The battle lines drawn over economic policy in the context of the global financial crisis and recession are well known--its either the government or the market.The Washington Monthly has a special report The Next Frontier

In the Introduction Paul Kedrosky spells out the two sides of the debate. One the one side:

government stimulus spending will be the primary force in our eventual recovery. This view holds that the key to exiting economic downturns is countercyclical public spending to keep the U.S. economy closer to its optimal level of activity. You should deficit-spend when the economy is operating at less than its full capacity; you should shrink spending and manage debts when the economy is back to normal. It is, in short, the Keynesian view, named for economist John Maynard Keynes and widely held by congressional Democrats. And there’s some truth to it. Massive government spending can cushion the blow when an economy shrinks as severely and as quickly as this one has. But imagining that a fiscal stimulus, however outsized, can compensate for indebted consumers hell-bent on saving their way back to (relative) solvency is high-definition dreaming.

greater government spending only leads to higher tax rates, hence to declining incentives for investors to take risks. Better, in this view, to allow the economic crisis run its course, permit large firms to collapse, and let entrepreneurs pick up the pieces and create new companies, jobs, and wealth. This is the "Hayekian" view (à la Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek), widely held by congressional Republicans, and there’s some truth in it, too. Higher tax rates will, at some point, undermine investment incentives (though the evidence suggests that we’re not very close to that point yet). Downturns—especially severe ones—do disrupt markets and provide opportunities for innovators. Microsoft, Allstate, Morgan Stanley, and many other companies rose from the wreckage of economic downturns. Small companies have been the primary source of job creation in the United States over the last few decades. Unless you expect that trend to change, start-ups and small companies must, by definition, play a major role in any meaningful recovery.

There's plenty of comment today on John Hartigan's press club speech, where he came up with the unique idea that journalism is not blogging, and blogs are not good. And the other, somehow related in some people's minds, that Crikey and blogs should always be mentioned in the same sentence.

Journalist and blogger Tim Burrowes on the journalists versus blogger thing.

Crikey blogger Trevor Cook on the contribution newspapers have made to their own current circumstances.

ClarenceGirl figuring, almost Rudd-style, that all this consternation means bloggers must be doing something right.

Tobias Ziegler from Pure Poison on the hilarity of a News Ltd person criticising others for spouting nonsense.

Laurel Papworth pointing out these rants are actually attacks on their own readership, and therefore counter productive. In comments she makes a distinction between heritage and traditional media:

Heritage media = traditional media outlets opposed to community created media. Not traditional media that embraces it… and stays culturally relevant.

Just for fun, an example of what can go wrong when you attempt to fit in with this internet thingy, but continue to take your audience for idiots. Jamie Briggs at The Punch doing truthiness on Labor's handing of the economy. And they published that with their own figures to hand.

Despite all the rhetoric about bringing democracy to Iraq, it was commonly seen as a bad war. There was the breaking of international law, the lies about weapons of mass destruction, the apparent corruption of contractors, the brutal anarchy in Baghdad, the torture at Abu Ghraib and CIA's torture playbook and the outsourced torture (and torture techniques) to foreign allies.

An Islamic society is emerging from an authoritarian state and it remains to be seen whether Iraqi's can create a functioning state. As the Americans start their withdrawal from Iraq they are convinced that Iraqi democracy will protect the United States against terror.

If Iraq was seen as a bad war, then Afghanistan is the good war. The US invasion was a response to 9/11, sanctioned by international law and a broad coalition; the objectives were those of self-defence and altruism. Al-Qaida has killed and continues to try to kill innocent citizens, and it is right to prevent them. Rory Stewart in The Irresistible Illusion in the London Review of Books quotes Obama as saying that the aim of the US intervention:

is to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.A necessary condition of the defeat of al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban becauseif the Afghan government falls to the Taliban . . . that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

The Adelaide Festival of Ideas says that it aims to be a sort of ‘over the horizon’ radar for public discussion. The object is to discern the ideas that will shape the coming decades, not just the coming months.

The context in Australia is not just the collapse of the economic boom, the global financial crisis, the global recession; it is also the effects of climate change and the need to shift to a more sustainable society and a low carbon economy because of natural limits.

The shift here is one of economic growth being decoupled from environmental harm, moving beyond constructing environmental issues as ‘jobs versus the environment’, and policies which accept that the switch to renewal energy is necessary to long term security and sustainability.

Interestingly, the 2009 Adelaide Festival of Ideas is about limits. The blurb says that:

On the one hand there is pushing the limits to each new ideas, experiences, products and plans.On the other hand, the limits push back. For example, the Murray Darling Basin and world financial markets have been pushed too far and the consequences are serious. And in public policy, the limits of tolerance are always a matter of passionate debate.

Peter Cullen, who was thinker in residence in Adelaide in 2004, said in his Flinders Research Centre for Coastal and Catchment Environments Schultz Oration in late 2007 about water and climate change. I thought that I might revisit this in the light of the focus of the forthcoming Adelaide Festival of Ideas on limits.

Cullen draws attention to what is becoming increasingly obvious. He says that:

Much of Sth Eastern Australia is drying out and is now in serious water deficit. It is no longer prudent to believe this is a drought that is about to break. There is every likelihood that we are seeing real climate change and this must be a driver to let is start managing our water resources as thought they were a scarce and valuable resource upon which we all depend.

The demands on our dwindling water resources are escalating. Everyone believes their use of water should be the priority. The environment has been largely sacrificed with the Coorong rapidly becoming like the Dead Sea. We are facing a crisis. There will be a horrible shakeout in rural Australia and our cities are going to have to lift their games in water planning.

Temporary worker schemes are a fact of life. They exist around the world including Australia with its 457 visa system and they indicate a shift in international migration from settlement migration to temporary migration. Globally, the flows of temporary labour have been increasing.

Peter Mares in an article entitled The Permanent-shift-to-temporary-migration over at Inside Story says that there has been a transformational shift in Australian migration policy.

What was initially intended as a way of plugging temporary skills gaps has become a permanent feature of the Australian labour market. Last financial year, for the first time, the number of visas issued to temporary foreign workers under the 457 scheme outstripped the number of visas granted to permanent skilled migrants. There is every possibility that this will happen again: although the permanent skilled intake is capped, the employer-driven 457 visa scheme is not.

Max Fisher in The Atlantic has a good idea, given the low profile that urban policy has in Australia---Inside Story does not even a category for cities, though Australian Policy Online does have an urban planning category.

Fisher says why not have a segregated set of roads and paths for bikes only. If we separate fast-moving highways from slow-moving local roads -- why not create a separate road system for even slower bikes as well?

 City planners should take overcrowded city streets, which barely move anyway and are unsafe for cyclists, and close them to cars. His argument is this:

Citing a need to alleviate motor traffic, reduce air pollution, and increase general health, cities are carving out more bike lanes. But bike lanes simply don't work. Maybe something about America's competitive cowboy culture means drivers just can't bring themselves to share the road, frequently parking in bike lanes, turning across bike lanes without warning, and colliding with bikes....The solution isn't more bike lanes, many of which are so poorly designed that they make biking even more dangerous.

Well, there you have it. Whilst the Australian Senate evades the issue the US House of Representatives has passed historic legislation to limit pollution blamed for global warming by aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 (note the baseline is 2005, not 1990 levels) by 2020, and 83 per cent by 2050. 212 representatives voted no, with all but handful of these no votes rejecting the bill because they rejected the notion that America has to do something about greenhouse gases.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act is a cap-and-trade system that sets a limit on overall emissions of heat-trapping gases while allowing utilities, manufacturers and other emitters to trade pollution permits, or allowances, among themselves. The cap would grow tighter over the years, pushing up the price of emissions and presumably driving industry to find cleaner ways of making energy.

It was hard work to pass the legislation it is riddled with many loopholes and concessions) and the bill must still clear the Senate (where it faces even more daunting odds) before it can be signed into law.

Meanwhile in Australia:

In Australia the political play is to have the legislation rejected by both the Liberals and the greens whilst the economic play is to protect the mining sectors and unions, which are part of the base of the present government.

Miles Kemp in the The Advertiser reports that the state governments of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland are turning a blind eye to water theft and manipulation of irrigation rules to protect their irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin. That is what the water politics is about----protecting irrigators at all costs.

Kemp outlines how the various ways by which water is being stolen by irrigators across the Murray-Darling Basin; ways that indicate the indifference of the irrigators to the health of the River Murray. These include:

Tampering with water meters to stop them recording water use.

Frequent breaching of water use caps without prosecution.

Inadequate policing of water theft.

Earthworks which divert floodwaters, bypassing water metering.

Recapturing downstream of water destined for environmental flows.

Poor control of groundwater use.

The most significant regulatory issue was that legislation needed to be reviewed and updated to control water harvesting from flood plains and multiple channels. Flood-plain "harvesting" and its diversion to storages in Queensland and parts of northern NSW was extensive, and once the water gets out on the flood plain state governments have no idea how much there is or what is being taken. Nor do they care, it seems.

It is increasingly obvious that the Islamic regime in Iran is transforming into a dictatorship as it increasingly turns to repression to deal with civil disobedience, and clamps down on the opposition. The attempted silencing of dissent is now Iran’s everyday currency. As Juan Cole states:

By stealing the election for Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has effectively made a coup on behalf of the clerical sphere in alliance with lay hard liners, which threatens to virtually abolish the sphere of popular sovereignty. That is what Mousavi and Karroubi and their followers are objecting to so vehemently. The reformers are saying that the regime has just moved toward really being a totalitarian state and is now removing any space for dissent.

The neocons are arguing that the protesting Iranians we see on our TV screens and computer monitors have gone far beyond demonstrating about a stolen election. They want to dump the current regime, turn their backs on radical Islam and install a Bush-era Middle East secular democracy. Bush redeemed. 'Something Must be Done' they say.

The national broadband network (NBN) discourse has been dominated by discussion over its cost and whether to go ahead with a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) architecture. Instead of seeing basic connectivity as just another marketplace we look at it as we do roads, which means a state-funded organisation with one mission: universal gigabit access as a public service.

Yet the action is not the network per se, as it is going to be in the applications you run over the network. The development of applications in healthcare, education, social networking and general business as primary areas where innovation would occur and opportunities arise.

In other words we are talking about a digital economy. Since the NBN would be a white elephant without the digital economy, it is better seen more as a national infrastructure, with that infrastructure carrying all information services with broadband Internet being just one of them. IPTV will almost certainly be another, voice services, government-related services, creative businesses and financial services.

The digital economy is the key to the nation’s economic future, and how it will drive future industrial capability and competitiveness. Australia's communications infrastructure and increased digital participation are key to building a 21st century knowledge economy.

There is a parallel to the Goodwin Grech fake mail saga currently consuming Canberra, and the event happened in SA several weeks ago. Just like Turnbull + Co, the SA Liberals were hoodwinked by a political hoax. Odd isn't it--the lust for a "silver bullet" solution by those desperate to get back into power at any price. It means that they see Labor rorts and cronyism (behind which stands a looming Labor corporate state) everywhere and so they go for the smear strategy.

The dodgy documents event in SA is a good example. It refers to the false emails, which appeared to have come from Labor Party headquarters. They suggested that Mike Rann, the Premier of SA, had links to a company connected with the Church of Scientology. They were anonymously dropped off to the Liberals and Martin Hamilton-Smith, the Liberal leader, then spruiked them inside and outside Parliament, without bothering to check them out, even though he said that he had.

Hamilton-Smith then accused Rann and others of serious criminal misconduct, and he released the documents that he claimed supported his allegations. He accused Mike Rann of being involved in plans to give a company associated with the Church of Scientology favourable treatment in return for $20,000 in donations organised by Labor fundraiser Nick Bolkus. Rann's Government was corrupt.

Now documents in brown envelops turn up to oppositions all the time. Oppositions rely on these leaks to get a foothold in criticising the government of the day and making them accountable. Rann gives many genuine examples from his time as Opposition leader. But the Church of Scientology? That should have been a red flag, surely, despite the Rann Government being very socially conservative.

Ryan Avent has an interesting argument in American Prospect about the causes of the global economic recession. Behind the fallout from the global financial crisis --ie., the decline in wealth due to housing and market crashes---there is the effect of the rising cost of oil on consumers:

it seems clear that the sudden and sharp increase in the price of a commodity so integral to all aspects of American life was very much responsible for putting us all in the uncomfortable situation in which we now find ourselves.

Avent goes on to say that return to global growth in the future will mean a continued rise in oil prices. They are starting to rise now, and that rise will mean cuts to consumer spending and problems for indebted households. They are going to restrain their spending on other purchases.

So the political crisis that the Liberals promised to engineer in the OzCar affair has fizzled to little more than the standard Parliamentary squabbling and bile. Can Turnbull use his finely tuned barrister skills to turn things around, reignite the blowtorch, and turn it on The Treasurer? How wounded will Turnbull become from the Labor counterattack on his big character?

For the moment people will just switch off now as the fizz has gone and there is no blood flowing as the arrows have missed their target. Some will see the ongoing political spectacle as the politicians throwing the switch to avaudeville understanding of a blood sport. Should we sit back and have a good laugh at the clown's doing their resignation act? Will this act be pushed aside by another act about spooks or moles?

What has been lost sight of with the switch to vaudeville is the politically significant "debate" in the Senate about whether Australia should take a legislated position on carbon reduction to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen next December. Or whether, like the US, Australia should decide its emissions trading policy after Copenhagen. Australian policy on carbon reduction really matters because it has a direct impact on both jobs and exports and on the necessary shift to a low carbon economy.

As we know the global recession had forced financiers to tighten lending, leaving many car dealers in danger of losing crucial financial support. Hence the yet-to-be-established OzCar finance facility. One fallout from the Rudd Government efforts to establish alternative financing for car dealers when two major financiers threatened to pull out of Australia at the height of the global credit crisis is the so-called OzCar affair or ute-gate.

Ute-gate refers to the Coalition's allegations of a favour for a mate (namely, Ipswich car dealer John Grant, a friend and political donor who lent a 1996 Mazda ute to the PM's electoral office for use as an electoral vehicle) by both the PM and Treasurer. Both are alleged to have helped to arrange finance from Treasury and to have misled Parliament about this, by understating their contact with, and support of, John Grant's attempts to find substitute financing for his business.

Little evidence has been presented to justify the allegations. Firstly, the Coalition does not have the alleged email from from Rudd's economic adviser Andrew Charlton to Treasurer Wayne Swan's office and to Treasury official Godwin Grech. Said email does not appear to exist at this stage, despite the clams of News Ltd journalists. Secondly, the case against Swan is circumstantial, in that the public emails show Grech reporting back to Swan and his office in regular detail about Grant's case, but Grant did not receive any finance for his dealership.

Not withstanding this, the Coalition is calling for the resignation of both Rudd and Swan for having mislead Parliament. At this stage it's still heat and bluster. On the basis of an email Turnbull says he doesn't have he has demanded the resignation of Kevin Rudd. The federal police and Auditor-General have been called in to ascertain the status of the missing email. So it's all sound and fury at this point by both the Coalition and News Corp newspapers.

As Ezra Klein points out in American Prospect Obama's health-care reform is health-care-system-spending reform The purpose of health reform is to pay for health care -- not to improve the health of the population. If health insurance does not equal health, health insurance is important because, as Kein says:

for too many, a trip to the emergency room ends in bankruptcy, or a child's fall results in massive credit-card debt. And those who can't afford regular care often suffer terribly from chronic pain and preventable illness. Fixing the health-care system is imperative from both a moral and an economic perspective.