A Sugar Faeries Sugar Hit

Judith Sloane, the oo's new "Contributing Economics Editor"  has decided to ignore her own new papers articles, and join in with the rest of the conga line of ruperts historians repainting the pallette of recent events, hoping against hope one would suggest that nobody cares to examine their claims to closely. In her recent outing, she makes the following claim, pushed, interestingly enough, the claims favoured by three stooges of Australia's economic current debate Larry, Curly and Moe.

But as a stimulus spending program, the problem was that the buildings were still being constructed well after the crisis had passed.

In fact, as history actually shows, the timing and extent of the fiscal stimulus, and, more importantly, the impact on our economy, was weighted almost perfectly, and tapered of at precisley the time the economy begun recovering, as was shown in the very paper she is writing in.

The main prop for the economy in the first quarter was the government’s national school’s spending program, which added 0.9 percentage points to GDP. Consumer demand held up, despite the impact of aggressive interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

The Daily Speculator

Well, it appears that our media have abandoned all pretences of journalism, and entered instead into the divination game. For the past week, we have had speculation, assertion and equivocation over this fairly innocent comment from the PM

I've had some discussions with Andrew Wilkie, we will have some more discussions in the future and it's not my intention to engage in running commentary in any way while those discussions are happening.

Somehow, the author of the article interpreted this to mean

JULIA Gillard has backed away from her promise to introduce a mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines.

Sadly, he was not alone.

A fairly complete list of the some of the ridiculous speculations masquerading as news can be found here.

Dad's Army

Just an image to accompany this post by Tim Lambert in his ongoing series, The Australian's War on Science.

Now up to number 76

To wireless, or not to wireless

The oo continue to remain undecided if we should go wireless or not in regards to the NBN

In their ever increasingly erratic position against anything NBN, it now appears that wireless is no good, providing that it sits within the NBN roll-out. Previously, they have been right behind the wireless 'solution', yet now, it appears that wireless is plagued with problems (duh).

PLANS for a wireless signal tower to deliver the National Broadband Network near Ballarat may face a legal challenge, with residents seeking advice on how to stop the development.

No Telework please, we're media

Considering the great lengths that the oo has gone to reveal about the NBN, such as how many customers to employees, how many have credit cards, and the all important, how bad for our health could it be, one would have thought that Conroy releasing a press release about an upcoming Telework Week would have been big news, particularly as it relates directly to this obviously hot topic issue.

Alas, a search of Bing and Google returned only one story dedicated to this release, and that was from a Fairfax paper. Even IT articles have written about it, so ignorance really cannot be the excuse.

I can only conclude that, considering the positive tone of the release, and the obvious benefits that the NBN will give to actions like Teleworking, that it really didn't fit in with the angle that the murdoch press is trying to sell us, in place of the actual news.

An Open Secret

Back in November 28, 2011, the oo ran with the 'breaking' story

CAPITAL spending on the National Broadband Network will top $50 billion and slower-than-expected development of digital video content could put at risk the financial returns for the ultra-fast network, a confidential report to Labor states. 

.....

 The full report by Greenhill Caliburn, obtained under Freedom of Information, also reveals that $50.6bn in capex would have been spent on the network by 2028.

Trouble is, although the oo may well have found this in a report they did indeed obtain from under FOI, these same figures have been available on the NBN's own website in their Corporate Plan 2011 - 2013 for over a year for anybody who was prepared to look, like, you know, a journalist perhaps. So, no, this is not some figure trying to be hidden away by the Government, it is a figure which was released over a year ago, and has been in the public domain all that time.

You keep using that word.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The oo fails basic literary skills yet again.

Climate change effects unknown: IPCC report

Unknown? Considering the IPCC is very clear about the projected effects of AGW on the climate, many of which appear to be coming to fruition already, the word 'unkown' is deliberately obfuscating what is within the report. Uncertain perhaps, but not unknown.