G'day Don, maybe the ABC has some useful footage (probably a few years old now) that can be leaked out, stuff showing minors in detention being flogged and abused by AFP staff. Pity they "kept Mum" on the other territory until after the general election. So much for the right wingers alluding to the ABC being a nest of Loony Lefties.

All elections in recent years have been very, very usual and ordinary, considering that we are voting for rats in Armani suits...nothing changes. The electorate on the whole are more interested in the footy scores than whether their superannuation is going to be annexed by stroke of legislation to fill the governments coffers.

Most Australians know very little, if anything about our constitution and when asked, go off sprouting references to the US constitution...Second Amendments etc.

The only thing of note in recent years is the ACT Human Rights Act (2004) and Amendments (2008 -2009), something of a first in this country. One can only hope the incoming ACT government once formed, do good works in the spirit of those days, because Labor, Liberal, Green at the Federal level have been singularly unimpressive and boring to say the least.

South Australia will have had a Labor government for 16 years by the election next year, and look at the mess we are in.

As you say Don, Of very small moment to anyone living outside the A.C.T.

That said, Canberra is an example of very well thought through decentralization! That would likely benefit from light rail as would almost any other community! Except say every small rural hamlet or village, still large enough to support a general hospital and a couple of schools? Like here, where our only local public transport option is a single taxi service that allegedly doesn't run after dark?

I was surfing the web yesterday and spotted something that would work in most small country towns? A stretched limousine as long as a bus, with gull wing doors. This rechargeable all electric vehicle could be recharged at every stop, (schools, supermarket, newsagent, hospital, RSL, sports venues?) via an under bitumen magnetic interface.

The incorporation of driverless technology, (tesla's?) would make it inherently safer as public transport that almost any competent C class driver could pilot? As would GPS tram track technology that ensured near perfect lining up with all the magnetic recharging interfaces?

This very unusual vehicle is dutch design and could be trialled in a few rural communities like ours, where unlike Canberra that wants for very little public amenity, our options are limited and few! Gull wing doors adjacent to every seat, (about twenty?) allows exceptionally easy entry and disembarkation?

Light rail Don? I'd settle for a service that just ran around four or five time daily, that just wasn't an antiquated very second hand diesel bus, like that which ferries the out of town kids into our schools? But refuses to take the odd adult into town for almost any reason, (Dr, Hospital?) even when running half empty! And paid at the same annual rate whether packed or half empty?

I'd just like a domestic public transport service!
Alan B.

Canberra's voters are relatively coddled, lefty and precious. Their tummy's hurt about, for them, two major local issues:

1. the mere thought of Kangaroo culling. They prefer individual birth control for roos instead, and

2. they insist on calling a Tram project the environmentally precious name "light rail".

As I see it if the Can Tram is built there'll be a lot of economic refugees leaving Canberra.

Do Canberrans deserve all these "issues"?

This is because Can Tram (Civic to Gungalin, Civic to Woden) will cost $Billions causing steep rises in property rates.

I hear its the one Green, Rattenbury, who, with the balance of power in the Assembly, wants to duplicate a perfectly good bus system with his "light rail" train-set.

plantagenet,

> As I see it if the Can Tram is built there'll be a lot of economic refugees leaving Canberra.

Like they've been leaving Sydney these past few years? :-)

Aidan

Sydney is different - The Big Smoke. Its regularly topped with brainy Hong Kong Chinese and industrious Indians.

Meanwhile Canberrans are cut off from the real Oz and dependent on we taxpayers for their way too inflated average wage of $86,791 http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/act-offers-the-top-average-advertised-salaries-on-seek-20160519-goytb4.html

The time to reach the nominal 100% renewables is 2020. The ACT government has already awarded contracts for all the 600MW of wind farms and 40MW of solar necessary to reach the target. As Don points out, very little of this electricity will actually be used in Canberra and that the Liberals have decided to support the target. Liberal leader Jeremy Hanson justified taking this stand because the contracts were now in place. This would not have mattered.
The ACT reaches a higher level of renewable electricity than the rest of Australia not because it has these contracts but because it will take the 2.3 million large-scale generation certificates these generators will produce and effectively tear them up, thus removing them from Renewable Energy Target scheme. LGC’s currently cost $80 in the spot market. This high price is due to the fact that speculation is the target will not be met in 2020. If this happens the retailers will pay a tax effective penalty of $93 per certificate they are unable to hand to the Clean Energy Regulator.
It would be simple for an ACT Liberal government to pass legislation to have some or all of these certificates sold to retailers thus making it easier for the target to be met and have the ACT supporting a more sensible level of renewable generation. The 600MW of wind farms being built but not contributing to met the RET only makes the target harder to reach. Because of the large amount of coal fired electricity which will be fed into the ACT the retailers will also have to buy 500,000 certificates and pass this cost on to their customers.

How many from the 'Libertarian Party' are running for Office in the Canberra elections Don?

That's right, none. There is no Libertarian Party to vote for by the IPA true-believers like yourself. You're running a very different political and social engineering power strategy in Australia.

There is an obvious growth habit of the IPA, Sydney/Lowie Institutes and other fundamentalist Libertarian/Randian Ideologies that is at work. Similar to a Parasite the IPA's plan is infesting it's host organism. In Australia that is the Liberal and National Parties.

Examples of this in the Federal Parliament are James Patterson, Tim Wilson, Andrew Nikolic, George Christensen et al and of course the beloved Oxford Scholar Tony Abbott. Murdoch is the Neo-King who is all but deified.

The parasitic nature of the Libertarian operates as a hemiepiphyte, such as the Strangler Fig tree. These plants begin life as epiphytes, when their seeds, often bird-dispersed, germinate in crevices atop other trees. These seedlings grow their roots downward and envelop the host tree while also growing upward to reach into the sunlight zone above the canopy. After making contact with the ground they encircle their host tree and "strangle" it.

This usually results in the death of the host tree, either through girdling or through competition for light. The strangler fig becomes a "columnar tree" with a hollow central core. Which is a very appropriate true metaphor of the IPA - whose philosophy is to first operate covertly in the shadows, take over a Host by using it's solid foundations and access to Light (PR Marketing), slowly hollow it out and then to take it over completely, killing it in the process.

Essentially the IPA and all conservative think-tanks are following a corrupt and fraudulent irrational ideology that is fundamentally only about YOUR OWN 'power and control' and 'born to rule' beliefs and internalized attitude.

Of course you cannot see it any other way - it is a part of you all, and you'll deny it is even a belief that you adhere to.
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The Strangler Fig Movement /Con't

Your philosophy (though unspoken) is anti-Democratic to it's core! This 'pro-Democracy myth' is simply something that one has to put up with and manage in order to achieve what you want in the long term - despite how much you all truly despise it. This truth oozes from all your and others essays here.

The declared value of Individual Freedom is another Myth being sold to a public suffering under the yoke of entrenched information asymmetry about the Truth of 'conservative' (yet essentially radicalized) Think-tanks and their operatives everywhere.

It is of no surprise then the close interconnections with climate science denial and that PR machine that is poisoning the minds of the public with deception and lies - a modern day pea and shell game in plain view. Nice in theory and not a bad strategy, but it's destined to fail.

Climate change and the insidious denial of science will be your comeuppance and ultimate undoing - your own strangler fig moment is coming!

Pity you won't be around in 20 years to see it Don. But where you're going is exactly where your corrupt fraudulent anti-life anti-freedom ideology is heading.

Without genuine Empathy life is meaningless, empty and inhumane to the core.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21

Deep down you'll know I speak truth here. Plausible deniability wont cut it either. Been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt factory! :-)
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Were 'the people' sitting on Boards and working in the Banks, Finance, Stock markets, Corporations and 'the people' operating in big party politics already honest and ethical, there would be no need for a banking Royal Commission nor a Federal ICAC.

Eddie O'Beid wouldn't be heading for jail and nor would his many criminally corrupt like-minded friends be living in fear right now!

There is nothing more self-evidently dishonest, self-deluded, unethical and corrupt than climate science denial Don Aitkin.

Your 'days are numbered' and not simply because you're 79 years old.
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Thank you Don, but as Alan B.,[Monday, 12 September 2016 11:06:08 AM] has said: "Of very small moment to anyone living outside the A.C.T."

What interests me is: where have the proponents of "small government" gone?

Why is no one suggesting that a 25 member Assembly is about 24 too many?

I realize that while [plantagenet, Monday, 12 September 2016 1:08:42 PM] may well be speaking tongue in cheek when he says: "Canberra's voters are relatively coddled, lefty and precious.", but even if that were partly true, why not have one Chief Minister and leave the kangaroos to arrange their own affairs?