Blogs

Day 32 and 33 of the Federal election campaign and the big ticket item of the past two days was the announcement by the Labor Party that they would put up $10bn to help fund the suburban rail loop in Victoria, which would be the largest federal funding injection in public transport history. For their own part the Coalition had kind-off splashed some money as well with $4bn offered for the East West Link - although it must be said that's now been rejected by two state elections and the Feds have been withholding $3bn in transport infrastructure spending since.

I'm not usually very fond of the term, but it's hard to describe this quote as anything other than post-capitalism at its finest:

"While battery arrays that are installed to support short-duration renewables integration may be able to underbid current service providers and win a share of the frequency regulation revenue, additional battery capacity that exceeds total demand is likely to drive frequency regulation prices down to levels that are currently unthinkable. It may ultimately be good for electricity consumers, but it will be very bad for facility owners."

When this government came to power in 2013, Australia was ranked 24th out of 133 nations for gender equality. Today we are ranked 39th.

WEF Global Gender Gap report, 2018
https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2018

But don't fear women of Australia, on Mother's Day Scottie said he respects you!

The rate at which California builds new sources of renewable energy has slowed dramatically over the last few years. In 2013, we were adding over 3,000 MW a year; in 2017, we only added 546 MW. The reason for this slowdown is that conventional utilities (like PG&E) have been losing customers to Community Choice Aggregators (like MCE). The conventional utilities don't want to add capacity because it's expensive and their revenues are down. The CCAs have a hard time adding capacity because they're still small and young.

Day 30 and 31 of the Federal election campaign, and without a doubt the biggest possible news item was Labor's costings which project the largest budget surplus in history, and double the size of the Coalition's. Note that these values are verified by the Parliamentary Budget Office, an indepedent statutory office, which uses the same numbers and models as the Treasury and are required to do so. I guess it helps a *lot* when you're not giving $77bn in tax-cuts to those earning $180K or more per annum.

Day 28 and 29 and Liberal candidate Gurpal Singh, who previously made headlines for his past attempts to link marriage equality with pedophilia (a little awkward in the context with John Howard offering support to Dutton and Abbott, after his support of Pell, who would want that?). "The standard you walk by is the standard you accept," Mr Morrison said while attacking then-Labor candidate for Melbourne Luke Creasey - but apparently this didn't apply to one of his own. So Labor is making a point of this by advertising Gurpal's views on Grindr...

Concord Communities Alliance had a very interesting discussion today with a representative from Hall Equities about the stadium they want to build in downtown Concord. This project hasn't gotten a lot of love from the community, but she did make some good points:

Day 26 and 27 of the Federal election campaign, and OMFG did you see Bill Shorten on Q&A?! Scott Morrison has told Q&A that he won't be making himself available to the tough questions (and they were tough), but Shorten answered the questions deftly and sincerely. It was, quite frankly, his best performance (he also committed to a review of Newstart payments - and not with a view of reducing them).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhJCumGOnSk

I've decided to run for Party Policy Director of the Environmental Caucus. Party Policy Director is a new position that will be responsible for identifying resolutions and platform issues and bringing them to the attention of the caucus. If elected, I'll use my research skills and technical knowledge to provide caucus members with background information on the issues at hand. I won't tell anyone what to think, but I will ensure that people have access to the information they need.

Day 24 and 25 of the Federal election campaign, and the big news items are the second leader's debate and a number of policy announcements coming from Labor's official campaign launch. Again our independent and publically-owned ABC (which the IPA finds troubling) provides a fact-check on the debate, which, on sheer volume of dubious claims made, don't look good for the Prime Minister. Looking even less good was Scott Morrison gesticulating wildly towards Bill Shorten, with the latter describing him a "space invader".