The ingrown toenail of Australian politics

This is a story that was on ABC recently but is so good I had to put it up here too. I especially love the Paragraph Highlighted in Orange.

By Tim Dunlop Updated Mon 20 Jan 2014, 1:26pm AEDT

Neither major political party any longer represents the electorate as a whole, writes Tim Dunlop. They have instead become self-perpetuating mechanisms for the advancement of their own kind. What we are seeing in Australia at the moment is a collapse in the relevance and standing of our political class. By "political class" I mean those organisations and institutions involved in the day-to-day work of running and informing the country, most especially, the major political parties and the mainstream media.

How did this come about? It begins with the parties themselves, as they are ultimately the institutions on whom we rely to not only carry the weight of sensible political discussion but to stand up to the various rent seekers (from mining companies to retail magnates) who think the country should be run for their benefit. Both Labor and the Coalition are failing to do either.

The opinion polls that once (allegedly) showed our desire to change government and install the Coalition have already swung back the other way. The problem is that neither major party any longer represents the electorate as a whole. They have instead become self-perpetuating mechanisms for the advancement of their own kind.

In the absence of a broad membership, Labor and the Coalition have become inwardly rather than outwardly focussed, the captive of special interests. Their reason for being is no longer to serve but to continue to exist.

Both parties are riven by internal disputes that have less to do with policy differences (that is, visions for how to make the country better) than with factional power. The most obvious example is the insane infighting that culminated in the Rudd/Gillard disputes of the last few years. Nothing has done more to undermine the credibility of the Labor party than these so-called "leadership" battles.

The Coalition has benefitted from Labor infighting in that they are the only major alternative for which people can vote, but that doesn't mean that people are happy with them either. In fact, major factional battles exist within the Coalition too, and they are driven by the same malaise: a disconnect from the electorate at large and an inability to articulate a vision of the national good outside their own obsessions.

Even an ideologue like News Ltd journalist and former Liberal staffer Chris Kenny is honest enough to admit the fact. Back in 2009, as Tony Abbott ousted Malcolm Turnbull as party leader, Kenny wrote:

The federal parliamentary Liberal Party has become, in a practical sense, divided into two separate and disparate parties, one in the Senate and one in the house. The Senate party is deeply conservative, reluctant to take action on climate change and supports Tony Abbott as leader. The Liberal Party of the House of Representatives is moderate, supports an emissions trading scheme and prefers Malcolm Turnbull as leader. In the recent leadership change and policy U-turn over the emissions trading scheme, the Senate party imposed its will on the house party. ...the conservative minority pushed for a leadership spill but still fell well short of the required numbers. Confronted by this defeat, the conservative wing, from its power base in the Senate, unleashed a shock-and-awe campaign of frontbench resignations, forcing the Liberals into a policy and leadership crisis, from which Abbott won by a solitary vote.

He concluded that, "The Senate-house divide, unchecked, could lead to a fatal disconnect between conservative politicians and the people they seek to represent." That's exactly what is happening and it is what I call the ingrown-toenail syndrome of Australian politics: a seemingly endless bout of political self-obsession.

The net effect of it is the rise of a harsh partisanship of which the Abbott government is the most successful proponent. Public policy is no longer seen as a long-term process of trying to enact reforms that are to the benefit of the nation as a whole, but as a winner-takes-all game where the incumbent gets to reshape the country according to its own prejudices. Or rather, the prejudices of the dominant faction within the governing party. Under such circumstances, the emergence of Cory Bernardi is not an aberration but a logical development. When parties stop reflecting the mainstream of voters, marginal ideologues emerge, and Bernardi represents a particular faction within the Coalition trying to assert itself so that it gets to play its part in the game of "reshape the country".

The electorate's dissatisfaction with all this is palpable. The opinion polls that once (allegedly) showed our desire to change government and install the Coalition have already swung back the other way. And polls are far from the only indication of our dissatisfaction. At the last federal election, more of us voted for someone other than the major parties than ever before. As Antony Green summarises:

Support for minor parties and independents reached record levels for both the House and Representatives and the Senate at the 2013 election. Support for non-major party candidates reached 21.1 per cent in the House of Representatives, representing more than one in five of all votes. In the Senate, support for non-major party candidates reached 32.2 per cent, just under one in three of all votes. ...In the House the 21.1 per cent non-major party support broke the 20.4 per cent record at One Nation's first election in 1998. The level of support for independents and minor parties has now been above 14 per cent at every election since 1996. Non-major support in the Senate has always been several percentage points higher than in the House. The new record of 32.2 per cent surpasses 26.2 per cent in 2010 and 25.0 per cent at One Nation's first election in 1998. Minor party and independent support in the Senate has now been above 19 per cent at every election since 1996.

These are incredible figures and they show how we are desperately scratching around, trying to find an alternative. At the moment, the system is throwing up "solutions" as diverse as Palmer United and Cathy McGowan, but small parties and independents alone cannot properly address voter concerns. Indeed, under such circumstances, the very act of voting deepens our sense of powerlessness rather than allaying it. We simply don't feel we are getting a parliament with our best interests at heart.

Compounding the problems is the collapse of coherent public discussion. The mainstream media, in print and on television (television being where the vast majority of us still get our political information) simply can't cope. They either oversimplify everything to the point of caricature, or they become - as is the case of the Murdoch newspapers - openly and comically partisan. This partisanship is in part the result of the financial problems within the media industry, an attempt to consolidate what small market share they have by pandering to the converted. It is probably inevitable. But I don't think it is our chief concern.

The problem is more fundamental. The media isn't failing because their business model is broken (though it is). They are failing because their news model is broken. They, too, have lost touch with their audience, in exactly the same way that the political parties have. Audiences are bored and turned off by the way politics is covered and the editors and journalists in charge of things have little idea about how to respond. So just as people have sought alternative candidates come election time, they are also seeking alternative sources of news and information as they try to get their head around the changing political environment. The emergence of social and other online forms of new media is most welcome: can you even imagine how much worse things would be if we were still limited to the handful of media outlets we were stuck with before the invention of the internet? Nonetheless, new media is still in its infancy. And just as a few independent MPs cannot fix a parliamentary system struggling for relevance, a few new news sites and social media pages cannot replace a coherent, focussed and properly functioning fourth estate.

Where does all this leave us? The bottom line is that we are passing through a period of transition, and the trick at this stage is to step back from the day-to-day trivia and see the big picture. That's a lot easier said than done, but the ferment obvious in our national politics - from our voting patterns to the way we are now consuming media - suggests an engaged electorate actively thinking about how to make things better. It is from such engagement that reinvention will emerge.

Proper Discourse

Occupy Wall Street is a protest movement that began September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district, initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters. The protests are against social and economic inequality, high unemployment, greed, as well as corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The protesters' slogan We are the 99% refers to the growing income and wealth inequality in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.


Prior to the global financial crisis, Australia had a diverse and highly competitive financial system. The four major banks went head-to-head with the likes of St. George, BankWest, Bendigo Bank, Aussie, Adelaide Bank, RAMS, Wizard, and Challenger.

Today every single one of these entities has disappeared as a genuinely independent concern, wholly or partly acquired by the majors (with competition concerns waived by the ACCC), or merged with one another.

Prior to the crisis, Australia's banks were not explicitly government-backed. And taxpayers had never guaranteed bank deposits before (or conceived of providing such guarantees for free as they currently do), nor had they ever guaranteed the banks' institutional debts.

The taxpayer-owned central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), had also never lent to the banks on the much longer-dated and more flexible terms that it offered as the financial markets meltdown started to gather momentum, and continues to offer to this day.

The reason taxpayers had not got into the business of bailing-out private banks was because of a well-founded fear of "moral hazard". That's the concern that once you start insuring away a private company's risk of failure, you remove the critical disciplining influence of free markets. And executives will, over time, start behaving less responsibly, and expose taxpayers to even greater risk of loss.

Banks have nevertheless always been different to private companies because they perform a vital social function: they take our short-term savings and transform them into long-term loans. They run this constant "mismatch" between the term of the funding they receive from depositors (eg, mums and dads) and the length of the loans they give to businesses and households.

As a result, banks have always risked insolvency if their funders rapidly withdraw their money. In the 1890s, before the RBA existed, most of Australia's private banks failed. That's why we now have a public "central bank" that lends directly to the private banks. And it's the reason we have a banking regulator, APRA, to ensure that the banks hold enough "capital" to cover liquidity shocks.

We were compelled to write this op-ed because we're convinced that the policymaking surrounding Australia's banking system has been predicated on a flawed and risky paradigm: the frequently-referenced — by APRA and the RBA — trade-off between "competition" and "financial stability", which ends-up favouring a more concentrated industry.

Today Australia's prosperity relies on four colossal banks — or "oligopolists" — worth around $50 billion each. They control 80-90% of all financial transactions executed across the country. Importantly, the introduction of government guarantees for the first time during the GFC bequeathed them with a unique comparative advantage.

In contrast to their smaller rivals, the four majors are now regarded by credit rating agencies and investors alike as "too-big-to-fail". The majors get the benefit of credit ratings that have been explicitly lifted "two notches" higher than they would otherwise be because Standard & Poor's thinks they alone can depend on "extraordinary government support" in a crisis.

This helps them raise money much more cheaply than their smaller peers, which in turn means it is almost impossible to compete effectively against them. Size thus begets more size.

Some recent advertising campaigns have claimed that "the banks are at war for your home loan". Both the new head of the ACCC, Rod Sims, and we disagree. A few weeks ago Sims concluded,

    Normally four players in a market should lead to a lot of competitive activity. In the banking sector it seems to need more because even though there are four of them there is a lack of full and effective competition.

While they rank amongst the 30 largest banks in the world, Australian policymakers have worked surprisingly hard to have the four majors excluded from the extra capital charges that global regulators are sensibly insisting the biggest, and most "systematically important", banks hold.

For a number of years we've suggested this is misguided and symptomatic of a worrying oligarchy between Australian banks and their policymakers. Last month the IMF agreed with us, arguing that Australia's major banks should, in fact, be forced to hold extra capital as systematically important institutions. More capital means less leverage and less taxpayer risk. So why exempt the majors, particularly when they have designs on higher-risk growth strategies overseas?

An additional capital buffer for systematically important banks would also be an intelligent disincentive to becoming too-big-to-fail. And it recognises a point we've made for some time: in many ways the catastrophic risks posed by smaller and simpler banks, like Bendigo & Adelaide, Bank of Queensland, and Members Equity, are a fraction of those threatened by the majors.

In all properly-functioning financial markets there is an inexorable trade-off between risk and return. The higher the risks you take, the higher the returns you generate. But in Australia this maxim has been turned on its head: in Australia, the supposedly lowest risks banks with the highest credit ratings — the majors — are somehow able to yield the highest shareholder returns. In contrast, the smallest banks, with the lowest credit ratings, produce much lower returns on equity. This complete reversal of the inverse relation between risk and return is the purest possible illustration that taxpayer subsidies are being used for the benefit of the banking oligarchy to the detriment of meritocratic democracy.

During the GFC, most of the smaller banks did not use the taxpayer guarantees of wholesale debts because the premium paid for the guarantee was, ironically, based on the banks' credit ratings. This made it cheapest for the major banks to use the government’s insurance, which they did in vast volumes. It was peculiar that Treasury decided to price its insurance using the same rating agencies that had missed so many of the moral hazards that triggered the crisis in the first place.

A more subtle example of how the system encourages extreme size are the terms on which the banks borrow from the RBA. When doing so, banks have to pledge an asset as collateral to get RBA funding. Included in the list of "eligible" assets the RBA will accept as collateral is any senior debt issued by an Australian bank. But historically that debt had to have a credit rating — yes, there it is again — of A- or higher, which excluded the debts issued by smaller regional banks and building societies. Since the major banks were amongst the few that qualified for the RBA's funding, this helped further support investor demand for their bonds, and thus lowered their cost. While this month the RBA cut the minimum rating to BBB+, this still excludes several smaller banks and building societies.

A final example of the unanticipated consequences flowing from recent policy decisions is the advent of so-called "covered bonds".

In the past, the first-ranking creditor to any Australian bank has been depositors. It was illegal to issue a debt security that subordinated depositors, which precluded covered bonds. When a bank raises money from an institutional investor, it normally issues an "unsecured" loan. This means that if the bank goes belly-up, the investor must queue up behind mum and dad depositors when getting paid out.

In contrast, a "covered bond" allows banks to issue loans to investors that are secured by specific bank assets. The investors thus have a claim on these assets that ranks ahead of everybody else, including mums and dads. Securing their covered bonds with billions of dollars of home loans has allowed the four AA- rated major banks to win rare AAA ratings for their funding.

The problem for the smaller banks is that they do not have the major banks' credit ratings, which, as noted earlier, are lifted higher because the majors are regarded as too-big-to-fail. And since the smaller banks have far lower credit ratings, they would have to pledge many more assets to secure a AAA-rating for their covered bonds. The bottom-line is that this makes it, in the words of one bank CFO, "non-economic" for them to do so, much like it was non-economic for them to use the government guarantees during the crisis.

In the last four months the major banks have raised about $17.5 billion of new funding via their AAA-rated covered bonds. None of their competitors has followed suit.

Setting aside the fact that allowing the majors to issue covered bonds has provided them with another fund-raising advantage over their rivals, there has been a second, perhaps more damaging, consequence: it has significantly increased their competitors' cost of funding.

CBA and Westpac's sale of around $7 billion worth of covered bonds to Australian investors has created a new ultra-safe, domestic asset-class. By doing so, it has made every other bond, including the unsecured, more lowly-rated bonds offered by smaller banks and building societies, more expensive.

The former head of capital markets at Standard and Poor's, Phil Bayley, concludes, "The bad news coming out of CBA's covered bond issue is that all other debt issues in the market will be more expensive … One of the hardest hit asset-classes will be securitised home loans, which has been a key source of funding for smaller lenders."

That, frankly, is a short-strokes summary of the policy problems we are focussed on. While resolving them will require leadership, we believe that there are tractable solutions. Here are three:

1) Change the policy paradigm: It is often said in financial markets that neither APRA nor the RBA care much about banking competition, and would prefer it if there was only one bank to regulate. Policymakers have been captive to the idea that there is an unavoidable trade-off between improving competition and reducing financial system risks. They are wrong.

As a matter of pure logic, a financial system reliant on four $50 billion banks that are regarded as implicitly government-guaranteed (much like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in the US) is surely less secure, and more prone to moral hazard, than one based on, say, ten, $20 billion banks, each small enough to fail without causing widespread damage. Think of ten pillars as opposed to four.

We learnt from the US experience with Fannie and Freddie that there is a threshold beyond which size becomes a massive "contingent liability" for taxpayers. Like the major banks, Fannie and Freddie could raise money more cheaply than their competition because investors believed they were government-backed. And they were right. Both institutions are now owned by US taxpayers.

The learning from this is that we need to remove the regulatory incentives that actively encourage size of the too-big-to-fail variety. And we should consider, at the very least, explicit breaks on banks becoming too big, and then using this size advantage to horizontally consolidate other industries, such as funds management, financial planning and insurance.

One policy option is a progressive financial taxation regime, such as that being proposed in Europe, which attempts to price the too-big-to-fail subsidy: ie, the bigger you get, the higher the price you pay. Today the system is stacked in the opposite direction: as a bank’s size increases, all its costs decline.

2)  Guarantee the assets, not the institutions: Australia's financial system already suffers from moral hazard writ large. Taxpayers are guaranteeing billions of dollars of bank deposits for free, and the majors have artificial fund-raising advantages through their credit ratings and new devices like covered bonds.

There is, however, one solution, which we’ve advocated in the past. All these financial subsidies come back to the fact that there is a catastrophic risk that only governments can insure. That's why the government guarantees bank deposits and bank debts. That's why the government's central bank — the RBA — explicitly refers to itself as the "lender of last resort" to private banks during crises.

Moral hazard emerges when this taxpayer insurance is not properly priced. So let's allow the taxpayer to earn a fair return and iron-out the dysfunctions at the same time. The simplest and most conceptually elegant way to do this would be to offer a permanent government-guarantee of bank-issued, asset-backed securities. This would allow any bank, irrespective of size, to issue asset-backed bonds that had the highest possible credit rating.

So long as the underlying asset quality met the required criteria, this would in turn mean that minnows like ME Bank and Bendigo & Adelaide could raise funding at the same price as CBA or Westpac. It would immediately level the competitive playing field, and remove many of the majors' regulatory advantages. And, as the current Chairman of ASIC, Greg Medcraft, leading economist Dr Nicholas Gruen, and we have argued before, there is a compelling precedent: Canada. The Canadian government offers exactly this type of insurance to its lenders. So why can't we?

3)  Back the government's banking regulator, not the rating agencies: the cost of the RBA's lender of last resort facilities, and the price of government guarantees (determined by Treasury), has been based on a bank's credit rating. This confers immediate fund-raising benefits on the majors. Yet Australia's banking regulator, APRA, is responsible for setting the banks' capital requirements, and overseeing their risk management, with powers to intervene directly with a bank if it thinks something is wrong.

Since the government licences the banks, controls their risk management, and can directly remedy any issues it identifies, the government should be willing to rely on itself when determining the price of taxpayer support. We believe that the cost of government insurance should be the active and intrusive regulation of APRA, and generally priced the same, irrespective of an institution's size. If APRA is doing its job properly, ME Bank should pose no more risk to taxpayers than CBA (and vice versa).

Australia can build both a more stable and competitive financial system. All it requires is real leadership. That is the challenge politicians and policymakers now face.

Proud Stralian..... Really?

I have linked to this video on Google+ as well but G+ doesn't offer the same venue for comment that a blog post does so here we are. Below is a youtube video which I believe to be a beautiful counterpoint to the rise of nationalistic rhetoric that surround Australia Day.


 


It is sad to see so many people claim to be proud Australian but put nothing back into the community to keep this country great. A great place to start, if you want to put back in, is a local sporting club, SES, Surf lifesaving or Service club. While it takes up some of your time it's more than worth it for the people you meet and the friends you make.

Later Than Usual Review

Well 2011 was a big year. It started off with big events. first off was the renovating ( a continuing theme throughout the year) by the 26th of January I had renovated one of my units and rented it out. Next was a big weather event. Cyclone Yasi came thundering towards us in the latter part of January and hit well to the north of Townsville in very early February. With any normal cyclone if it hit more than 200km to the north all that we would have recieved here was a bit of a blow and a dousing of rain. Yasi was nothing like normal though. Severe and damaging winds extended out from the eye in every direction more than 500km. To put this in perspective for our NSW viewers that means that if the eye of Yasi had hit in the geographical centre of NSW the ENTIRE NSW coast line would have experienced cyclonic winds. Just imagine NSW trying to deal with every coastal town in the state being destroyed. Yasi didn't stop at the coast though. It was still a catyegory 2 cyclone when it reached Mt Isa. So if Yasi had of followed my theoretical path through the centre of NSW then all of the cities and towns west to Broken Hill would have been effected, or about 80% of the state (It got smaller as it went inland). We packed up the entire house and strapped everything down, this meant that the next month at least was unpacking and fixing up our two houses. Also with the effect on the community and the rebuilding efforts that went on this one storm coloured everything for the next few months. I still haven't found everything I "put away".

So with the Big start to the year, I then got into the Long events. With one unit finished I then had to get the other one done as well. I worked on it all year but it is finally finished and will be rented out soon. So it was a year where I finally got all the reno's out of the way. When Karin and I bought the place in 2003 we knew that we would eventually have to fix up both sides as neither side looked great. One side didn't even have a bathroom or kitchen. We decided to tackle the easy side first, the side we lived in. We fixed and almost completed that side with only the hallway and bedroom not painted along with an unfinished cupboard and a couple of other odds and ends. Since about 2005 though I have done little to the house. Well 2011 was the year for it I finished one side (which was the almost finished side) and 99%completed the other side. Must acknowledge helpers and workers for the cause. Min first and foremost for helping substantially and for putting up with me when not helping. Mum and Bernie for a good 60% of the interior painting and to Dad and Judes for painting as well. It has been a bit of a strain to work, paddle, and renovate for a year but with the way the place looks now I am super happy and proud of with the way it looks. Hopefully with this out of the way 2012 will be a year where I have more of both money and time.

With most of my time taken up working full time and renovating a house I then decided to take on extra duties with my paddling club. I took on the job of steerer for the men's crew. This meant I really needed to be at all training sessions and go to all regattas even when I was the only male paddling for the club. Sometimes I was the only male paddler for the club as well. For the first regatta in Airlie beach I was the only Maggie Island boy. Towards the end of the year I decided that you know I had too much spare time so I took over the job of President of Magnetic Island Outrigger Canoe Club.

Another big change for us was Min's job change. She took on the role of a project manager at the port running and overseeing some of the major projects that the port is undertaking such as the Billion dollar Port Expansion. The new Job really took up much more of Min's time then along with that Min decided to Join Rotary taking even more of her limited time. Luckily for us Min Joined paddling and raced in regatta's through 2011 so at the very least Min and I saw each other at Paddling.

Finished the year off with another renovation but this time at Mins house. Min and I created a Garden in the front yard. This one is all about keeping the view out to the street and adding flowers to that view along with protecting the front fence from the dogs and bringing some life into the front yard. Also with the garden come much... much needed irrigation for the front yard.

Some things that didn't happen though was, rogaines, adventure races, camping trips, overseas trips. the first three are easy to bring back once we manage to make time for them. Min and I might hold off on any over seas trips for 2012 so we can build up a monetary buffer again.

Looking forward what would be nice to include in 2012 camping trip in a new spot. The adventure race that is run in Townsville. What has to happen in 2012. Job change is the big and scary fact of 2012 once I have negociated that Min and I should be set again for the next couple of years.

New Gambling Laws

"Won't work" has become the new black. Carbon tax? Won't work, says the Coalition. Plain cigarette packaging? Won't work, say retailers and the tobacco industry. Poker machine reforms? Won't work, says the gambling industry. No proof is required; it's enough to stare into the camera, look earnest and say forcefully, "It. Won't. Work."

The above is the first paragraph of a great piece on the drum today. I have often posted pieces on this blog by experts etc. about various topics that are currently effecting Australia. This time is similar and it's about the new gambling laws being brought in by the government. This guy is definitely an expert. Not unbiased but definitely an expert. Tom Cummings is a former problem gambler who has turned his attention to gambling reform and the industry in general.

My favourite part though is his description of the genesis of his addiction.

But something clicked inside my head the very first time I played the pokies. It was the start of years of addiction, years in which I pissed away close to $100,000 and destroyed the trust of everyone I knew. I was a poker machine addict, and no matter my intentions, I simply could not stop playing. Suicide became an option I seriously contemplated, and it took discovery, exposure and the loss of everything I had to finally force my hand and give me the ability to step away. Yet while I was playing the pokies, I wasn't gambling on anything else... and in the years since I stopped, no other form of gambling has interested me. It wasn't about the gambling; it was about the pokies and nothing more.

Tom gives a first hand account of what pokie addiction is like and how he thinks the new laws will affect pokie addiction. It is a very illuminating piece of writing and well worth a read considering the current advertising campaign from Clubs Australia.

Climate Doubt

Below I have embedded a great video on how doubt has been created, where none really exists, about climate change.

DOUBT from The Climate Reality Project on Vimeo.

Italian Disgrace

A Quick warning this post might get a bit sweary right at the end!

Perusing the ABC website I found a story about Italian scientists being charged with Manslaughter. It caught my interest and I clicked on the link expecting to see a story about scientists who had been trialling a dodgy drug and people had died.

What I found however was a story about a panel of 6 Geologists. WHAT? How did Geologists cause people to die? The First paragraph explained it all it out to me:

"A group of Italian scientists have gone on trial accused of manslaughter over the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake that killed more than 300 people."

No... Actually wait that doesn't really explain it at all. What these scientists Caused the Earthquake through ill advised geology experiments? Lets see what the rest of the story had to say:

"Prosecutors allege the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake and say residents around L'Aquila should have been warned to flee their homes in the days before the quake..... The defendants were members of a panel that had met six days before the April 6 quake to assess risks after hundreds of tremors had shaken the medieval city in Italy's mountainous Abruzzo region. At that meeting, a committee analysed data from the low-magnitude tremors and determined the activity was not a prelude to a major earthquake. The experts had made it clear that it was not possible to predict whether a stronger quake would occur but had recommended stricter enforcement of anti-seismic measures, particularly regarding building construction."

So the scientists analysed the data and failed to predict and earthquake so they are charged with Manslaughter. Just Like everyone else in Italy they failed to predict the earthquake. Just like every person ever to have lived so far they failed to predict an earthquake. They did mention in their statement that " it was not possible to predict whether a stronger quake would occur" and the recommended that "stricter enforcement of anti-seismic measures, particularly regarding building construction".

Vincenzo Vittorini, a doctor who founded the association "309 Martyrs" and lost his wife and daughter in the disaster, said: "No-one expected to be told the exact time of the quake. We just wanted to be warned that we were sitting on a bomb". Wait just a fucking second. Earlier in the story it mentioned that the scientist had assessed the risks after HUNDREDS of minor earthquakes. How can you not know your "sitting on a bomb" when you can feel the Ticking through your ass? You live in an earthquake zone plan for it and build or renovate your house accordingly. Don't be a Cockhead and try and ruin someone else's life just because you FAILED to look after yours. I live in a Cyclone area and I have planned extensively for cyclones including an evacuation plan for the bigger ones. Now you will not know that a earthquake is coming, BECAUSE NO-ONE CAN PREDICT AN EARTHQUAKE, but you can still have an evacuation plan in your house and have designed safe areas in your house where you will survive if the house falls apart.

In an open letter sent to Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, more than 5,000 scientists said the defendants essentially face criminal charges for failing to predict quakes, even though this remains technically impossible. I would like to see Scientists and people from all over the world sign a petition in support of these poor guys being victimised by the Italian government.

It's not just about bike lanes

The Following article by Jan Garrard was published over on the ABC website.

It has long been recognised that urban planning and transport policies in Australia encourage car use and discourage cycling and walking. But what has been less well-recognised is that our road safety policies and practices are also car-oriented. This is arguably a more serious bias, because it results in unacceptably high levels of death and serious injury among unprotected road users such as cyclists.

Australia prides itself on having achieved a relatively low traffic crash fatality rate of 6.8 fatalities per 100,000 population. World's best practice (3.8 fatalities per 100,000 population) is not that far away, and we aspire to achieve it. But Australia's overall fatality rate hides an inconvenient truth - our cyclist fatality and serious injury rates are several times higher than world's best practice, and increasing. 

Cycling accounts for about one per cent of daily trips in Australia, but cyclists comprise two per cent of road transport fatalities and 15 per cent of serious injuries. Serious injury rates for cyclists are increasing as bicycle use increases (by 47 per cent from 2000 to 2007), while for most other road users rates are steady or declining. The relative risk of injury per kilometre travelled is several times higher for a cyclist than for a person in a car.

Improving cycling safety is a key factor for increasing everyday cycling, particularly for the 'missing' cyclists in Australia: women, children, adolescent girls and older adults. It is also important to recognise that perceived safety is as important as actual safety. Most people don't know the relative risk of injury for a bike trip compared to a car trip, but they know how it feels, and cycling in Australia feels risky. 

Cycling safety and cycling prevalence go hand in hand. Not only does the Netherlands have one of the highest rates of cycling in the developed world (27 per cent of daily trips are by bicycle), it also has the lowest cyclist injury rate (1.4 per 10 million kilometres cycled). These figures highlight the potential for a win-win-win-etc scenario. More cycling trips mean more health; cleaner air; less traffic congestion; and more liveable cities; and, if we get it right, fewer road traffic injuries. Achieving high levels of safe cycling begins with acknowledging that cycling is a legitimate form of transport. In Australia we begrudgingly tolerate cyclists on our roads, but the high-cycling countries of Western Europe actually prioritise cycling over driving for the numerous short to medium-distance trips that are a part of daily life. 

The implication of accepting cyclists as legitimate road users is that people who ride bicycles have a right to complete their journey safely. Citizens in high-cycling countries are protected by road safety systems that acknowledge that the greatest risk to cyclists comes from motor vehicles and the way they are driven. The protection is multi-faceted - safe cycling infrastructure is complemented by ethical, moral and legal environments that protect vulnerable road users. In several European countries, the higher standards of duty-of-care for more vulnerable road users include the legal responsibility for car drivers to avoid collisions with cyclists and pedestrians. In these countries the onus is on drivers to prove no-fault when in collisions with pedestrians and cyclists. 

"I just didn't see her", "He came from no-where", or "It was raining/foggy/dark/glary" are not legitimate excuses for colliding with people on bikes or on foot. A driver is expected to anticipate the presence of cyclists and pedestrians on the road, and take action to avoid injuring them. In contrast, drivers in Australia, the USA and UK are far less likely to be held accountable for injuring cyclists and pedestrians, including when the driver clearly is at fault. An analysis of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in New York City found that most pedestrian and cyclist deaths were caused by dangerous driving (90 per cent), but few of the drivers responsible (26 per cent) received summonses for traffic violations. No comparable analysis has been conducted in Australia, but numerous instances have been reported that demonstrate a similar social and legal tolerance of the harm caused by drivers to cyclists and pedestrians.

The flip side of our reluctance to hold drivers responsible for injuring cyclists and pedestrians is our predilection to blame cyclists themselves. In a classic case of victim-blaming, cyclists are said to be "asking for trouble" by putting themselves in harm's way by cycling on public roads. The implication is that it is cyclists who should avoid hazardous drivers - not the other way around. Australia's National Cycling Strategy (pdf) aims to double cycling by the year 2016. Achieving this target will require investing in good cycling infrastructure. But constructing bike paths and lanes is not an effective stand-alone strategy for achieving high levels of safe cycling. We also need to invest in 'soft infrastructure' in the form of driver and cyclist education and training, and equitable (and equitably enforced) road rules. High levels of safe cycling are underpinned by a culture of respect for the rights of all road users to a safe and comfortable journey regardless of whether their vehicle of choice is a car or a bicycle.

The route to high levels of safer cycling is well-developed, clearly sign-posted, and not particularly difficult, it's simply that it can feel a little alien to a nation whose personal mobility is so all-pervasively car-oriented.

Discoveries

I have discovered Geoff Lemon. When I say discovered I don't mean found a raw talent and introduced him to the world. It's more in the sense of a great independent writer that is already out there but I'm just reading for the first time.

There is something special when you find a writer that can capture ideas well and express them in a fluent way. I follow Marieke Hardy on twitter and she expressed rather a fondness for his writing.

I then followed a link over to Heathen scripture only to find that Geoffs popularity had risen so much since writing his article titled 'You shut your goddamn carbon-taxin’ mouth' that he had to move his blog over to a wordpress account. I found a sometimes rude but mostly funny blog with some true gems. Anyway shut you carbon taxin mouth and the couple of articles that follow are really quite fun to read. I particularly like the following paragraph that he wrote in his article 'Australiar and the f*cking idiot dilemma'

Net result: people will always sulk about what they’ve got if they think that maybe they could have had something better. But a billion dollars is still a billion dollars, regardless of what-ifs in either direction. A business that is even turning a profit, any profit, is doing well, and should be thankful in the scheme of things. A business turning profits in the billions of dollars should just shut the hell up and eat its ice-cream.

Please head over to Heathen scripture and have a little read.

On the Should... Hu Hum... Pedals of Giants

Nearly every bike company on the planet sponsors professional riders. They do this to get their brand name known and to get a bit of a following. The professional riders also provide feedback about the bikes that the company make and aid in the development of next years models. This is all very good and I think everyone can see the importance of this type of marketing/development model.

It doesn't directly interact with everyday riders though. To do that you need to have a program like the one that Giant have just introduced.

I think this is a great idea and will hopefully win Giant a bit extra following. I have never owned a Giant bike but Min has and it was a fun little bike for her and quite cheep in comparison to other brands of Mountain bikes.