Tony Abbott Accused Of "Climate Change Racism"

Today's unhinged climate alarmist moment comes courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Federal Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of having a racist climate change policy.

Mr Abbott has warned that Australian businesses buying carbon permits under an emissions trading scheme could be conned by unscrupulous international traders.

Because there has been absolutely no fraud in the climate change hoax carbon schemes.

The Government plans to introduce its carbon tax legislation to Parliament by the end of September and hopes to have it passed by next year.

Mr Combet described Mr Abbott's position as "economic xenophobia" in an address to the National Press Club.

"It sends the signal that it's somehow dubious to trade with foreigners. It's typical dog-whistle politics, trashing the commitment that's existed for many years on both sides of politics to economic liberalisation and open trade," he said.

"It is in effect a white carbon policy designed to harvest more votes no matter what the cost."

So, even with the idiotic anthropogenic global warming issue, liberals go for their choice attack, raaaaacism. But, then, AGW turned from a scientific issue to a political one about 5 minutes after someone said "hey, I wonder if the output of greenhouse gases by Mankind is affecting the climate?"

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Yet another advance which will render Julia's fibre network obsolete before it is built

Light bulbs could be soon used to broadcast wireless Internet, a leading physicist has claimed. Harald Hass said he has developed a technology which can broadcast data through the same connection as a normal lamp. By simply turning on the light in the room you could also switch on your Internet connection, he said in a speech.

Other possibilities of the device - which he has dubbed ‘Li-fi’, or Light Fidelity - include sending wireless data from the ‘white space’ in your television spectrum or unused satellite signals.

Professor Hass, of the school of engineering at Edinburgh University in the UK, said that currently we use radio waves to transmit data which are inefficient. With mobile phones there are 1.4 million base stations boosting the signal but most of the energy is used to cool it, making it only five per cent efficient. By comparison there are 40 billion light bulbs in use across the world which are far more efficient.

By replacing old fashioned incandescent models with LED bulbs he claimed he could turn them all into Internet transmitters.

The invention, dubbed D-Light, can send data faster than 10 megabits per second, which is the speed of a typical broadband connection, by altering the frequency of the ambient light in the room.

It has new applications in hospitals, airplanes, military, and even underwater. Aeroplane passengers could in theory be able to surf the Internet from signals beamed out of the lights on board.
Named D-Light - it can send data faster than 10 megabits per second, the speed of a typical broadband connection, just by altering the frequency of the ambient light in a room

Named D-Light - it can send data faster than 10 megabits per second, the speed of a typical broadband connection, just by altering the frequency of the ambient light in a room

‘The way we transmit wireless data is inefficient electromagnetic waves, in particular radio waves which are limited, they are sparse, they are expensive and only have a certain range,’ Professor Hass said. ‘It is this limitation which does not cope with wireless data...and we are running out of efficiency. ‘Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum...wouldn’t it be great to use it for wireless communications?’

He added that the visible light spectrum had 10,000 more times the space than radio waves, making it the ideal range to use.

During a lecture professor Hass showed off a desk lamp which had been fitted with an LED light bulb which transmitted data to a receiver on the table below it. Whenever he put his hand in the beam of light the video, which was beamed onto a screen behind him, stopped playing as the signal was being blocked.

Professor Hass said the technology has not yet been integrated with smart phone but he hopes that soon it will be. ‘Everywhere that there is light, these are potential sources for data transmission,’ he said.

‘For me the applications of it are beyond imagination...all we need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device and this would combine illumination and data transmission, and this could solve the problems facing us in wireless communication.’

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Mother explains why she made her son wear 'I'm a thief' sign

A MUM has ignited a national debate after making her 10-year-old son stand in a busy park wearing a sign saying, "Do not trust me. I will steal from you as I am a thief".

The mother, who confessed to having a criminal past when she was young, said it was to ensure he did not follow in her footsteps, the Herald Sun reported.

"I have lived a life that most people would not dream of and I am trying to stop my child from going down the same road as I did, because even though I have sorted myself out, it took me 10 years to do," said the single mother of three children.

The woman said she had tried everything to stop her son shoplifting and stealing - visits to courthouses, chats with police, visits to police cells and even a trip to a youth detention centre.

Finding a stash of chocolates in her son's drawer after a trip to the corner shop to buy milk last week was the last straw.

"I have put him into courses, I have had counselling done, I have done everything I can," she said. "I think he has learnt his lesson. I think that hour (in the park) is enough for him to go: 'I don't ever want to do this again'. "I did the same thing as my son, shoplifting as a teenager, and then it escalated because I didn't have a mum there to teach me right from wrong."

The woman said her son had been stealing since he was seven.

The mum's actions made headlines, becoming the No.1 story on websites and dominating talkback radio from Melbourne to Townsville, where the family live. Her parenting style simultaneously appalled and inspired parents around the nation.

A surprisingly large number of people praised her and called for the cane to be reintroduced. Many also sympathised with her.

But Queensland University parenting director Prof Matt Sanders said the "shame and humiliation" approach was unlikely to have the desired effect. "There's almost no evidence that I'm aware of that this kind of shame and humiliation approach to kids is effective, and it can very easily backfire," he said. "If it doesn't work, what's your back-up? You've already pulled out the big guns."

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Labor turns the boom into a crisis

THE crisis now engulfing Australian manufacturing has been long predicted and much foreseen yet the inescapable impression is that our decision-makers have been taken by surprise and are scrambling to do something.

There are two unpalatable questions for Gillard Labor. Did Labor expect such job losses from the biggest terms of trade boom for a century? Or has Labor misjudged the boom and made a serious policy blunder?

After his company's announcement, BlueScope Steel chairman Graeme Kraehe said: "All this structural change has been forecast for several years, it is not as though it has suddenly hit us. In my view it is an indictment on everybody concerned: business, industry associations, governments and unions."

It is, in truth, a collective failure but not the type of failure that many assume. The problem, in essence, has been the inability to promote productivity-enhancing policy when the terms of trade were high and national income was surging - a hard task. That would have seen Labor thinking outside and beyond the boom.

The real policy schism is represented in remarks by Australian Industry Group chief Heather Ridout on behalf of manufacturing and Treasury boss Martin Parkinson in last night's Shann Memorial Lecture, with his views guiding Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan.

Ridout said: "AI Group has been warning for some time that the resources boom has not been going to plan and despite the predictions of optimists is not delivering the promised growth and related opportunities." She said the high dollar meant "our competitiveness has just been literally bombed out of existence".

Ridout's point is that Gillard Labor, relying on the views of Treasury and the Reserve Bank, has been too passive in the teeth of the high dollar and too ready to let the market make the adjustment, meaning manufacturing must make room for mining. She argued manufacturing "as a whole" faced the same pressures as BlueScope: weak demand, high interest rates, rising labour costs, absence of productivity gains, rising electricity costs and the high dollar. The fear is that worse job losses lie ahead.

When deconstructed, some of Ridout's elements are beyond government control and some of them are the result of explicit policy.

What is beyond government control is the 140-year terms of trade peak and the extent of dollar appreciation. The float is the key to the present situation because it means the economy adjusts to the boom by a higher dollar rather than higher inflation - this is a plus because it extends the boom's longevity.

The core point, however, is that many of the present problems are tied to Labor policy, priorities and flawed decisions. In November last year, former Treasury boss Ken Henry said the rise in the terms of the trade could constitute "the biggest external shock to our economy in history". Treasury says this structural change based on China and India will endure for decades with long-run opportunities for Australia. Parkinson put the Treasury line last night: the priority must be "a flexible responsive economy" and it is pivotal to "facilitate structural adjustment, not oppose it". That means rejection of protectionist measures to prop up manufacturing. Gillard and Swan are holding to this framework, so far.

Given the century-defining nature of this challenge, it had to be the supreme policy task for Gillard Labor this term. That meant making the boom work in all its dimensions. Yet this was not Labor's top priority. Since the August 2010 election its priority in terms of energy and political capital has been pricing carbon, not managing the resource boom of the century - a strategic blunder.

If Labor had no political option but to proceed with carbon pricing it should have been framed differently as just one part of the epic resources boom challenge.

Australia's history proves resource booms are saviours and destroyers and often end in tears. Since this boom emerged in about 2004 it has helped to finish two prime ministers and weaken a third. John Howard misjudged the economy's strength and ran on Work Choices; Kevin Rudd would have survived if not for his poor management of the mining tax; Gillard believed the strong economy would underpin her carbon pricing scheme. Gillard and Swan would dispute such criticism. "This is something we've understood for a long period of time," the Prime Minister said. The Treasurer pointed to the $3 billion skills package in the last budget to meet the terms of trade phenomenon.

Yes, the government has been acting. The critique, however, is it has not acted enough. Its political mismanagement of the mining tax in early 2010 despite the convincing case for a new commonwealth-based resources tax was a major blunder. Its corporate tax relief is too modest given cost pressures. Its re-regulation of the labour market has reduced flexibility and diminished productivity. Its instinct for government initiative means excessive red tape and regulation on industry.

Labor, in short, has had a competitiveness strategy but it hasn't been pursued with enough conviction or whole-of-government rigour. Ross Garnaut kept saying the adjustment from the resources boom would far outweigh the adjustment from the carbon tax. The irony of this truism is Labor's priority has been the smaller, not the bigger, adjustment. Now Labor is caught out. The nightmare Labor faces in 2012 is rising unemployment when the carbon tax begins.

The speech given yesterday by Reserve Bank deputy governorRic Battellino shows the diabolical dilemma Labor faces - the mining boom proved to be stronger than expected; the economy overall proved to be weaker than expected with demand falling away; yet inflation is likely to be higher than envisaged. So in Australia's two-speed economy, the fast lane got faster and the slow lane got slower. The miners got fatter profits and the manufacturers had disappearing profits.

Gillard's reassuring words conceal a government trapped by forces that demanded an earlier and stronger policy response. Gillard said yesterday that manufacturing had a "bright future" but that Australia's economy was undergoing a "transition". Ridout jumped on her. "Transition to where?" she asked. Ridout wants a transition around a manufacturing strategy but Parkinson wants a market transition that accepts the Asia-driven structural changes in our economy. Gillard is stranded between them.

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