. Once deposited into the Treasury they would be caught in the net of the Section 83 provision, surely. The funds could go in, but not come back out.

Not that Ozzians need have any worries about the country being able to be run under executive authority without a Parliament for an excessive time. Section 6 of the Constitution provided "There shall be a session of the Parliament once at least in every year, so that twelve months shall not intervene between the last sitting of the Parliament in one session and its first sitting in the next session."

Forrest didn't really see that there would necessarily be problems with supply with respect to the coup, but it was nice to have a plan should it prove necessary or advantageous to use the full amount of time that the Constitution otherwise might allow between any prorogation of the Parliament, its subsequent dissolution, and the election and sitting of a new Parliament.

It seemed nobody had ever thought of giving or lending unsecured on trust to the Governor-General as an alternative source of funding of executive government to that of making withdrawals from the Treasury. That would be the ultimate voting of supply! Direct from the people. Imagine if many of them were prepared to do that! That would be the ultimate referendum on keeping the Constitutional Monarchy.

There would be little problem for the Governor-General in having such a fund properly overseen. Section 68 covered it. As Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces she could second any number of defence force officers to actually administer and audit the fund.

Forrest had not exactly been pleased to see the greatest-ever one day plunge in the Dow, but even the blackest of clouds were liable to have silver linings. The wind still blew, in South Australia.

The music still played inside Forrest's head.

"Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind"

In the real world the giant blades of the wind turbines kept turning, cranking out the electricity hour after most hours. And Forrest had a 20 year government contract for the supply of a lot of electricity. Even if demand collapsed badly, there would still be need for some electricity, and Forrest had access to the cheapest there was, electricity that might get even cheaper as the Wind Gardens of the now Doubly-Dispossessed, that had no government contracts, desperately sought markets that could actually pay their electricity bills.

Huge numbers of people stood to be badly let down in the fallout from the seemingly likely world-wide financial crisis. There were already coming aplenty the glib attributions of all this impending dislocation of lives and livelihoods to good old 'greed'. It was far more complex than that. Greed had always been an aspect of human nature.

In Gert-by-Sea, which was a Constitutional Monarchy, it had long been the case that laws were made to mitigate the effects of unrestrained greed. In the making of such laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth, there existed a guide to the law-makers, the Constitution. In recent decades, law-makers had been neglecting the Constitution.

Forrest reckoned deception, of both the law-makers, and the people who elected them, had a greater hand in bringing this crisis upon the land.

Planning of the coup in Gert-by-Sea would now be seen to be of greater relevance than it might heretofore have been by the more dismissive and less perceptive of viewers of the OLO firmament.

It was shaping up to be the sort of day NEMMCO* dreaded. A real stinker. The forecast for Sydney was 37 degrees Celsius, That was on the coast. Inland it would go over that. People everywhere would fire up the airconditioners for the first time since last summer. Electricity demand would go through the roof.

Forrest rubbed his hands vigorously, as was his frequent habit.

It was the sort of day Forrest lived for. Spot prices for electricity would go through the roof, too. Forrest ran his eyes over the anemometer readouts permanently displayed on one of the multiple desktops his Ubuntu system allowed him to have. Forrest had taken a leaf out of Sir Sidney Kidman's book, having anemometers, and webcams, just about everywhere in the country there were wind turbines, and then some. The computers to which they were all attached constantly fed this information, via the internet, to both the office and the penthouse. All those computers had their stand-alone uninterruptible power supplies for when it was dead calm. Very 'green'. Very environmentally responsible. Bootlick, bootlick, bootlick.

The wind might well blow where it would, and most might not know whence it came or whither it went, but one way or another Forrest would, and how fast it was moving, too.

For all that the anti-actinic glazing reduced the heating load in the penthouse, it was getting a little warm. Forrest turned the airconditioning up several notches. The two big Caterpillar natural gas powered emergency generating sets in the basement of the building had been test run only a week ago. One started automatically if a blackout happened.

The mouse clicked on a windmill near Port Augus-ta,
showing at a glance how much money'd been made.
Forrest reflected "How lucky we are",
to be living off windmills in South Australe. Ja!

This privatised electricity game was really all very much like SP bookmaking. Forrest was starting to quite enjoy it.

Forrest's other name was Jack, and he was doing alright.

* National Electricity Market Management Company, for the acronym detesters. A QANGO.

It was three o'clock, and Forrest had not yet been for his daily 'Constitutional'.

Just idly glancing through Part V, the Powers of the Parliament, Forrest's eyes lit upon sub-section (v.) of Section 51. It read:

"51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-

(v.) Postal, telegraphic, telephonic, and other like services:"

Interesting.

Electricity grids used poles and wires to transmit power, similarly to the telephone network. In some places the electricity wiring was actually used as a carrier for radio communications. There was a degree of interest in electricity distributors becoming internet service providers because of this synchronicity of capabilities.

Forrest thought that that would bring electricity grids within the ambit of the "other like services" of sub-section (v.) of Section 51.. That would have meant that when it came to setting up the National Electricity Market the Commonwealth did indeed have the power to enact the co-ordinating legislation required in order for that market to function.

Why had the Commonwealth abdicated from its powers in this area in favour of South Australia being given the defining say in determining how the NEM would operate? It would have been good to be able to put this question to the comments thread to Gavan McDonell's OLO article 'Fencing wire and Mirrors: the world of the National Energy System' ( http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7585&page=0 ), in the hope of an informed response, but still nothing had been heard from OLO management regarding re-opening of archived discussions to moderator-vetted posts.

In the absence of explanation, Forrest could only conclude that the Commonwealth had something to hide that could not stay hidden if it legislated in this area. Given the proportion of generated power in Victoria that was consumed by the aluminium smelters, was NEMMCO effectively favouring Victoria at the expense of other States by farming out the subsidised supply obligations to that industry? Such would certainly run foul of Section 99.

It was amazing what one could learn on OLO, not only from the responses from users, but from the articles and the links therein. One link contained in the Article 'Peak oil and retirement', by Michael Lardelli, see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7981 , was to an essay, “Peak Oil and the Preservation of Knowledge”.

Forrest had finally got a handle upon some of the Middlekingdomian population statistics that he hadn't had when he had last spoken with Hu. It provided some very convincing argument in support of the sustainability of public order by Middlekingdomian policemen in what might come to be known as the General Gouvernement of South West Asia, that area stretching from the Pamir Knot to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, of which it was considered the Dalai Lama might become the Governor-General.

The essay had revealed "There are almost 120 boys for each 100 girls being born in China, due to the one-child policy leading parents to prefer boys to girls. Historically, this skewed ratio has meant big trouble, and one of the ways societies coped was by starting wars. .... Women are being kidnapped and sold as brides. From 2001 to 2003 China's police freed more than 42,000 kidnapped women and children. And it's only likely to get worse; one estimate puts the number of bachelors over the next decade at 40 million."

A Middlekingdomian intervention in that notoriously badly-behaved area could digest quite an attrition rate of its forces with inscrutable equanimity, Forrest thought. There'd be no more carrying on up the Khyber. Forrest wondered what the Hajj tax might be, but promptly left off worrying about it: that would be the Dalai Lama's problem.

All the more reason to get moving on the coal-to-liquid fuels project and renewable energy sourced electricity in Gert-by-Sea in a big way, thought Forrest. Liquid fuels could become extremely valuable stock in trade within a few short years.

Ozzians had best quickly resort to their notable propensity for effective team play, Forrest thought.

FG, there is a lot of interesting stuff for me to catch up with both here and elsewhere.

The key to getting through our crisis, if it can be done is to reduce our consumption of natural resources by both directly reducing our per capita consumption and by not increasing further our human population.

Only after we take that on board, should we consider coal liquefaction, nuclear, etc as a means to get us out of the difficulties we find ourslves in. If we only use the promises of new technology to allow our complacency to continue, the we will only dig ourselves in deeper.

---

An article which I recently wrote, which may be of interest is "How decades of privatisation has impoverished NSW" at http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2570 http://candobetter.org/node/823

Forrest had been busy.

One of the calls on Forrest's time was a carbon sequestration project for which he was a consultant. Forrest wasn't convinced that atmospheric carbon dioxide really was all that much of a problem, but it was nice being on the bleeding edge of planetary engineering innovation, even if one couldn't talk too freely about it. So much of its technical detail was classified as 'commercial in confidence', which everyone now knows trumps just about any other information security classification that may be imposed. Far higher than mere old 'top secret'.

Upon the return to his high-rise lifestyle after his stint in the field, Forrest noted that daggett had been getting a bit of a rough trot on OLO at the hands (or was it the bad mouths?) of the forumscoffers lately. That was unfortunate. One thing that everyone other than the forumscoffers had to admit was that daggett was good at links. Forumscoffers were hardly ever guilty of posting a link, and more and more contributors were noticing that fact. The best the forumscoffers could offer in return was some mealy-mouthed attempt at suggesting some sort of relationship between a contributor and a missing link!

dagget worried too much about population here in Oz, Forrest thought.

Forrest had been taking a novel approach to population. He had been reading Hugo; Graeme, that is, not Victor.

Professor Graeme Hugo, (who had gained his PhD in demography in 1975), had written an article for inclusion in Year Book Australia 2001 titled 'A Century of Population Change in Australia'. It started on page 169. He made in it the critical observation that the average number of children born to women in Australia by 2001 was only 1.7 in the first seven words on page 170.

That's below replacement rate!

That means that the only population pressure in Oz is now one being put upon itself by migration.

Forrest thought an afterthought: "Ludwig needs to know that".

It was good being girt by sea. Ozzians should prepare to take full advantage of that.

FG,

I appreciate the support for me here and on the 9/11 Truth forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0 What makes my situation worse is that I gain the distinct impression that even Graham Young himself has taken the side of the forumscoffers against myself. Certainly, I have received no sympathy when I have pointed out to him the harm that was being done to that and many other forums by people who have openly stated that they have no intention of discussing the issue seriously.

As a result of one complaint, the moderator suspended both my account and the account of the person I was complaining against (although curiously the suspension of the other account was not applied until I complained of that fact). He apparently deemed my alleged use of a second account to occasionally get around the restrictions of OLO as every bit as bad as persistent personal abuse and persistent refusal of others to seriously discuss the topic at hand.

I somehow don't think that most other OLO users would agree.

In any case, anyone who wishes to argue fairly and with logic and evidence is at a distinct disadvantage to someone who is there (I believe) with the intention of preventing others from gaining a clear understanding of the issue with obfuscation, non-sequiturs, straw men, personal abuse and various other debating ploys. Almost every sentence of the latter type of contribution seems to require at the very least a sizable paragraph to counter.

As the extremely unsophisticated OLO rules often don't allow for people placed in such a situation to respond in a timely fashion to all of the specious arguments, it should be no surprise that some serious OLO contributors have placed themselves in situations where they can be accused by the trolls of having made use of a second account.

One would expect a reasonable and fair moderator to be understanding in these circumstances, but this has not been the case.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

Whilst we should all appreciate having a free service set up in this way, if the administrators are going to have the mindset that thoughtful, honest and well-meaning contributors, if accused of having broken a rule, have no right to complain about clearly destructive and harmful behaviour of others, and, furthermore, if the administrators make no proactive efforts to curb these abuses then I question the value of OLO.

As I said on the other forum, this is one reason why a number of people I know just don't bother with OLO.

---

Whilst this may also be going off topic, geosequestration seems insane to me. There will necessarily be a huge additional energy cost and material to transport, store and bury the CO2 underground. It defies the imagination to think that there are any safe means to store massive quantities of CO2 underground that it is assured to prevent it from violently and catastrophically erupting and finding its way back to the surface in the coming decades, centuries and millenia.

There would be huge obvious incentives to find ways to cut corners to cheat altogether, particularly in a privatised free market. The amount of bureaucracy needed if there were to be any hope of making this system work would be astronomical. If it were to be maintained over anywhere near the necessary timescale, the costs would be prohibitive. Barbara Friese discusses this on pp255-257 of "Coal - a human history" (2003).

The obvious solution is to scale down as from today our wasteful consumption of natural resources including fossil fuels. If we could find ways to live worthwhile existences without such profligate uses of our natural resources in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then I am sure that we could do so again if we cast off the straightjacket of economic 'rationalist' ideology and took back from our wealthy elites what they have stolen from the rest of us in recent decades through the subversion (and often outright destruction) of our democratic institutions as Naomi Klein has chronicled so well in "The Shock Doctrine" (2007).

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

Clearly we also need, as a matter of urgency, to limit human numbers so that we stand some hope of reducing our excessive impact on the natural environment can be reduced to what is sustainable.

---

FG, even if the birthrate is less than the replacement rate, births still exceed deaths at the moment, because of longer life expectancies, so it is still a problem, but, of course, not nearly as much as high immigration as you pointed out.

I see that the barking dogs on the "9/11 Truth" forum have fallen silent for the time being.

That is a good thing but they have still succeeded in doing a great deal of harm in the meantime.

“Forrest thought an afterthought: "Ludwig needs to know that".”

Thanks for thinking of li’’le ol’ Luddie, Forrest.

I’ve addressed this point a number of times on this forum, but do you think I can find one of my relevant posts that I could refer you to? A bloody hour or more spent looking and nope…buggrit! [Ludwig has just written so much crap that he can’t find any of the good stuff on his user list!! ( :>| ]

So I’ll repeat it here…

We still have a very considerable rate of population growth due to births. Even if immigration was reduced to net zero, we would still have a fair old rate of growth. If you look at the birthrate – which was about 1.76 before the disgusting baby bonus was pushed and boosted by Howard and Costello, and is now considerably higher, but still not up to 2, you’d wonder how this could be.

The answer is that this fertility rate is the personal fertility rate, not the national fertility rate. There are far more breeding people in our population than there would be in a stable or ‘natural’ population distribution. So even though the average number of babies per couple is below 2, the disproportionately high number of breeding people means that the national birthrate is considerably higher than the death rate.

So it certainly ain’t a case of immigration exerting the only population pressure in this country.

.
Agreed Daggett: sequestration seems to be absurd.

.
You and Forrest might be interested in my comments here http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8077#126208

It really was an absolutely capital wind farm empire that Forrest had sort of fallen into the ownership of.

Deliberately ending his sentence with a preposition, Forrest gloated over his new discovery.

Forrest, in reading over the planning and legislative background that had established his little empire of wind farms of the dispossessed (in a DEUS document titled 'NSW Renewable Energy Target Explanatory Paper', see: http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:qlBArXX7umwJ:www.deus.nsw.gov.au/Publications/NRET%2520Explanatory%2520Paper%2520FINAL.pdf+Renewable+energy+certificate+market&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=14&gl=au), realised that he had acquired a double whammy along the way!

Forrest's windmills didn't just crank out electricity with or without pride. They also cranked out paper money, in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). Ridgy didge, totally legit, lucre!

Every time one of the windmills made a megawatt hour of electricity that fact was duly recorded on a meter, and a certificate was issued. These certificates had a market value: not a volatile market value such as shares on the world-wide stockmarket were currently displaying, but a very stable, almost predictable, market value. Forrest was collecting lots and lots of these RECs. A 1 MwH REC was currently worth around $45, Forrest thought. By 2020, Forrest's vision, via WHIRLYGIG, saw a price of around $70 per REC (expressed in 2008 dollar terms).

The thing was, Forrest had realised, his 20 year government contract customer, the Kurnell Desalinator, looked like it fell within a very special category with respect to the NSW Renewable Energy Target (NRET) legislation: the category of an 'energy intensive, trade exposed consumer'. That meant that Forrest, when he resold electricity he bought from other sources to the Desalinator, would not be liable for the NRET levy! That would give him a virtually permanent marketing edge!

'Energy intensive, trade exposed, consumer': what a clever way of saying 'aluminium smelter', thought Forrest. The authors of the NRET Explanatory Paper were definitely Forrest's kind of people.

DEUS. Ex machina? Forrest wondered.

Forrest was very particular about his acronyms. There seemed to be such a lot of them in the world of privatised power provision. Deep down, Forrest just knew nobody believed him about the future-viewer, WHIRLYGIG. Viewers probably thought he had made it up. That just wasn't true. Why were people so unkind, so unbelieving?

Reference to Frontier Economics' long term investment model, WHIRLYGIG, was first made on page 12 of the NRET Explanatory Paper linked to in Forrest's previous post. It was for real. People should really read the links before they dismissed what Forrest wrote, thought Forrest as he corrected the grammar in the pasted text he had just copied from the DEUS document.

They probably don't even believe DEUS is for real, either. Forrest knew that acronym stood for the NSW Department of Energy, Utilities and Sustainability. It was a real government department. True!

Forrest had even adopted an acronym-like trademark for his own electricity trading business, Intrastate Energy Marketing Management Associates. (There weren't actually any associates, but it made the name look impressive.) Because the trademark was just an acronym, Forrest had commissioned the design of a customized copyrighted font, Goodtimes Neo-Roman Privatised, just to ensure a truly unique look for the 'IEMMA' proudly displayed in the corporate letterhead, and elsewhere.

The State government might have thrown in the towel so far as pride in power went, but Forrest saw no reason to.

Forrest thought the State government actually deserved to be proud of how well it had provided for his absolutely capital wind farms. One of the better jobs of privatisation ever done: something for the 'little' man at long last. It had legislated for an extended renewable energy target, both over time and as a proportion of demand, well in excess of the provisions made by the Federal government in its MRET. Forrest even had his own acronym for this provision that underpinned his business, the Market Offset Renewables Reinforcement Intrastate Supplement (MORRIS).

There was no point being acrimonious. Forrest handled capitals every bit as well as windmills.

Gday Forest I have been watching you here.
Enjoyed it too.
Saw a recent post in another thread about my ALP and privatization.
Not going to see me post in that thread, some just do not need reality to slander.
Interesting that you truly would not have to stray far from the truth to get a stick on the back of my party.
This thread has come a long way from the day I started it.
Back to the very first post, selling the arms and legs, then bit by bit the rest, every bit of it.
I would be telling lies if I said anything else.
Only thing is given the financial crisis and near destruction of my proud party, survival instinct have seen some soften their views on the sale.
Jobs? protected for 3 years.
In effect three years notice of job loss.
Two strange things of interest, we get read here in this forum by many.
A bloke I worship, head of a union other than mine, front line fighter in the anti sale team, not the very great man Robo.
Gave me the cold shoulder, see I totally honestly refused to shut up! my party needed the kick in the ring it was my duty as one who cares to give it.
Second?well no taint of the lost in space teams devisions exist, rat bag news Medea may convince themselves we are gone but it is not true , this team is worth a closer look.
Much better than the last one who hide them from us? why?

OLO is strange! I just tried to post the following on the 'Forum features and quality of discourse' thread. The 'new post' button was active, but the discussion archived. Dayumm ayund blahst!

There only being around another 24 hours that this topic will remain up on the default OLO index display, I suppose I had better post the summary that david f has asked be made of features mentioned. Just as a courtesy.

Mentioned, not necessarily favoured by users in every case, were:

background shaded and/or iconic linkage quote authentication

hard numbering of posts

an optional to user gender box

post indelibility

online appeal process in respect to moderation decisions arising from user complaints

a default return to last comment rather than first

email notification box to be adjacent to new comment button

a time-limited edit function

sticky-for-user display preferences

one email alert only per thread, reset only after a visitation by user

provision for indented sub-threads (ie. comments on comments)

private messaging

posting of Forum rule violation notices for all to see

publication of suspensions

a chat window

I have listed features or suggestions in sequential order as mentioned in the thread. I hope in summarizing I have described them accurately, and have not overlooked anything that could be effected by modification of the forum software. In respect of some suggestions, some posters expressed disagreement with the original suggestion: this seemed to be particularly so in the case of a gender indicator. Want the details? Read the thread.

If there is anything else, users can still post to this topic after tomorrow. All that needs to be done to see it anytime is to select 'one quarter back' from the drop-down menu obtainable by clicking on the button beside the 'having been started' box at the top of the General Discussions index page, and then clicking the 'display' button adjacent to it. At the certain risk of repeating myself and others, I will mention that this is not a sticky preference: a user has to repeat it every time the Forum is visited.

FG, you didn't post the link to the discussion you were referring to.

The suggestions all look very good.

The OLO software is extremely primitive. A host of other commercial and open source packages leave it for dead. However, changing it over would be a huge expense which may not be affordable with the business model(1).

I guess the reason that we put up with OLO's technical limitations, not to mention arbitrary censorship and capricious refusal to undertake the simplest of tasks requested by users, is because of the momentum it has built up.

However, a good many out there don't bother with OLO because of its shortcomings and a good many other current users of OLO may not bother for much longer either.

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1. Wouldn't it be some much easier if forums could simply be funded directly through all our taxes? Competent administrators, manager and editors could be hired through open and transparent procedures and they wouldn't have to spend their days chasing advertising dollars and the pages would not be cluttered with advertisements. As all of the BBC website costs each British taxpayer only 50p each year (I heard about 3 or 5 years ago), it would cost us very little.

Hang on Daggett, it is privately owned, and equal to the best if not the best I ever used.
Funny but the only one I could compare it with was run by a Labor party member.
This by a Conservative.
I have fallen foul of the censor and copped it sweet.
No way we need governments ANY of them in control of forums.
Look in the last 3 theads for FG go for last 3 months search all you will find the thread.
Power without pride?
I feel like a cow that has been striped of every last drop of milk.
We will see power sold, all of it, bit after bit, by my side of politics if they win the next election.
The other if we do not.
Not happy yet not even near as angry as I was, the blood letting helped.

Forrest didn't watch very much TV these days, being so busy like what he was, plotting coups, analysing failed coups in other places, shining new light on the history leading up to the 'old' Pearl Harbour, looking at the 'New Pearl Harbor' in the light of older events, and doing carbon sequestration consultancy. It was just as well his absolutely capital Wind Farms of the Dispossessed kept him in clover, running sort of automatically like they mostly did, for there was so little time and so much to do.

Last night Forrest had seen an ad, one that would probably make Belly, and many others, in the light of the recent conduct of oil companies in the land of Oz, very angry indeed.

The ad was on behalf of Chevron Oil. It was touting how that corporation was already making enough electricity to power, was it 7,000 homes, or the needs of 7 million people? A lot anyway, but the important thing was that they were claiming to be doing it from a geothermal heat source! The implication was that it was hot dry rock geothermal energy.

A trans-national oil corporation in electricity supply in Gert-by-Sea. Just what we all need!

You really have to give it to the new Iemma and his team of ever so willing 'game lifters', one little touch from the Rudder and they are right back on course for a privatising sell-out of NSW electricity distribution that would open the floodgates to the likes of Chevron and their oily associates to soak the Ozzians to the hilt for electricity. At least the 'game lifters' weren't selling the NSW public out to just anybody, they'd picked the internationally most rapacious group of corporates to do it for. Unbebloodylievable!

"Better have another look in my WHIRLYGIG future-viewer", thought Forrest in disgust, "and try to see some way of speeding up the quite constitutional coup in Oz". Forrest knew he didn't need to fly any planes into buildings to effect this coup. Just adhere to old Sun Tzu.

Yesterday's little display preferences glitch on OLO seemed to have resolved itself. The rain from the Brisbane storm that had got into the OLO servers and prevented at least one user from being able to select 'display 20 topics, one quarter back' and then order this list by 'last post', must have dried up. Forrest had actually been thinking earlier that the site might have been hacked by the Federal Thought Police!

Forrest could see the reasoning of the Federal Thought Police, faced as they were by the problem of OLO and the unrestrained opinions of the opinionators. Something had to be done, because there were just so many opinionators, and sites like OLO had so enabled them that they were getting to be a regular cacophony of disbelief. (Why, there was even an OLO user named 'cacofonix', a dreadful unbeliever if ever there was one.) The voices of the Media Moguls and their parliamentary factota were getting to be drowned out, not only by criticism, but worse, by laughter. Make it hard for users to get to these old topics and the laughter might abate, the Thought Police thoughtfully thought. It would all be as if it had never been, all that terrible laughter and public disbelief.

The pride of the Factota had undoubtedly been hurt, so some of them had begun to lash out at anything that moved, so to speak. The internet moved. "Let's censor the internet!" shouted a factotum called Steven, his face fairly shining with righteousness and conviction as the rest of the congregation of the Factota looked upon him in wonder. "Let's create gaps in the internet through which these political pornographers, these peddlers of public ridicule that so offend our Dignity, can fall", Steven implored.

His own little clique responded with dutiful but hushed 'Yes, Ministers'.

Censorship!

On the periphery of the claque, some who were not of Steven's clique irreverently speculated as to the prospects of there soon being a stoning. One called Malcolm got ready to hold some coats.

Power without pride!

Forrest was still on topic.

For another rant about NSW politics, read "Jeff Kennett: NSW harmed by 'politically criminal' culture" by Rick Wallace, at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24667522-2702,00.html

The article is principally about Kennett, but Keating also gets a brief mention. These days the Murdoch media regularly attempts to resurrect yesterday's failed and discredited politicians as supposed 'elder statesmen' in order to lend weight to its own sociopathic world view.

Kennett wants NSW to adopt a five point plan to supposedly restore the health of NSW's economy.

According to the report:

"Mr Kennett said whoever spearheads a revival in NSW must be prepared to face protests in the street while they cleanse the state of rorts, waste, incompetence and a 'politically criminal' culture."

In other words, carry out economic shock treatment in the interests of the NSW corporate sector for which it had never obtained any electoral mandate in the face of popular grass roots protests.

Of course, the fact that the kind of 'reforms' that Kennett would introduce are typically opposed by the order of 79% or more of the NSW public as in the case of electricity privatisation is ignored.

The Australian has shown on this and on almost innumerable other occasions is little more than a propaganda outlet for Rupert Murdoch and his corporate mates.

Another 'elder statesman', of course, is former NSW Treasurer Michael Costa whose rants also regularly feature in The Australian these days.

The Australian's facade of superficially decent reporting on a few token issues and its championing of some fashionable 'bleeding heart' left-liberal causes doesn't alter this underlying reality.

It had been interesting to learn that Desertec Australia (http://www.desertec-australia.org/ ) also opposed the sale of NSW electricity generation and distribution assets. See this page on their rather extensive site: http://www.desertec-australia.org/content/nsw.html It was a bit of a pity that Desertec had not been a bit more specific as to the reasons it opposed the sale of NSW electricity assets, but at least it was encouraging seeing its opposition to a sell-out right up front.

Forrest liked the way that Desertec Australia also seemed to look on the bright side of life. He wondered whether they did it always. You could learn a little more about Desertec here: http://www.desertec-australia.org/content/about-desertec.html

What was interesting was what Desertec did NOT say in relation to Hunter region renewable resources. No mention was made of the development of cost-effective solar pondage in conjunction with reduced-pressure seawater desalination brine disposal. The seawater desalination is envisaged as being powered by the waste heat from the existing coal-fired power stations, which are seen as remaining in operation for quite some time yet before renewables come on stream in preponderant measure.

Solar pondage, which collected solar radiation in a dense layer of brine insulated by a blanket of fresh clear water kept separate from the brine by a membrane, was not only cost-effective, but was also both capable of overcoming the intermittency of solar energy availability and was in large measure of relatively low-technology construction requirement in nature.

Forrest saw power generation from solar pondage heat storage as being a very logical augmentation or enhancement of any hot dry rock geothermal power that may come to be undertaken in the Hunter region, but one that would stand on its own feet even if HDR sourced heat did not take off in the region. Much the same thing was already being done using hot artesian water at Birdsville in SW Queensland.

Low technology renewable energy collection and storage could be built and funded by Australians, for Australians.

FG wrote, "Solar pondage, which collected solar radiation in a dense layer of brine insulated by a blanket of fresh clear water kept separate from the brine by a membrane, was not only cost-effective, but was also both capable of overcoming the intermittency of solar energy availability and was in large measure of relatively low-technology construction requirement in nature."

Every technology, whether alternative or mainstream, has an ecological cost.

The principle ecological cost in regard to solar pondage would seem to be acquiring sufficient land close enough both to a source of salt water and to the human population who would consume the fresh water.

Has anyone worked out how much land would be necessary to produce sufficient water for, say the additional 1,000,000 that the government of the 'smart state' actually wants to encourage to move to Queensland by 2026?

If we kept strictly to the the austere target of consumption of 140 litres per day per person under water restrictions, not take into account the needs of industry and utlities which provide services such as electricity, we would need 140,000,000 litres or 140 gigalitres per day.

How much land would be required by solar pondage to fully meet that additional demand, or even just to significantly contribute to meeting that additional demand?

Would the be enough suitable land in SEQ?

By all means we should examine all the available technologies, but the real solution to this problem must lie in not creating the need to use such artificial means of obtaining fresh water in the first place, and that means not needlessly encouraging population growth in order to line the pockets of land speculators, property developers and bankers at everyone else's expense.

daggett,

It appears I have not described clearly enough that part of the 'bundled' proposals for ongoing Hunter region NSW government power generation relating to the desalination of seawater. As a consequence you have appeared to think that the production of the desalinated fresh supply capable of arising therefrom is related to the land area available for solar pondage. This is not so.

The requirement for solar pondage space only relates to the desalination of seawater inasmuch as it provides an opportunity for the concentrated brine produced in the desalination process, one that uses the waste heat at the location of an existing coal-fired power station, to become a valuable product in its own right, rather than a disposal problem associated with desalination.

The concentrated brine by-product is envisaged as being piped to sites suitable for the construction of solar ponds. The brine becomes the collection and storage medium for solar radiation. It is permanently held as it is progressively accumulated over the remaining operational life of the coal-fired station. It is never used up.

The overlying insulating blanket water in the pondage is subject to being 'used up', however, due to evaporation, and consequently requires replenishment. It does not strictly need to be fresh, simply clear and less dense than the collecting layer of brine. It could be clean seawater.

Whilst in the NSW setting some of the power stations are adjacent to a source of seawater, in SE Queensland this is not so. This very scenario in regard to using waste heat from coal-fired stations to produce desalinated seawater for SE Queensland was the subject of a discussion with Peter Ravenscroft on the 'What is a bone-dry city worth?' comments thread, see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5616#75523 as a good place to start.

In the NSW context proximity of a source of seawater, available waste heat, and a reticulated, short supplied water demand already exists, thus meeting your stated requirements. Pipeline is the cheapest transport for brine, which transport is usually the greatest cost in solar pondage creation.

To more directly address daggett's question as to land area required for solar pondage in relation to electricity generation, experience from the Pyramid Hill, Victoria, solar pond indicates around-the-clock generation of 60 Kw of electricity 365 days per year from a pond one third of a hectare in area. See: http://www.enersalt.com.au/Local%20Publish/html/cheap_heat__.html

Clearly, there exists the possibility to scale the generation capacity installed in conjunction with solar ponds so as to permit greater output per hectare at peak demand times, provided a corresponding reduction in output occurs at off-peak times. Such amplification of generating capacity would seem relatively easy to progressively achieve, given the modularity of organic rankine cycle engine/generator units.

If solar pondage was to be initially managed as a peak demand matching capability generating electricity only, say, 10 hours in every 24 hour period, the output per hectare, based on the Pyramid Hill experience, could be around 432 Kw. Expressed slightly differently, around 2.32 Ha of solar pondage would be required per Mw of peak load time generation capacity.

By way of comparison, the Tarong coal-fired power station has a generating capacity, I understand, of 1,400 Mw. Let us say that peak demand for 10 hours out of 24 threatens to outstrip installed capacity by 30%. That would be equivalent to 420 Mw of peak period generating capacity. That 420 Mw peak demand, met from solar pondage managed so as to supply peak demand only, would require around 975 Ha of pond surface.

If you wanted to generate 1,400 Mw of base load electricity around-the-clock, you would require around 7,800 Ha of pondage. Not beyond question, here and there, in salinity affected parts of Australia, so far as land availability is concerned.

Of course, this would become to be a source of power with pride, and as such is completely off-topic here. And I must get back to my CBD penthouse from where I can catch up on what my capital wind farms are doing.

Forrest, I meant to thank you for your earlier helpful reply and links.

I would like to (but may not find the time to) write an artcle based upon it at http://candobetter.org, if that would be OK with you?

There have been quite a few false solutions proposed to humankind's overall predicament of overpopulation and growing resource scarcity. (Two obvious examples being nuclear fusion and bio-fuels (see http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2008/12/02/a-long-recession/comment-page-3/#comment-222915))

It seems from the way you have described it, this proposal would actually help us, rather than make things worse.

Nevertheless, we should not use such technical innovations to put off necessary measures to stop further population growth and to reduce humankind's consumption of natural resources (which is what are political leaders stupidly allowed to happen after the commencement of the unsustainable fossil-fuel driven Green revolution of the 1960's and 1970's).

---

FG, have you been following the "9/11 Truth" forum, lately?

It looks as if our good friend Paul.L may have finally, after 380 posts posted to that forum, spat the dummy:

"Dagget,

"As I said, MORON. I continually show how little grasp you have of this subject and you just pretend it hasn't happened.

"I'm not interested in debating this with you anymore ..." (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166#52342)

Let's hope it's for good this time and that if I do decide to follow up any of the dozens more loose ends he has left lying around that he will stand by his undertaking not to be 'baited' into coming back.

The more Forrest thought about solar ponds, the better he liked them.

It was fine having wind turbines, but there was a limit to their scope. In his own case, Forrest knew how exceptionally fortunate he had been to have got a large government supply contract at a fixed price indexed to inflation. Newer entrants to the wind game faced having to deal, increasingly, with large privatized base load power enterprises, enterprises that were disinclined to pay the smaller wind energy investors very much for their non base load power. Unless these newer wind-farming entrants had also somehow obtained long-term featherbedded contracts at the outset, they were destined to be price-takers, not price-makers, in the national electricity market.

There was also the limitation as to the proportion of total demand that wind-generated electricity could meet. 'Balancing the grid', and all that. Wind turbines had little prospects independent from a grid, but were just price-taking satellites of those who owned the base load generating assets on that grid.

Solar ponds, by contrast, enjoyed the best of both worlds: they could be connected to a grid and supply not only base load capacity but a fairly rapidly deployable peaking increase in output, or they could operate standing alone in remote or not so remote locations providing round-the-clock electricity with virtually no transmission losses.

There was a third world potential for solar ponds. Their ability to be able to utilize salinity affected land, and the construction and management techniques related to them, was serendipitously synergistic with the likely requirements for the large-scale farming of oil algae in Gert-by-Sea. Forrest liked the idea of both being in power, and getting into oil. In a very democratic way, of course.

Finally, solar ponds were a bit like Linux in the computing world: they, as a concept, were non-proprietary; any Tom, Dick, or Harry could quite legitimately build and operate them without having to license the technology from some neo-feudal corporate overlord.

Forrest thought he'd get Dick to help build some ponds.

Forrest looked at the photos of the Pyramid Hill solar pond. "That's a lot of plastic! I hope Dick has access to lots of plastic: it will make the diversification into on-demand peak-load power supply that much easier and more viable" Forrest said to himself.

It was just as well Forrest saw these sights and thought these thoughts, and then wrote them down, for he had noted that it had been 17 days since anything had been posted to the 'Power without pride thread', and it was within a day of going dead. That would never do! There was so much more to be said, let alone done, on this topic. Have to keep the 'gamelifters' on their toes, and give the priests of DEUS something to do. It would be a shame for the topic to be archived so soon, all just in order to prevent some incognito poster from necroposting libel in some long forgotten thread. "Why didn't they do their libels up front where it counts?" Forrest asked himself, and others. "Self-defeating, if you ask me" said Forrest to himself, at the same time noting that nobody had so asked.

Dick had seemed to have been a bit pre-occupied of late; something to do with legal problems or litigation, Forrest thought. Forrest wondered whether Dick's legal problems had been deliberately fabricated by other parties just to keep Dick's attention off any foray he might otherwise make into water conservation, or power, or, heaven forbid, both! In Forrest's opinion, many proponents of renewable energy who had great expertise in hopping the government gravy-train felt threatened by Dick, simply because he was so good at what he did. And hey, opinion was what it was all about, right?

There was shortly going to be $500 million of taxpayers' money up for grabs under the Renewable Energy Fund. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2372#52921 Forrest and Dick might collar it all. That would scatter the corporate behemoths like the charge at Beersheba scattered the Turks!

That other long running forum "9/11 Truth" http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=0 the longest running on OLO as far as I can tell, has been quiet for a few days. I still have more to say, so I will be sure to make sure I post before it is disabled.

Forrest had got the horrible feeling that the Renewable Energy Fund, sourced from the Ozzian taxpayers, was in reality intended as nothing more than a subsidy for trans-national oil corporations and the like to help emplace them as major, if not monopoly, players in the Ozzian electricity market. As near to an absolute and direct betrayal of the electors as you could get, when it is considered that in large measure the Ozzian public already, and for long time past, owned outright the generating capacity and constituted a very large part of the end-market for the product, electricity. THAT really would be an exercise in power without pride.

Right on topic if it was true, but could it really be that brutal a betrayal?

Forrest wondered whether the general run of Lablib and Liblab pollies, be they already elected or but yet only aspirant to such status, had had it explained to them that the mug public could be so inconvenienced by degraded conditions of service and supply with respect to electricity that they could be charged by 'privatised' utility corporations much, much more per KwH for supply than any publicly accountable enterprise could ever get away with charging. This envisaged situation would of course be very good for the 'private' corporations that would be effectively granted a government monopoly, from which advantageous 'commercial' situation significant funding could be derived with which to provide quite a rewarding 'career path' for all ductile pollies henceforth, in due course, conditional upon 'good behaviour'.

The other little side-benefit of handing-off the public assets associated with electricity supply to 'privatised' utility corporations was, for the class of ductile apparatchik pollies of either principal sort, that they, as pollies, would be able to publicly wash their hands of accountability for the degradation of service and/or the cost of maintaining supply. That would no longer be a politician's responsibility. Pollies could be free to scatter what largesse may remain in the public coffers in support of other 'causes'.

Today provided an example of service degradation. There had been load-shedding.

It seemed there had been more than one form of heat being experienced during the past week of heat-wave conditions in much of south-eastern Australia. The public in the black-sheep State of NSW, the fly in the electricity 'privatisation' ointment, was being subjected to 'kite-flying'.

The kite-flying was in the form of the touting of Frank Sartor as a replacement for Premier Nathan Rees in a prognosticated leadership contest in the near future. Frank was being touted as a 'can do' leader for the State. The kite-fliers had got that one right! That was exactly how a very large proportion of the general public perceived Frank Sartor.

Forrest wondered whether the kite-fliers were really that out of touch as to what the true meaning of 'can do' is seen as being in the public's perception, or whether the touted leadership change was simply another example of the exercise of power without pride on the part of arrogant power-brokers.

Still, the kite-flying was an example of what could happen if a fresh leadership face passes up a major opportunity to set an example in the public interest. Nathan Rees had failed to impose a 3.9% pay cut across-the-board in the NSW public sector in what should have been a leadership response to those on the public payroll looking after themselves in the face of the world financial crisis by quietly awarding themselves a 3.9% pay increase.

Forrest reckoned that Premier Rees should revisit this issue. By golly, that would change the thinking of a lot of NSW pollies when they saw the public acceptibility of a small across-the-board public sector pay cut. That would show who was in touch with the times and the public mood. Perhaps Premier Rees should, by way of delivering justice to the public at large, impose a slightly greater pay cut, say 6%, just to get his team focussing on the real issues.

The past week had been very good for spot electricity prices, though. Forrest rubbed his hands vigorously.

I was wondering if there was any reason whatsoever to be hopeful that Nathan Rees would be any better than the corporate stooge that any of his predecessors, or indeed Sartor, were.

However when I read that both Bob Carr and Michael Costa had urged the Labor Party to support Rees against any possible challenge by Sartor, the glimmer of hope I had in Rees was extinguished.

---

BTW, the article "Courier Mail manipulates reporting of water recycling to demand early election" written by myself at http://candobetter.org/node/972 does touch the issue of NSW electricity privatisation, so it may be of interest.

Comments there or here are welcome.

Ever being one to keep an eye out for future trends, Forrest had noted one aspect of the Victoria bushfire tragedy that might in future seriously impact the market for, and marketability of, grid-distributed electricity in the dry sclerophyllous forest and woodland urban fringe and rural areas of south-eastern Australia.

It was the potential liability of a 'privatised' electricity retailer in Victoria for having been responsible for 'starting' at least one of the number of fires that comprised the total disaster.

Forrest reckoned this could only mean one thing. The price of retail 'privatised' electricity would soon go through the roof in Victoria as retailers made financial provision at the expense of their captive market in anticipation of eventual findings brought down against them that their electricity-carrying wires sparking as strong winds blew trees down over them were to blame for starting fires. Insurance companies would make a squillion. Someone had to be to blame, and you couldn't sue God, notwithstanding an implied claim to that effect recently made in a film title. The legal profession, or at least that part of it specialising in litigation, would soon be in clover.

How lucky were the people of NSW, where there were no really 'privatised' electricity retailers to be sued, and common sense perforce had to prevail, with the community having to accept the necessity of taking the good with the bad: the near constant availability of grid-distributed electricity, against the very occasional fire that might start because of those nasty live wires being knocked together and, arcing, dropping molten aluminium onto the bushland fuel load. How desperately unlucky was the NSW State government, that it was seemingly forced by the weight of public opinion to have to continue to appear to responsibly manage electricity generation and distribution!

All this was what so excited Forrest about solar pondage. Rural and urban fringe areas were relatively ideal for solar ponds. They could soon become as ubiquitous an icon as tennis courts up until recently were in the outer fringes of Melbourne, rendering much of the grid redundant.

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: a Tale of the Near Future, in several parts

Bronwyn, of the Cysterhood of the Coup de Grace, was going to deeply regret missing witnessing this contest in real time, Forrest was sure. She had all but prophetically said so, here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2509#56742

There Forrest had been, selflessly posting away against his own vested interests in wind power on the article comments thread to 'Installing solar PV panels - the figures don’t add up, BUT… ', here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8569&page=0 . He had courteously and, he hoped, constructively responded to several on-topic points made by Fractelle in that thread, but did in one small respect have to effectively say 'disagree' to her encouragement of other viewers to sign the petition promoted in the article.

The challenge had come out of nowhere. Not from Fractelle, whom Forrest felt was as much taken aback by it as he was. It came from the article author himself! Suddenly, when he had least been seeking it, Forrest found himself hearing the unmistakeable sounds of argument by abuse, abuse directed at him: whether he wanted it or not (and he didn't, refusing to be provoked by the first attack), Forrest was involved in a Phlaigme. A Phlaigme that was no mere tournament joust, but single mortal combat to the death in the Articles arena of OLO. Perhaps it was as well Bronwyn (of the Cysterhood) would not see the confrontation unfold: it could get very ugly. Forrest might even get killed. Bronwyn might cry.

The die was cast. Forrest, slap-happy Perve Erse Jokeln that he was by birth, long years past having left the field of actual knightly combat through being raised to the honorific rank of Knight-Commentator of the Undying Phlaigme, although out of practise, had picked up the gauntlet.

Forrest hoped Prince Valium of OLO could give him some tips as to current flaming techniques, but had a few tricks of his own nevertheless. It was game on.

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 2

In the prelude before the contest, Forrest walked his trusty war-horse slowly around the arena. He had kept WYRDMABUBY (pronounced word-ma-booby) since his retirement from knightly combat. He was a most dependable unflappable mount, and very big, like a drum-horse. Of a breed that a hundred or so years ago would have been called a Waler. You could see a large bronze statue of a horse like him in a park, near the Well of the Oath.

It was unusual for a horse to have an acronym for a name, but this one did, for just as Forrest was very fond of his old steed, so too was he very fond of acronyms. WYRDMABUBY stood for What You Really Do May Actually Be Unrecognised By Yourself. Given that until now, for a long time he had not needed WYRDMABUBY for a contest, Forrest supposed that made him a hobby horse. Forrest very much enjoyed riding his hobby horse.

If there was one thing Forrest knew well, it was his heraldry. He could see what he was up against the minute the Banner of the Coat of Arms was carried into the arena. The State flags were all missing from the central shield, being replaced by a multiplicity of featureless unreflective little clone-like grey rectangular cells that were doubtless meant to represent the regional councils of Gert-by-Sea. He was up against the New Federales and the entire Humphrey Appleby brigade!

Behind the Banner of the Coat of Arms, borne on horseback, was a large silver urn, the Holy Grail of Climate Change. A large choir, adoring faces all aglow, was marching behind the Grail, and singing a song in celebration of it. The words of this horsed vessel's song vent:

"The prices high, the Cartels tightly closed
Capital, it marches with quiet step
The Stockbrokers, all now Party Comrades
..................................... "

You could get the German version here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst-Wessel-Lied#Parodies , but you couldn't sing it there.

Nasty agwo.

TBC

I posted the following to Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser on 17 February:

"Open letter to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections" at http://candobetter.org/node/1073

Dear Premier Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser,

I will be standing as an Independent pro-democracy candidate in the state electorate of Mount Coot-tha in the forthcoming state elections.

In part, my purpose in standing is to raise critical policy issues, which I believe will otherwise not be drawn to the attention of the Queensland public.

One issue is privatisation.

The evidence clearly shows that privatisation has gravely harmed the public interest and as a consequence, has been overwhelmingly opposed by the Australian public, including the Queensland public, for years.

Yet, most Australian governments, including your own, have persisted in imposing privatisation without any popular support and without any electoral mandate.

The list of privatisations, which comes to my mind, includes Energex, Ergon, the Golden Casket, the Mackay and Cairns airports, the Dalrymple Bay Coal loader and numerous tracts of valuable publicly owned land.

Indeed, the only privatisation that was raised in an election campaign of which I am aware, is that of the then named State Government Insurance Office (SGIO), now named Suncorp. Former Premier Peter Beattie promised during the 1998 election campaign not to fully privatise the half privatised SGIO, but, upon winning office, promptly broke that promise.

Last year we witnessed, in neighbouring NSW the appalling spectacle of the NSW corporate sector including Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper, clamouring for the privatisation of NSW's electricity generators, even though that policy was never put to the NSW public in the previous state elections of 2007, had been explicitly rejected in the 1999 elections and was opposed by at least 79% of the NSW public.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

In spite of the widespread public opposition, and in defiance of a vote 702 to 107 against privatisation at the NSW state Labor Party conference of May 2008, Morris Iemma's Government proceeded to ram through the privatisation legislation anyway. Thankfully for the people of NSW, the legislation was blocked with the votes of the Liberal/National Party Opposition, Greens and Independents.

Premier Anna Bligh, I was disturbed to read that your Government also gave its support for the privatisation of NSW's electricity generators, in spite of your own reported personal stance against the privatisation of Queensland's electricity generators in 2006.
Given this history, it seems to me that the Queensland public have good reason to fear that, upon re-election, your Government may proceed to sell of yet more of their assets, including Queensland Railways, electricity generators, more airports, the water grid, public buildings, public land, etc.

The reason I write this letter is to seek your firm assurance that if you do intend to privatise any of these assets that you state your intention to do so to the public before the forthcoming elections, or, alternatively, that you will put any planned privatisations to the public at referenda.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon
Independent pro-democracy candidate for Mount Cooth-tha

---

I still haven't received a reply.

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 3

Sun Tsu's injunction was "Know your enemy". Forrest heeded it as best he could.

Forrest found it hard to consider the author his 'enemy'. They had never met before. The argument by abuse, however, was unmistakeable, and Forrest felt himself obliged to continue posting at the steady, measured rate of two posts in every 24 hours imposed by the OLO rules, and in the spirit of proper Forum discourse, if only for the sake of genuine enquirers after truth. He had, however visited his opponent's blog, via the little yellow icon below his posts' timestamps, and learned that this was the author's usual literary style: Forrest's perplexity declined accordingly. The author had, on his blog, spoken disparagingly of Forrest Gump (the film, about Forrest's hero), so there was a hankering for some degree of satisfaction on Forrest's part.

Shambling around the stables incognito some hours earlier, Forrest had thought he had heard his opponent's mount for the upcoming combat referred to by the squires as 'Carbuncle'. The name didn't ring any bells with Forrest. It was every bit as important to gather intelligence as to an opponent's mount rather than as to the knight rider himself, as in these mortal combats the horses did the bulk of the real work, and bore the brunt of the risk of injury. They were bigger targets for the lances. Come to think of it, 'Carbuncle' is a most inauspicious name for a war-horse, isn't it?

It was a shame really, that it had come to this. They were in agreement as to virtually everything in both the article and the sleaze, except as to the merits of the petition. Forrest had come to think the author's stance represented an instance of the very thing WYRDMABUBY, his own trusty mount, pnemonicised. He could understand the lashing out in anger once realization as to one's having been used dawned upon one.

Understanding was no substitute for withdrawal of support for the petition, though.

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 4

It was late summer, slipping into autumn.

The afternoon light bathed the arena in that particularly clear and intense light so commented upon by that now-long-departed Knight who remembered the forgotten people so long, long ago. There was a gentle breeze, on which thistledown floated, magically, like the Australian dollar. Several wind turbines visible in the middle distance turned lazily as they went about their business, megawatt hour after megawatt hour; something that caused a deep sense of satisfaction to wash over Forrest.

Banners of the Coat of Arms, alternating with banners of the SA, the silver crossed-lightning bolts superimposed over black circle on red background representing the 20/20 Vision of the New Federales, a symbol of power out of the earth, were all hanging down straight despite the breeze.

Forrest had received some last-minute intelligence from 'Spaghnum', the senior page boy responsible for organising and dispatching all the other pages. He was the page page. He showed up in the nominal roll of pages as Moss, A.D.; oddly enough, he didn't get his nickname from his surname, but because he was always knowledgeable of any graft going on. When Forrest had asked Spaghnum what he knew about the war-horse Carbuncle, Spaghnum had laughed uproariously. "Carbuncle's not the horse, that's what all the squires call Sir Knight when he's not around" he spluttered. Forrest sniggered. Spaghnum, who was one of the very few 'public officials', or 'businessmen' that were game to be seen with Forrest these days, then told Forrest the name of the war-horse 'Sir Knight' would be riding. Forrest's eyes widened in amazement.

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall", Forrest muttered, as he applied the last of the blue warpaint to the second of the diagonally-opposed quadrants of WYRDMABUBY's face. The two white quadrants were already painted, as was Forrest's own face in mirror-reversal. Disruptive camouflage. Disorienting for an opponent.

The time was getting near.

WYRDMABUBY was a trick horse.

TBC

As I have yet to say anything either positive or disparaging about either Forrest Gump or Forrest Gumpp on my web site, I felt a sense of relief to have been able to deduce that Forrest could not have been referring to me when he wrote of his 'enemy'.

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 5

The SA, the 'South Australians', were a pillar of the New Federales rise to power. The term, of course, was apt to be a little misleading to those who were not of the new elite: it was not meant to signify in generality the resident population of that vestigial remnant of the former federation; indeed its membership had been long dispersed across the Commonpoverty of Terra Nullius, the officially agreed compromise term for the new Wiemar-style Republic of the Ozzians.

Earnest reams of obfuscation had been brought into being to disguise the nature of the contribution of the SA in the rise to power of the New Federales. Banana republicans almost to a man and girl, almost all shared the conviction that Manual Labor was a Mexican, and that all physical goods could and should only be produced in China, or at least anywhere else but Oz. They placed great store in the value of intellectual property as an elite road to wealth. Australia still rode on the sheeps' backs, but only after they had all been fleeced.

Whatever, here all the SA were, on one of those rare occasions when an officially sanctioned mortal combat was to be followed by a torchlight rally and ballot box burning, all acting as standard bearers for this great occasion of State.

Forrest used the extended 'recantation time' alone in the arena routinely offerred to anyone so foolish as to accept a challenge made on behalf of the New Federales to try out some of the tactics suggested by Prince Valium. Riding slowly along the line of standards, "Swill!", he shouted at the SA standard bearers. "Opportunist scum!". They all positively beamed back. The crowd behind the security barriers went wild with delight. One young SA standard bearer actually broke discipline to say "yes, that's us". He was promptly pistol-whipped.

The insults were not producing results. Perhaps Forrest didn't have just the right inflexion. Crowd baiting could be like that: what worked for one did not necessarily work for another.

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 6

Forrest clearly had to rely on his own resources for this combat, few as they were.

He had little in the way of arms, even less armour. Apart from the lance, his only weapon was a blade shorter even than the renowned old Roman gladeus (more like an oversized and unwieldy dirk); a sword-bayonet, which he carried in a custom-made scabbard that doubled as a greave on his right lower leg.

The lance. Now that was something else. Good lances were hard come by, and very expensive. These days, combatants on the field of honour were required to supply everything needed: horse, weapons, armour, tack, the lot. A lance (and obviously a war-horse to ride) was compulsory: all the rest was optional at the contestant's preference. Forrest could not afford a proper state-of-the-art lightweight shock-absorbing carbon-fibre reinforced lance: carbon was now a controlled substance, and could now only be used for State-approved purposes. Those who already had such lances would neither lend nor sell them: they were irreplaceable. Forrest had had to turn one up treen from an ironbark log that had lain in a paddock for forty years. It had taken forever to do.

Forrest's lance was beautifully seasoned, as hard and strong as iron, but talk about heavy! It was all Forrest could do to keep the lance level in a charge, let alone maintain aim with it while charging. He had had to make a special carrying tube for it when moving with the lance in the vertical 'carry' position. The carrying tube was special in another way: the very end of the regulation-length lance could be locked in position just within the steel-reinforced mouth of the thick-walled ironbark tube, effectively, but still within the rules, extending its overall length thereby. The tube itself was secured to the saddle on a swivel, which allowed it to pivot in virtually any direction. There was a hand-grip on its bottom.

Such were Forrest's weapons.

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 7

For armour Forrest only had the single dual-purpose greave for his right leg, and a rather small but highly polished brass six-pointed shield, or mogen, carried on his left forearm. The sum of it was nothing in comparison with that of the New Federales champion, who was fully suited with the best burnished steel armour, helm to toe. So clad, it was impossible to know for sure whom one faced in reality in a mortal combat.

The war-horse, whilst not strictly a weapon, was more often than not the key to success in such combats. Speed and power were not everything. WYRDMABUBY was capable of an amazingly slow and measured canter, which gave a real rocking-chair ride. He not only neck-reined beautifully, but, when the reins were loosened right off equally would maintain perfect pace and direction until asked to change. Forrest had never known him to shy, at anything.

WYRDMABUBY's secret weapon was his ability, on command, to fake a stumble and either go down on his knees, or 'fall' right over on his right side, according to a knee-aid given in an unusual place. That, and an ability to carry very asymetric loads while maintaining his legendary ultra-slow canter and dead-straight line of advance.

Lances characteristically were given names, much as had been the katana, the swords of the Japanese Samurai. Forrest's was named 'Sidere'. Its time in Latin. And it was.

The Master of Ceremonies had just finished announcing the identity of Forrest's mount, and proceeded to call that of the mount of the New Federales champion, ".... riding 'Chevron'.

The crowd let out a collective gasp, and fell silent. SA standard bearers looked furtively at each other in uncertainty. "Why were they risking Chevron?" was the thought in everybodies' mind. He was a world champion war-horse, a freak in the way Phar Lap had been on the track. The fee for taking him out of stud must have been stupendous. Why was this combat so important?

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 8

As they faced each other at opposite ends of the arena, waiting for the scarf to be dropped by the Master of Ceremonies as the signal to charge, the combatants each took up their lances in readiness. Forrest only withdrew 'Sidere' to the mouth of the carry-tube and surreptitiously locked it while making it look like he was just resting its weight on the tack. The New Federales champion swept his lightweight carbon-fibre reinforced lance about as if it were a feather, then levelled it.

The scarf dropped.

Chevron, the freak oversized quarterhorse, was almost in the instant at the full gallop. WYRDMABUBY began his dead-slow canter, and no sooner had he started moving forward than Forrest kicked his foot out of the right stirrup and reached down for the hand-grip on the bottom of the carry-tube.

Forrest, holding onto the hand-grip beside the saddle horn with his left hand, the reins completely loose, then swung his right leg back, up, and over WYRDMABUBY's rump as if dismounting, all the while holding the carry-tube hand-grip, and then proceeded to ride Cossack-style one foot in the left stirrup. 'Sidere', now perfectly counterbalanced pivotting on the swivel at the top of the saddle, could be laid and aimed like a gun. The method of mounting meant the point of the lance was about a metre further out than that of an opponent holding the lance in the usual way.

Chevron was fast approaching. Forrest gave the cue for WYRDMABUBY to stumble. Down he went to his knees, 'Sidere' now lower and pointing slightly upward, was aimed directly at Chevron's chest.

The New Federales champion was momentarily disconcerted, but failed to check his charge, expecting Forrest's lance to be dropped in the near-unseating he could see was happening. The champion's aim was now slightly high, and combative instinct took over, and all focus went into bringing the lance back onto its target.

But 'Sidere', still aimed, had not been dropped.

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 9

By the time the champion's lance had struck Forrest's ridiculous little mogen, breaking his grip and sending him sprawling backwards to the ground, Sidere's point was a metre deep inside Chevron's chest and travelling upward.

The combined momentum of the two war-horses ensured, in that split second before the girth and surcingle of WYRDMABUBY's saddle simultaneously parted, that the ironbark lance, exiting through the champion's saddle and catching inside the steel backplate then catching the chainmail neckpiece as it continued, snapped the champions neck in the process as if it had been a hangman's noose.

Chevron made one deafening, nauseatingly discordant squeal before falling on his left side, legs twitching convulsively. The New Federales champion had not been thrown: his body was still astride the now horizontal dying Chevron, left leg trapped against the ground, upper body leaning right back as if riding at a rodeo, held in place by the now-protruding ironbark lance, the neck clearly broken. The combination helmet and visor had been knocked off during the impalement.

WYRDMABUBY stood up, his bridle with its now separated reins (the lightweight joining springclip having flown off with the first tension of impact) the only tack still on him, unmarked. Forrest, too, was able to stand up, but wasn't quite so unmarked, grazed as he was in the not-unexpected unhorsing. He walked across to where the champion lay transfixed in fatal union with the legendary Chevron, and looked down.

It had been Sir WYSIWYG, after all.

The crowd were silent, stunned. The near-setting sun had gone behind a cloud, and the silver emblems of the crossed lightning bolts on the SA standards, before so newly risen brightly shining, now were leaden dull. A lone shaft of sunlight lit up the aftermath of combat. The polished brass of the mogen, in the sunlight, shining like a six-pointed star. It made an interesting juxtaposition to what had been an unexpected final solution.

Walking away, Forrest wondered if horses got PTSD.

TBC

The Saga of the Undying Phlaigme: part 10

The protocol of officially sanctioned mortal combat required that the victor in any contest be given the opportunity to sum up briefly what he saw as being the outcome or significance of the victory won. Should a victor be able to so summarize an outcome in just one word, it was a virtual passport to literary immortality, and the status of living national treasure.

Forrest led WYRDMABUBY to the portable dais upon which the Master of Ceremonies waited, flanked by the Commandant of the Humphrey Appleby Brigade, and the senior member of the SA present, the commanding officer of the Innamincka Regiment. A representative of the event sponsors, Big Oil, was also present. They all looked about as comfortable as Adolf Hitler after the 100 metres sprint at the 1936 Olympics.

The Master of Ceremonies asked the regulation question: "How many words have you to say?"

"One", answered Forrest.

As imperiously as possible, the Master of Ceremonies demanded: "Say it, then".

"WYGIWYS" Forrest said, in Acronymian. What You Get Is What You See, in English.

The crowd murmured in puzzlement despite the requirement for absolute silence during the protocol. The Master of Ceremonies was quietly furious. Trying to make the best of a bad situation for the New Federales, he curtly demanded of Forrest "In English! No acronyms here!", thinking Forrest would have to forego the quest for literary immortality in order to explain.

Forrest reached out and took the microphone, and spoke just one English word.

"Shafted".

The quest was over. Literary immortality had been attained. As a Living National Treasure, Forrest was now entitled to drink from the Holy Grail of Climate Change, no longer a horsed vessel, but now in the custody of the Cysterhood of the Coup de Grace, or, to give them their formal title, the Cysters of the Conventional Order for the Promulgation of True Literacy and Articulate Expression. They knew who they were. Their heads he had with oil anointed, and their urn now overflowed.

Forrest drank deep.

Climate changed.

All allegorically speaking, of course.

That was a particularly gruesome ending.

I am not sure what my animal-rights friends would make of that.

If this were to be turned into a movie had you given any though about how it could be shot realistically without causing harm to any horses?

It was nice to get back from the future, Forrest thought to himself, as the big black Hummer towing the triple horse float pulled up at the residential vehicular entrance to the Borg Tower, at No. 7-9 Hubris Place, in the Sydney CBD where he lived. Some of the applications of the principle of tempbidirectionality to modern travel could be downright demanding upon the human body. The recent hurried trip to the Field of Honour near Canberra had been quite hard on Forrest.

Forrest got out of the vehicle and walked toward the roller-shuttered entrance. "Bungendore and Dumblyung, Pialligo, Belconnen: open now this Dumbledore, for now I am homecomin" Forrest intoned to the little grate in the wall beside the roller door. The incantation, processed by the voice-recognition software of the building security system, resulted in the door rising to admit the Hummer and float.

Forrest had had the name 'Mariah' painted on the Hummer. He felt it only appropriate to name it after the wind that funded his 'penthouse' (spelled with a small 'p') lifestyle. Speaking of wind, Forrest had been able to capitalize (Oh how Forrest wanted to use an upper case 'c', but didn't dare) on his victory in the mortal combat. As a result of an excellent tip he had received from plerdsus, here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8559#135459 , Forrest had dropped in on the Clerk of the Parliament on the way back from the Field of Honour. To his amazement, he had been able to lease, for a quite nominal fee, the airspace above Parliament House for the purpose of operating a wind turbine for the next 50 years.

"It is prohibited airspace anyway" the Clerk had said, and noted that there would be distinct security enhancement for the building as a consequence of the ever-rotating blades when the turbine is in horizontal mode during sittings. Parachuting terrorists would get cut up badly. Between them they thrashed out a quick EIS (Ease of Impact Statement), shook hands, and Forrest paid the lease fee.

Too easy!

There was getting to be phlaigme everywhere one looked these days on OLO, Forrest thought. An OLO poster could easily become phlaigme-happy, shooting first and then reading carefully second. It had very nearly happened with this post: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2583#58351

Fractelle had finished a post off with a sentence that included the words:

"..... an incandescent lightbulb in your lamp or a Hummer in your driveway ....."

Forrest's first thought was that Fraccers was having a go at his penthouse lifestyle and renewable-energy carpetbagging business methods, what with that reference to his Hummer that he garaged at the Borg Tower, and the good old no-longer-proprietary technology of the incandescent bulb. "Three cheers for good old Thomas Alva Edison" Forrest said out loud. "And no cheers at all for the dim bulb that forced upon us the flickering, buzzing, not-nearly-so-long-lasting-as-claimed, much more expensive, mercury-containing fluorescent bulb". "Thats right," thought Forrest, "mustn't forget three jeers for tokenism and the one-time environment minister that they bring to mind". It was just as well Forrest noticed the quotation marks at the end of Fractelle's post: it hadn't been her at all! It had been Gabriel, the Scientific American article author, and, unless he was also an archangel too, was someone who couldn't possibly have known Forrest had a Hummer.

Forrest had heard on the news only yesterday evening that Babcock & Brown, the merchant banking firm, had gone into (he thought voluntary) receivership. Forrest was sure that Babcock & Brown had facilitated wind turbine investment in recent years. In fact he had a recollection of a business entity called Babcock & Brown Wind Partners: he wondered whether that was caught up somehow in the receivership situation.

"Not my problem", thought Forrest, "I'm not an investigative journalist or a competent opposition parliamentarian. I can barely even spell 'register of pecuniary interests'." He didn't think anyone else was either, anywhere at all in Oz.

Forrest's latest Parliament Wind Farm acquisition truly was absolutely capital.

Last night's big blackout of a quarter of the Sydney CBD had set Forrest to thinking.

"Is this going to prove to be a situation of pride without power?", Forrest asked himself. "Is the tack now being taken one of making the NSW public corporations responsible for electricity generation and distribution appear incompetent, as a backdrop for a renewed push for full sell-out, 'privatisation', of public utilities?", Forrest mused.

Not that the inconvenience had inconvenienced Forrest. The big gas-fuelled Caterpillar emergency generators down in the sub-basement could well have cut in for all Forrest knew or cared. There had been no interruption of supply to the penthouse of the Borg Tower in Hubris Place (off Gas Lane), nor was it intended that there ever should be. They didn't call it 'Gas Lane' for nothing. There were gas pipes underneath it, Forrest was sure, and a spur pipeline ran from there under Hubris Place direct into the sub-basement of the Borg Tower. Fuel for the big Cat generators was guaranteed whilever gas was available in the LNG distribution system, even if road transportation was brought to a complete standstill. They didn't call it Hubris Place for nothing, either. There was a hubris pipeline running all the way up the outside of the Borg Tower: the private external lift to the penthouse.

Forrest looked east from the 'thinking room' of the penthouse to Bondi Junction. Yesterday there had been a few problems for high-rise dwellers in that locality, with what was thought to have been a gas explosion in a service room at the top of the building. Bricks blown everywhere! Plumbers were thought to have been involved.

Forrest was very glad that the Borg Tower penthouse had no service rooms anywhere near the top floors, and that he didn't have any call for a plumber. Service rooms were like cars: people had accidents in them. Speaking of cars, Forrest had philosophised to the Tower plumber, Ron, only last week, saying "if you can't afford a Ford, dodge a Chev, Ron".

Gamelifting!

FG, I also suspect that the NSW Government deliberately mismanaged NSW railways in the 1970's and 1980's in order to provide a convenient excuse to cut back services and privatise much of it. In many ways it was nice to be paid for doing so little work in many parts of the Railways, but I think most would have preferred to have done a fair day's work at a civilised pace providing a useful public service if that would have made it possible to secure their long term employment.

NSW is now paying a terrible price for the wanton destruction of much its rail network in subsequent years.

---

There's a discussion about plans to privatise NSW prisons at http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/03/27/sub-editing-fail/#comment-675737 in response to the article by chief Murdoch electricity privatisation propagandist Imre Saluzinksy at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25248776-601,00.html

As I wrote at the end, "In case anyone has forgotten Imre Saluzinsky's appalling misreporting of the NSW electricity privatisation issue last year, please read "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 18 Sep 09 at http://candobetter.org/node/765

---

It seems as if my long ordeal on the "9/11 Truth" forum at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/compose-message-general.asp?discussion=2103&page=81 over many months has paid off. The only denier with any grasp of the case of 9/11 Truth movement seems to have disappeared permanently from OLO whilst the near total ignorance of the rest is becoming too obvious for them to deny.

Forrest had watched the Channel 9 TV news the other night. There had been a news segment in which a television reporter had performed a subterranean circumperambulation of the CBD in a special tunnel for electricity cables! From the television footage, it looked like this tunnel had been built for some time; ie. it was not currently under construction.

Then was shown a quick grab of the chief gamelifter, premier Nathan Rees, explaining that all electricity accounts would shortly have to be billed an extra $2 per week to pay for this tunnel and associated works.

Forrest was puzzled. If the electricity cable tunnel had already been built by a NSW government corporation, then surely its construction had already been provided for in previous budgets. Then Forrest had a thought: what if the cable tunnel had just recently been the subject of an agreement to buy it from some third party? Forrest seemed to remember something having been said about an entity called Transgrid. He didn't know whether Transgrid was a NSW government corporation, or a private commercial entity associated, perhaps, with a company like Transfield, a company that fabricated lots and lots of electricity transmission line towers and such like.

Forrest couldn't understand why any government, or government corporation, would sell the very means of distribution of its product, electricity: the grid. It didn't seem to make sense. And, for that matter, why would anybody buy into a distribution grid hardware asset when they were niether generator nor retailer of the electricity? You would have to have open slather with respect as to what you could charge generator and/or retailer for transmission through your grid for your business model to make any sense.

It would certainly explain the chief gamelifter's explanation that suddenly all NSW consumers would have to pay for this electricity cable tunnel if it had only recently been bought back from some other entity: it might not have been in the recent budget estimates if that was the case.

It was a big circuit! Forrest hoped it wouldn't short out.

Forrest had noted this post: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8778#140927

Forrest agreed that the apparent level of migration indicated by the reported statistics was insane, given the circumstances of the GFC and all that.

Forrest wondered whether it was the case that the statistics themselves were perhaps becoming no longer dependable. Could it be that there was coming to be an acceptance that actual high levels of migration were no longer sustainable, but in the drive to inflate the electoral rolls no stone would be left unturned? Could it be that the population statistics of the Commonwealth were being deliberately inflated in order to keep the level of recorded electoral enrolments within the bounds of believability?

Forrest suddenly felt an overpowering need to wash his mouth out with soap! He knew he had uttered utter heresy. This was Australia! Such things couldn't possibly ever be allowed to happen here, could they? Forrest desperately wished that he was Jim Hacker, from a former time, and that he had a personal assistant named Bernard, and that Sir Humphrey Appleby would advise him upon a course of action. Jim would work it all out, wouldn't he?

Forrest could hear the answer already. "Yes Minister. Of course Minister! After all, Minister, we are the Elect. We know what we are doing."

What a relief, thought Forrest.

Great to know someone who is relatively sympathetic still reads my posts (as I read yours).

FG, It would be wonderful to be able to hope that your hunch that immigration figures being inflated for purposes of rigging elections.

But how could it be proven or disproven?

Whoops! The second sentence in the last post should have been:

"FG, It would be wonderful to be able to hope that your hunch that immigration figures being inflated for purposes of rigging elections was correct."